Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

One of the best things about living in the Bay Area is the unusual amount of exposure it gives you to people from other countries. Yesterday evening, for example, I went to a German acquaintance’s house in the Mission for a holiday get-together centered on a drink known as feuerzangenbowle—a flaming concotion which, if I understand correctly, comes from a movie of the same name. We also had a good time watching said movie, despite the fact that only about half the people present spoke German. The movie is essentially a farce—a college comedy not unlike Animal House or Back to School—and it’s amazing to see just how much of the humor and information about peoples’ relationships is conveyed though simple things like body language and intonation.

Hmm—no grand thesis there, I guess. I just haven’t “journaled” for awhile and felt like talking about feuerzangenbowle.

I know everyone’s probably sick of hearing about Cocoalicious at this point, but I’m so excited that I just couldn’t resist mentioning this: collaborator Andrew Wooster has the long-planned full text search feature working and checked into CVS. Now Cocoalicious can run through a collection of bookmarks, fetch the text of each page, and use it to create a SearchKit index. Using this index, users can search their bookmarks for words that don’t appear in the description, extended text, or tags (it even allows fancy boolean operators).

This was a really involved feature to implement, and the version in CVS still has some rough edges, but once they’re smoothed out I think full-text search will go a long way toward fulfilling my ambition to make Cocoalicious the greatest bookmarking app ever. Thanks to Andrew for all his hard work!

I wanted to wait until I was actually ready for a release to do another post about Cocoalicious progress, but right now I’m at home waiting for Ikea minions to come retrieve the load of crap they brought me a few weeks ago, and I have so little time to post these days, so I suppose there’s no time like the present. I’m also kind of eager to talk about the project, because I’m very pleased with the way things have been going.

In the month or so since Cocoalicious has been on SourceForge, the project has had what is (to me) a surprising amount of interest. Because of this, Cocoalicious has come a relatively long way in a short time. In particular, I’d like to publicly recognize the following contributors:

• David Schaefgen really dove in and contributed what is probably one of my favorite features: the ability to post the current page in Safari. He also finally gave users a way to see their extended text in a way that I hadn’t though of: through tooltips (based on Marc Northrop’s feature request). And, finally, he completed his hat trick by implementing an oft-requested feature that I like to call “tagging by dragging.”
• Mark Eichin submitted a clever patch that makes “New Post from Safari” even cooler: he modified the feature’s AppleScript implementation to grab the current page’s selected text for use as the new post’s extended text. I had told Mark I didn’t think this was possible, but he proved me wrong (by using Safari’s “do JavaScript” AppleScript command to call the JavaScript “getSelection()” function).
• Armin Briegel surprised me completely by implementing AppleScript support. Adding scripting to an app is a task I’ve always found trying, but Armin pulled it off in style: not only did he submit his implementation in the new(-ish) but somewhat lightly documented sdef format, he also factored all of the Objective-C code he needed to create away from the rest of the app by using categories.
• Probably the all time most requested feature for Cocoalicious is the ability to hide the web preview pane, and, admittedly, it’s one I’ve been too slow to implement. Fortunately, a discussion with co-worker (and HyperEdit creator) Jonathan Deutsch finally convinced me to bite the bullet and get it done, and the change is in the current CVS version. There are a few things my implementation doesn’t do, though, (like allow the pane to be collapsed by dragging) and for that, there’s Colin Mattson’s patch. It should probably be integrated this weekend.

All of this work (and more—including a Safari-style toolbar I’ve been working on) is in the current CVS version if anyone feels like checking it out. I’ll also probably be doing a release very soon for the non-SourceForge set. In the meantime, a hearty round of applause for our generous contributors, and for the very concept of open source software!