Welcome to Stuffed Iggy Software
Selenium 3.0 Released - 2/23/08
After several months of tweaks, improvements, and new features, Selenium 3.0 is finally available! Selenium (formerly Googalyzer) allows you to conduct online research even easier than before with a brand-new PDF manager and annotator, dictionary, thesaurus, and much more. For the full details, check out the product page. As I noted earlier, Selenium is shareware, with a license costing $15. You can buy a license at the Stuffed Iggy store, which will allow you to use Selenium on any computer you own and give you free upgrades until version 4.0. Since Selenium is designed to assist with educational purposes, there is not an education discount per se - it's simply built in to the price. If you're upgrading from any previous version of Googalyzer, please export your data from Googalyzer before moving to Selenium, as it is unable to deal with the old data files. Whether you're upgrading or trying Selenium for the first time, you can download it here, or check out the release notes. Selenium requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, and is a Universal Binary.
Leopard Notes
With the release of Leopard, there's a couple things that need covering. First and foremost, both Task List and Googalyzer should run fine on Leopard. New versions of both are also being worked on that take advantage of Leopard-only features. In the case of Googalyzer, the new version 3.0 (final, not beta) should be released as soon as I can get documentation written. With this release, Googalyzer will also become shareware, priced at $15. Beta 2 (and its source code) will still be made available for those still running Tiger or who would rather put up with more bugginess and fewer features to save the $15. While I understand that some people may be less than happy about this decision, I feel that it's the right move at this point in time. Though I do not currently plan to distribute the source code to the final, shareware version of Googalyzer, if you want to see how I implemented something (or even use it in your own application), there's a good chance that I'll send you the appropriate code if you ask.
While Googalyzer will become shareware with the Leopard release, I have no plans to do so with Task List, which will remain free and open source. I'm currently working on a complete Cocoa rewrite, which could be released within a month or 3. It's making good headway, and there are already significant speed and stability improvements.
Finally, you may have noticed that Funkware has been scrapped for Stuffed Iggy Software. This was done largely to get a catchier name, easier Googlability, and a logo that doesn't cop out and use the Xcode icon. I'll probably be putting up an About page in the next few days to explain the origins of the name.
Stuffed Iggy Software Update - 7/5/07
If anyone's actually following the Stuffed Iggy Software Blog (or even just updates for Googalyzer and Task List) you've probably noticed that nothing much has been happening lately. This is not at all the case - development is progressing as usual, except on Leopard. This means that there won't be any updates to Googalyzer or Task List until October, assuming Leopard ships on time.
Googalyzer 3.0 (not the beta) will be Leopard-only, and should be available within a couple minutes of Leopard itself, assuming nothing unforseen transpires between now and then. Googalyzer 3.0b2 for Tiger will still be made available, however.
While I announced in the first post here that I was retiring Task List from active development, I've gotten quite a few emails since then about it, leading me to somewhat reverse my decision. At around the same time as Leopard is released, I'll probably release an updated version of Task List, written in Objective-C, as opposed to the current Applescript Studio. There won't be much in the way of new features, but there should be a significant speed and reliability boost.
Late Night Coding - 5/13/07
I've spent the last couple hours today (from about midnight to 1:30 in the morning) fooling around with Python, just for the heck of it. Other than sleeping, I didn't really have anything better to do, so I figured that learnin' myself some code wouldn't hurt. On the highly off chance that anybody cares, here's what I've come up with so far:
#!/usr/bin/env python2
import os, sys, random
response = raw_input("\n Do you want to get a quote (1) or add a quote to the list (2) ? \n")
if response == "1":
quotes = os.path.expanduser("~/Documents/Quotes.txt")
f = open(quotes)
quoteArray = []
lines = f.readlines()
for l in lines:
if l.strip():
quoteArray.append(l)
print random.choice(quoteArray)
if response == "2":
newQuote = raw_input("\n Enter the quote you want to add to the list: \n")
quotesFile = open("/Users/Aaron/Documents/Quotes.txt","a")
quotesFile.writelines("\n" + newQuote)
Overall, it wasn't too difficult to figure out. All it basically does it prompt you to get a quote or add a quote to the list to pick from, and then do whatever you told it to do. If you're easily amused, and want to try it out yourself, copy the code, and replace ~/Documents/Quotes.txt and /Users/Aaron/Documents/Quotes.txt with the path to your list of quotes. Save it somewhere, open up Terminal, type "python" without the quotes, and then drag the file into the window and press Return. You can then enjoy hours of quoting fun. If you don't happen to have a list of quotes lying around, and don't like all the inspirational ones available online, you can get started with my list of humorous or random quotes compiled over the past school year.
Googalyzer 3.0 Beta 1 - 4/29/07
I said it would be released soon, and sure enough, it's done. Googalyzer 3.0b1 is now open to the world, for you to download, use, criticise and (hopefully) help improve. There's a ton of new stuff here, some of which I discussed before. For the rest, you probably just want to take a look at the release notes. Since this version is a complete rewrite in Objective-C, which I learned as I wrote it, it's almost certainly full of bugs, leaks, and horrendous coding practices. If you're good with Objective-C, or even just not bad, please take a look at the source and fix it once I get it uploaded to the SVN repository. Enough talk - just click the icon below to download it!
Updates, Changes and More - 4/20/07
For various reasons, the Stuffed Iggy Software Blog has been down for quite a bit. In the interest of changing this, it's now being moved to the homepage (right here, in fact), and will be updated by editing the page's HTML, as opposed to Wordpress or something similar. In some ways, it's a step backwards, but it's a lot easier to admin and keep online.
In other news, it probably seems like things have been awfully quiet on the development front. To put it simply, that isn't the case. In fact, Googalyzer 3.0 is nearing completion, and will probably have a beta in a week or two. To hold you over, here's a screenshot from the latest build:
As you can see, there's a ton of awesome new stuff. The most important thing is that Googlayzer 3.0 is a complete rewrite in Objective-C. In addition to allowing all the other cool stuff, it's now much faster and more reliable as a result. Feature-wise, Googalyzer 3 has tabs, download capabilties, history, the ability for multiple projects, each with autosaving bibliographies, outlines and text, as well as web clippings, as well as everything from Googalyzer 2.0 and earlier.
At the same time, however, all the development I've put into Googalyzer has come at a price. More specifically, Task List is being retired from active development. The competition's simply too good, and nothing short of an Objective-C rewrite would give it a chance at becoming the best homework tracking option. Given that I have no objections with the feature set or quality of the competition, especially Schoolhouse, I simply see no reason to invest the requisite amount of time in a rewrite. The source will still be made available, and you can continue using Task List indefinitely if it works for you, but I don't plan to release any further updates any time in the near future.