Mathieu Tozer's Dev Blog

What a hideous, hideous bug! It turns out that the nasty behaviour
that images weren't sticking around between launches (Why is it
loosing objects!!!!) was happening BECAUSE I WAS TELLING IT TO.

It was happening because of the old way the image system was
architectured, before I refactored. Every time the application quits,
images that aren't flagged to be 'kept' are promptly wiped.

And I had completely forgotten about this code and that it was running.

Now that it's commented out, let's see how it all goes.

Yup, sure enough, I comment out that cleanup method in
applicationShouldTerminate, and everything is dandy.

Not sure what the lesson is to take away from this... except that
maybe I'm silly. (Dumb is too strong :P)

I am starting to feel the weight of the application as it grows (and
groans). Perhaps this is one symptom of a growing application.

So now I have a working copy locally on my MatBook, and a repository
ready to manage the source on the server.

Now that the databases assignment is done with, I am going to begin
work on the working version which I can actually roll out at some stage.

Like Pete said, I'll use a rails backend. Currently I'm reading a bit
more about how rails works. Because of my work done in Cocoa, I am
understanding it better than when I looked at it before.

People wouldn't want to log in to use a dictionary. They might log in
to play word games, but the basic dictionary lookup has to be user
free. And if I expect people to submit their own word lists, then
this has to be user free as well.

Construct it as a basic rails app, then open the database up with a
rails api (the type Pete said you could do pretty much for free with
the latest bleeding edge Rails).

So this means I have to
1. Write the database migration, which will generate the database
schema.
2. Modify the model objects to maintain their data integrity, and
increment their counts as required by Words
3. Put up scaffolding, including custom scaffolding, that will enable
simple manipulation of the database.
4. Set up an API for the database.
5. Put the application on a rails server somewhere.

The issue with the rails front end is the inability of unicode. I
know a fix for this is in the works, and there are patch gems available.

Well Uni is finishing this week. Sure I have exams.
I'm actually feeling all depressed about the whole thing really.
Like, almost I don't give a damn. Kind of like I want to just escape
by leaving the country entirely and moving to... India or something.

Kind of like I just want to take off once it's all done.

Maybe I'll stay down in Torquay for a week or something, give me some
time to gather my thoughts. One Week! That would be the longest stay
in 5 years.

I guess my problem is that I need to download higher resolution
images of the same image given only the URL. My interface downloads
images by having them dragged into a custom view which accepts URL
drops of thumbs, but then I want to actually download a higher res
image behind the scenes. Is there enough information in the URL alone
to parse another well formed search to the API perhaps? I think there
is - it will be a bit annoying, but doable.

Hey. Isn't it nice when things Just Work. Especially when you
engineered it yourself! I had been thinking all along that
implementing type-to-define search would be difficult, but it seems I
already had the building blocks for it already. All I've done is
create another method, mostly a copy paste of the usual defining
method, but removed the word loop, because I pass it an individual
word. My thread is taking care of getting the definitions from the
dictionaries back to my user interface.

Geez. even the defining spinner gave me feedback on what it was doing!

Having said all that, I haven't tested it fully, of course, but
still, I wasn't expecting to get even this far on the first run.

Words is finally getting to a stage where I could probably start to
use it.

So there that's version 0.16

Perhaps I need to remove rankings all together from definitions, so
that it removes one of the data entry steps that users have to make
to get concise definitions into words.

Internally I can have a ranking which will be set from the server,
but that's quite a bit in the future. Users should still be able to
order their lists of definitions though.

I'm going to have to go down the list of things I need to finish
before Friday.

One thing is the type to define thing. So that things can get defined
easily.