The Trove

I’m moving the Trove up one directory to plain old wubbahed.com.  This site will be left as is for the time being, but might be deleted in the near future.  Please update your bookmarks, etc.

It looks like there are some bugs with Upcoming Birthdays around birthdays when the calendar flips.  I think I’ve tracked this down to just bad Date() math on my part.  For some reason, it doesn’t seem to be taking the year into account, so if it’s December, then a January birthday seems 300+ days away and if it’s January, then a December birthday seems 300+ days away.

Overall, it sounds like a simple fix but I haven’t touched this (or the Apple API for that matter) in a few months, so it might take me a while to get this sorted out.  Thanks for your patience.

Though most won’t notice, the blog has been upgraded over to Wordpress from MovableType. And in the spirit of upgrading, I finally recompiled GuitarChords and UpcomingBirthdays to make them Universal Binaries.

Having said that, I don’t actually own any Intel-based Macs, so I have no way of testing whether or not these really work on those machines. So any feedback there good or bad will help. Thanks. Download links are in the sidebar ->>>

So it’s been nearly five months since I’ve posted anything. The biggest reason is that I have a new job now and I’m working more hours and traveling less. Which is unfortunate for you all because I did most of my widget development while logging hours in the passenger seat of transcontinental and transpacific airline flights. Now I would kill to have a solid five hour stretch of uninterrupted computer time (and with no Internet connection either because I’d get too distracted). But none of this matters to YOU, so here’s the status of everything.

1. GuitarChords - As a Dashboard widget, I think this is pretty solid and I’m probably not going to do much else to it aside from the occasional maintenance release. Most of my future efforts with this widget will be put into creating a port of it for Konfabulator or other new platforms like mobile phones.

2. UpcomingBirthdays - This widget is kind of stuck now. There’s a bug (commonly reported) about birthdays appearing a day early or a day late, and I haven’t been able to come up with a solid solution. The issue has to do with the “time” that a birthday occurs. I’ve noticed that the exact time of your birthday varies depending on a) which version of OS X you were using when you created the entry, b) which time zone you were in when you created the entry, and c) which time zone you’re currently in now. Any of these can cause the birthdays to appear up to 12 hours off hence the reason why sometimes they appear as “yesterday” or “tomorrow”.

The sad reality though is that I’m not sure how useful the UpcomingBirthdays widget is when there are other built in ways in OS X to accomplish the same thing. I hope to write more about this in a future post, but right now the easiest way to do this is to create a SmartGroup in the AddressBook program and voila, you have a more configurable view of upcoming birthdays, anniversaries, and other dates in the AddressBook.

That’s fine and all for some of you, but others like the immediacy of Dashboard. For those users, one possible solution is to use Automator. You can easily set up a system in Automator to work with iCals built-in birthday calendar to act as a system wide alarm for UpcomingBirthdays. So you could have your own computer send you an email once a day containing UpcomingBirthdays.

My point is that unlike GuitarChords, the UpcomingBirthdays widget isn’t a unique solution to a problem, it’s just a customized view of something you can get several other ways from OS X. Plus, it’s a widget that could never be ported to Windows, Konfabulator or any other platform, so the reasons to keep pushing its boundaries aren’t that compelling to me. I know some of you might say that’s the EXACT reason to keep developing it, but I’m not entirely convinced.

3. The Future of The Trove - I do plan to keep posting to the Trove. Five months without an update is just unacceptable, and there’s nothing anyone hates more than a dead site or an RSS feed that never (or rarely) comes to life. So I will probably start posting more things here. They will definitely be related to technology and software development. For instance, I have recently started playing around with Lifeblog, and posting directly to Flickr and Blogger directly from my mobile phone. And today I installed a new program called Widsets that shows a lot of promise.

But more on that later.

Sorry I have been ignoring you for so long. There will be a few new updates coming soon. They include a minor update of GuitarChords to include support for the new Intel-based Macs, as well as the long promised upgrade of UpcomingBirthdays. More soon…

So, my day job (you know, the one that actually pays the bills) has been absolutely crazy lately. As in working-around-the-clock-being-on-call-24-7 crazy. So there has been no time for any free software development.

Hopefully in late December, I will be able to continue the work. In the meantime, keep sending me translations! Currently, I have the following languages:

Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
French
German
Italian
Spanish

I’ve got a Spanish translation of UpcomingBirthdays, so we’re up to three languages. Just two more weeks until the cut off date! Get your translations in now!

So far we have French and German translations. However, as someone pointed out to me, there were some strings I forgot to include in the original post. The missing strings are:

There are no upcoming birthdays.
Plugin not found
Not in Dashboard
Before
After

I’ve updated the original post to reflect these changes for people who link directly to the post.

I try to make my software as universally usable as possible. In the case of GuitarChords, this is relatively easy because hey, music IS a universal language. However, in the case of UpcomingBirthdays, the translation becomes a bit more difficult. So I’d like to resolve this issue by adding localizations to the widget.

The only problem is that I’m an ignorant American who has no mastery of any language other than English (and even that’s pretty bad sometimes). So I need your help. Below I’m going to list all of the strings that need to be translated within the widget. If you send me a translation within the next 30 days, then I’ll include it in the next version of the widget. Also, if you have any cultural icons you think make more sense than the cake with candle, then send that along too and I’ll see what I can do.

Here are the strings. Whenver the strings contain [brackets] that implies there is a variable that gets inserted within the brackets.

UpcomingBirthdays
[NUMBER] days ago [NAME] turned [AGE]
Yesterday [NAME] turned [AGE]
TODAY [NAME] turns [AGE]
Tomorrow [NAME] turns [AGE]
In [NUMBER] days [NAME] turns [AGE]
Look [time period*] days in the future
Look [time period*] in the past
Font Size
Return to Birthdays
Help Page

* time periods - 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 4 days, 1 week, 10 days, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 1 month

Send the translations to will at wubbahed dot com. Thanks.

**UPDATE**
I forgot to include some strings in my original post. Here they are:

There are no upcoming birthdays.
Plugin not found
Not in Dashboard
Before
After

We’ve got the kinks worked out of the system plus a few new features thrown in. Add it all up and you get UpcomingBirthdays 1.5.

New features in this release include:
- ability to use different time ranges for missed and upcoming birthdays
- adjustable font size for people who like large and small text
- resizable widget window
- new help page showing how to add birthdays to the widget

Bug fixes include:
- fixed a refresh bug so birthday listing will update each time Dashboard is opened
- fixed a timing bug that would cause birthdays to change at noon instead of midnight

What are you waiting for? Download away. It’s free.

As always, here’s the standard disclaimer:

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.