Squeak People diary for KenCausey

18 Oct 2005

Tue, 18 Oct 2005 20:57:12 -0700

I mentioned something about an Announcements list, created it, then forgot to say anything further about it. Well, better late than never.

If you have any announcements related to Squeak please send them to announcements@lists.squeakfoundation.org.

And if you have even the vaguest of interest in Squeak you will want to signup at

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/announcements.

This list is moderated and traffic should be very light.

13 Oct 2005

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 21:41:11 -0700

Torsten Bergmann posted a notice about the News mailing list on http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/ and I just wanted to clarify that this is a list for use by the News Team which will handle producing the Weekly Squeak for internal discussion and not a general 'news' list.

However there will probably be a new mailing list for announcements in the near future, more soon...

30 Aug 2005

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 00:12:36 -0700

Avi Bryant recently spoke to the Vancouver Lisp User's Group about Seaside. The presentation was recorded and I've setup a torrent for the video at http://www.squeak.org/~kencausey/lv200508/seaside.mov.torrent.

23 Feb 2004

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 20:33:00 -0700

I applaud bkv (Brent Vukmer) for soldiering on with my aborted attempt at adding tabs to the BFAV2 interface. The more I worked on it the more I got frustrated with the current use of email as the reporting mechanism. I've turned my attention to playing with the concept of a new bug tracking system based on an OODB. I'm getting started much more slowly than I had hoped. avi has kindly been helping me with GOODS client and the GOODS server itself. I'm currently working on a spike and got a bit tangled in trying to massage data from the current BFAV repository for testing purposes. I hope I will be able to make some real progress this week.

9 Feb 2004

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 21:53:17 -0700

To return the serve:

Brent is working on improving the Comments Note Pad in a major way:

http://modules.squeakfoundation.org/People/bkv/world-with-DRNP.gif

If you ask him nicely he might even let you take it for a ride.

This work is likely to see the light of day soon, much sooner than my work with a tab interface.

Ken

13 Dec 2003

Sat, 13 Dec 2003 23:06:51 -0700

Brent (bkv) and I got together this morning on #squeak to try to finish up a releasable alpha of BFAV2. For now the release is primarily going to be the BFAV 1.x UI on top of a BFAV2 model.

We went though a series of smoke tests testing the UI and primarily verifying that no debuggers popped up and they seemed to do the right thing:

Open BFAV from the World/open menu. Slow but works. Be prepared to wait.

Go down through the menu from the title bar button starting with 'show approved groups' and try each menu entry. For the checkbox items, try them checked and uncheked. And ideally in combinations. Any of the items that requires rebuilding the list takes several seconds at least. Load Updates takes entirely longer than it should, even when there are no updates. After using the 'keep archive in memory...' menu item and the ArchiveKeeper is running Squeak becomes noticeably more sluggish. Looks like the filtering based on the checkboxes may not work quite as you might expect. If you have say 'show approved groups' and 'show announcements' checked only, you might expect to only see groups that are announcements and are tagged as approved. What you seem to see is all announcements and ALL approved groups (of any kind). Not sure about this, it's a little hard to judge. If you have nothing checked, you get no posts, perhaps this would be expected.

Test the menu at the top of the scrollbar for the pane that contains the list. Similarly test the menu pop up in this pane which should be identical.

Select some posts. Try the menu options that are added when you have a post selected. Keep in mind that the posts are downloaded as needed. If you haven't viewed a post before it may have to be downloaded from the server. They are downloaded in chunks.

Test the scrollbar and context menus in the pane which shows the text of the message.

Test CommentNotePad. There seems to be some weirdness with the tag checkboxes. Brent is looking into that.

I left testing of posting using CommentNotePad to Brent.

Enough for one day,

Ken

4 Dec 2003

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 16:55:27 -0700

BFAV2 Testing and Feedback

As bkv requested I'm taking the current dev version of BFAV2 out for a ride.

Comments:

The long delay when the client is first opened should probably be accompanied by some feedback. Why not go ahead and open the window but add a status line to the UI which would including a progress bar and some text. The main panes of the window would be blank but the status bar could say 'Getting Message Listing' and show some sort of updating progress bar.

The delay when clicking on a message that has not yet been downloaded is not bad on a high speed connection. I'm quite happy about that. But this should also have some feedback informing the user that the message is being downloaded from the archive along with a progress bar.

Sorting: Sorting by date is needed I believe. Keep threads intact and sort by the date of the latest (by date) message in the thread.

Scrolling the large list isn't too bad but I'm on a relatively fast system. Maybe someone with a sub-500MHZ system will comment.

More testing later today I hope.

Ken

27 Nov 2003

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 23:50:01 -0700

Posted an article to the page too quickly today and badly misspelled Daniel's last name. Cees quickly came to my rescue and bailed me out. But that added on to my microbrew debt with him. Brings me up to about two six-packs now I think.

Shipping is going to eat me alive...

Ken

27 Nov 2003

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 00:49:14 -0700

For those wondering why there was trouble with the squeakfoundation.org sites including this web site yesterday I suspect that the failure of a transatlantic cable had a lot to do with it.

Ken

17 Nov 2003

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 22:44:24 -0700

Discussed the attachment count issue for BFAV2 with Brent (bkv) today. We decided that it would be little more than a feature bullet.

The main argument I can come up with for it is to point out to the user which posts have attachments with the idea that the user may want to pay more attention to those. This is really only relevant if the cost of looking at a particular message is high.

This is not the case. BFAV2 does not download all messages before presenting the list as BFAV does. But when messages are downloaded they are downloaded in chunks of about 100. So it's likely that most if not all of a thread would be downloaded all at once anyway so having the user pick messages to be viewed at a high granularity does not improve the experience signficantly if at all.

Ken