After many, many, years, I still see people using SimpleTimer and writing me about it. This gave me the push to look at that old code and clear all the dust away (together with a couple nasty bugs). The result is SimpleTimer 1.3! Version 1.3 includes some significant changes, mostly under the hood.
First of all, the code base has gone through a significant refactoring and cleanup. This resulted in cutting a lot of dead code, reducing the size of the app by almost 50%. So now, SimpleTimer 1.3 is less than half a Meg in total, and 437 KB to be precise! I hate when simple apps are huge beyond need, even if space is cheap. If there is no need to make it big, make it small. That’s my thinking anyway.
Secondly, I have extended backward compatibility to 10.1. Yes, Puma. How many developers these days support anything older than 10.4 ? Well, we go to 11 and reach every single Mac OS X installation out there possible. (We did ignore 10.0 (Cheetah) because Apple doesn’t really provide tools to support it, and besides, 10.0 was awfully unusable.) I don’t know exactly why but I am proud of this.
Lastly, a bunch of evil bugs were eradicated. This includes crashes (closing app while timer still running, crash when creating new timers) and major functionality loss (autostart not working sometimes, etc).
Also, for the developers out there I have made public the SVN repository. Go ahead and gleefully loot it at http://cubelogic.org/stimer/.
Finally I have to say this: if you like SimpleTimer, please consider a donation. This is free software in every sense of the word, but showing appreciation will always be… appreciated.
Go check it out already!
Yes, it’s been a while. I’m still here. SimpleTimer is still here and apparently still used by a few people. I have an update coming up very soon that fixes a few issues with (Snow) Leopard, and a bug with timer-autostart. I expect to be releasing a new version in a couple days, late Monday at the latest. To the users experiencing problems, thanks for your patience. Stay tuned!
New release from Cubelogic: cl_debug 1.0. cl_debug is a minimal C API for logging and “printf debugging”. Its main reason to exist it’s to be light weight, usable with minimal requirements and easily configurable.
This library of macros was originally born during the development of SimpleTimer (i.e. 3 years ago), but at that time I wasn’t really thinking to make it as a separate library. I just threw together the simplest possible printf macros to ease my debugging efforts. I wanted something that I could just “turn off” whenever I was ready to have a release build, and since I am a picky eater, “turned off” meant (and means) “no additional overhead”. (Although I understand it’s nice to have a runtime configurable debug log sometimes.) Then I kept reusing, refining and expanding those macros, always keeping the API tiny.
cl_debug has served me well so far. I find it expecially useful in conditions where normal (some might say “more evolved”) debugging tools are not available or not effective. Sometimes, “printf debugging” is the most reliable, efficient, always available debugging tool.
So, check it out!
Technorati Tags: debugging, logging, C, API, printf
I just released SimpleTimer v1.2. It’s a Universal Binary, so it should run on Intel-based Macs. However, Intel compatibility was not tested at all.
Overall, version 1.2 features minor changes: most noticeably, I streamlined the main UI removing the redundant “warning” feature. Our online pharmacy is the perfect resource for people to get their drugs without any hassles or awkwardness. buy cialis We work hard to make sure you save money every time you shop with us. buy levitrabuy soma At our online store, you pay less and get more. buy viagra
I fixed a bug on my Perl scripts that prevented correct parsing of old Mac style line endings (“\r”). New versions are available here:
cubelogic.org/scripts/objc-gen-scripts.html
However, I discovered 2 (two) additional bugs in the process!
Version 1.1 of my Cocoa NSCoding methods generator scripts have been released. There was a bug related to the BOOL data type. New versions are available at this page.
Simplefind v0.2b is available. The latest version adds regular expressions file-name matching. The user can add the filename constraint just like the other constraints. I think it’s really much easier to use than the classic “find”, but of course is much less powerful. It seems to work quite well, but it was not tested thoroughly. I should update my makefile to properly install it on the host system, but I haven’t done it yet. No time.
UPDATE 07/2010:
Simplefind is no longer available. It was an unfinished project that I don’t plan to complete.
I released a new version of SimpleTimer a few minutes ago. About the un-dismissable alert bug: I am not able to reproduce it anymore with this latest fix. Nevertheless, since this bug is not easily trackable I’d like to conduct more testing: therefore, I am releasing this version as a beta. Whoever is interested in doing some testing should contact me at support at cubelogic dot org.
Rarely, when a timer ends and opens an alert box, it happens that the alert box is not dismissed. Currently, to get rid of the alert box, one has to close and restart SimpleTimer. Anyway, this won’t affect other applications and also SimpleTimer will continue to run fine, just as if the alert box was closed.
I am currently unable to reproduce the bug, so it’s quite hard to work on it. If anyone is able to spot this annoying bug, please send a bug report. Please included a full description of the circumstances under which it happened (how many timers were open, how many were active/running, what were you doing before it happened, etc.). Please also include the Console log, available thru the Console application (to find it, go to the “Applications” folder, and then the “Utilities” folder: here double-click on “Console”). Once Console.app is open, select the “console.log” and copy the lines related to SimpleTimer in the bug report.
Hopefully this bug will be fixed in the next version!
Thanks to the help of Mr. Claude R., SimpleTimer will soon have a French localization. I’m pretty excited and honored about the interest. I’m currently cleaning up my code, putting *all* localizable messages in separate .strings files. Admittedly, this is kind of a tedious job, but on the plus side it’s giving me the chance to make my code look nicer and easier to read. Oh yes, I also spotted a couple of bugs. 