Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

I’m back in Denver for Memorial Day, but the weather is so lousy that no one in my family has been able to build up the motivation to do much besides sit around my parents’ house. Fortunately, I’ve at least been able to use the downtime to get a lot of work done on Cocoalicious. The changes in 1.0b35 are mostly UI-focused, and include the following:

• Star Ratings: Cocoalicious now recognizes tags that consist entirely of repeated asterix characters as star ratings, and displays the ratings in the post table as graphic stars, à la iTunes. The ratings can also be manipulated directly by dragging in the rating column (again, just like iTunes). See the screenshot I uploaded to Flickr if you’re wondering what this looks like.
• Sortable Table Columns: This has to be the all-time winner for most inexcusable unimplemented feature in Cocoalicious. Fortunately, it’s finally in.
• “Type-to-Select” in Tag Table: Typing while the tag table has focus will now cause the first match for the letters typed to be automatically selected (à la Address Book). This extremely useful and timesaving feature is courtesy of Ken Ferry’s excellent KFTypeSelectTableView class.
• Delay of API HTTP requests: The del.icio.us API docs stipulate that clients should never submit more than one request to the API per second, and since the star rating feature makes that scenario a lot more likely, my del.icio.us API access code will now check to see if a second has elapsed since the last API request, and delay the request if it hasn’t.
• Assorted bug fixes: Including one for a crasher that could happen on reload.

I’d also like to preemptively say that I realize not everyone will use the ratings, and that some people will want to be able to hide the ratings column. I ran out of time to implement that in this release, but will work on it for the next one.

Update: Damn–it looks like Jonathan Deutsch has found a crasher in b35 that eluded me. Stand by for a fix.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2005 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Mac, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.