Cocoalicious 1.0b32
Beta 32 of Cocoalicious brings both good news and bad news for our friends abroad. The good news is that I finally became ashamed enough of the app’s issues with posting international text that I fixed them (that’s why I had those Japanese Amazon links in my bookmarks for awhile, in case anyone’s wondering), and b32 now properly handles submission of unicode to del.icio.us. The bad news is that there is a character encoding problem in the XML returned by the del.icio.us API that prevents unicode from working properly in tags.
For those who care, the crux of the problem is that the XML returned by the “/api/posts/all” call is encoded as UTF-8, except for the contents of the “tag” attribute of each post element, which appears to contain text of some other encoding (UTF-16?). The problem is easy to see if you post a link and put the same non-ASCII characters in for both the extended text and the tags, then look at the XML output of “/api/posts/all.” The “tag” attribute and “extended” attribute will contain different data, even though both should be the same.
I’ve been working with Joshua on resolving this problem, so hopefully it will eventually disappear (or maybe if I get impatient enough I’ll bow to Postel’s law and implement a workaround). For now, I guess, just be advised that tag filtering with non-ASCII characters will not work correctly in Cocoalicious.
Beta 32 also contains a few nice patches and suggestions that people submitted:
- Ken Ferry finally implemented something people like Jon Hicks have been wanting for awhile now: services support. Using this feature, users can highlight a URL in any services-capable app (including almost all Cocoa apps), and either choose App Menu > Services > Post URL via Cocoalicious or press command-^ (shift-command-6) to send the URL to Cocoalicious for posting. This means that it’s easy to post from other browsers, such as OmniWeb and Camino (although, sadly, not Firefox, since it doesn’t support services).
(Update: To get the services support to work, make sure Cocoalicious is installed in /Applications, and that you have logged out and back in after installing the new version.) - Diggory Laycock submitted a patch which adds a handy dock menu, making “New Post” and “New Post from Safari” accessible when Cocoalicious is not the active application.
- John Gruber contributed his eye for UI detail and pointed out a few things that needed fixing here and there (most notably the lack of an obvious way to re-open the main window after it is closed). His suggestions have been incorporated into this release.
- Jason Deraleau wrote a very nice post about the full-text search feature, but mentioned that he wanted a way to index a single post, rather than having to constantly re-index his entire bookmark collection. This was a just criticism, so I added a more obvious menu item to index only the selected post (incidentally, pages also get indexed every time you open them in the web preview pane, but that’s not very obvious). Eventually I would like to add an option to make the indexing happen at the time of posting, but for now this is a good workaround.
Thanks, as always, to everyone who contributed! Oh, and if you’ve submitted a patch I haven’t incorporated yet, I apologize—soon, I promise!