30 December 2007

Permanent Eraser 2.3.3 (released today) was the version that was never meant to be. The original goals for PE 2.5 were becoming overly ambitious, and coupled with the development of the New Mystery Product (NMP), work on PE 2.5 moved slower than intended. The goals for PE 2.5 were scaled back and work on PE 2.4 began. However, even the expectations of PE 2.4 are still a little out of reach for now, but an important update to PE needed to be released.

When Permanent Eraser 2.2.0 through 2.3.2 are run on Mac OS 10.2 through 10.4 (but excluding 10.5), it will stall after deleting around 250 files. After much digging, it was found that PE was not freeing up all of its resources, and since an NSPipe was not being released, it acted as if a "file" was still open. Mac OS X has a restriction on how many files can be opened by one process at any given time. As an experiment, try opening 101 Terminal windows. After a decent number of windows have been opened, the new Terminal windows will not work. This is part of the OS limitation at work. Permanent Eraser 2.3.3 fixes this problem where the NSPipe was not being freed up properly. Now PE 2.3.3 can delete large groups of files without stalling.

In future news, PE 2.4 (and eventually version 2.5) are in the works, which hopefully will arrive in 2008. Also to be released (after several years of work), is the NMP. Keep an eye out in the next several weeks for the first glimpses of Edenwaith's first new product in several years.

2 December 2007

Untar is still kicking with a bit of life as Untar 1.3.3 was released today, which includes an Italian translation and a minor bug fix. This will likely be the last release of the year.

26 November 2007

Mac OS 10.5 "Leopard" was released a month ago, and still no known problems have cropped up with any Edenwaith products so far.

The New Mystery Product is getting close to completion. It will be released in 2008 (hopefully March or earlier).

The expected list of new features and improvements for Permanent Eraser 2.5 has been larger than expected, so an interm release (either PE 2.3.3 or 2.4) will likely be released earlier.

2 October 2007

The remainder of the year should remain fairly quiet as Permanent Eraser 2.5 and New Mystery Product 1.0 continue ahead. If Mac OS 10.5 Leopard createst any unexpected issues with any of the Edenwaith applications, then some patch releases will be made available.

26 September 2007

The devlog has been quiet for nearly two months, but the development hasn't. Taking a look at the last couple of releases belies where the real efforts have been going towards for the past several months. EdenList has been making some incremental steps towards a hopeful One-Point-Oh release, and GUI Tar isn't quite dead yet and was updated to version 1.1.1 today.

Those were only small releases. The big releases, Permanent Eraser 2.5 and New Mystery Product (NMP) have been in heavy development for the past month or few. NMP will be Edenwaith's most ambitious project to date, and the proper time and testing will be taken to ensure that the past several years of efforts will not be for naught.

2 August 2007

Making hopeful promises about future release dates is always a gamble, but sometimes you get lucky and win. As foolish as it is, you are on a high from your win, and you tempt Fate once again. So far, the recent predictions about Permanent Eraser's schedule has (for a change) been pretty accurate. Permanent Eraser 2.5 is plowing along, so it should hopefully be released by the end of the year.

[Update: Don't tempt Fate. A lot of the development was stalled by the intense work on the New Mystery Product. Permanent Eraser 2.3.3 was released by the end of the year, however.]

26 July 2007

Just a quick update: we're still around and still developing Permanent Eraser 2.5 and the New Mystery Product.

23 June 2007

The fine folks at Mac Format magazine reviewed Permanent Eraser in Issue 183, so if you can find a copy, pick it up and read up.

EdenList 0.9.6 was released today - the comments view now saves properly, so EdenList is a proper working application now.

21 June 2007

The comments box in EdenList is now functional, which brings EdenList close to feature-complete at this point.

10 June 2007

Despite the seemingly nominal upgrade release of EdenList (0.9.0 to 0.9.5), the amount of changes made on the back-end have been relatively significant. Instead of being a flat list, check boxes have been added to actually make EdenList useful as a To Do list application. The comments box is partially functional - sometimes the comments save properly, and other times they don't. This will, of course, be fixed by the eventual 1.0 release.

7 June 2007

After the Permanent Eraser intervention, EdenList is back in development. This won't be the final 1.0 version, but version 0.9.5 will be a much more functional application over version 0.9.

31 May 2007

A tangent of a tangent has led us back to the beginning. After Permanent Eraser 2.3.1, work began on EdenList, but then our attention diverged back to Permanent Eraser. Version 2.3.2 is now out, which adds a Swedish translation, and several improvements and additions for Automator Actions. The Finder plug-in has been improved, and two Automator Actions are also included: Erase Trash and Erase Selected Items.

11 May 2007

Since the release of Permanent Eraser 2.2 last September, the hiatuses between each of the releases have been relatively brief. While PE 2.5 is still a ways off until it will be finished, another interm release is in the works which will extend its flexibility for those people using Mac OS 10.4.

1 May 2007

EdenList has been moving rapidly towards its long-due 1.0 release. Expected features such as check boxes and a useable comments window are now working. EdenList will eventually look like a stripped down version of OmniOutliner (just without any of the outlining part).

21 April 2007

Several different projects have been flowing in the past week: EdenGraph, EdenList, EdenMath, Permanent Eraser, and of course, the New Mystery Product.

13 April 2007

Permanent Eraser 2.3.1 is the sixth update in the past seven months, which adds a Cancel menu to the Dock Menu and corrects several minor issues.

1 April 2007

Yesterday was a day long awaited for Permanent Eraser. Ever since seeing the application QuickErase being advertised on the Mac Gems blog (which is pretty much a rebranding of the Disc Erasing developer code included with Xcode), Permanent Eraser has strived to also have any easy method to erase CD-RW and DVD-RW discs. Now it has this capability. What's next? While PE's original goals have been far eclipsed by now, the number of new ideas for this program have not ceased. By the time Permanent Eraser 2.5 is released, we should also be making use of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Permanent Eraser 3.0 would (logically) come next, which should fill in any gaps PE is currently missing. But that is the future, and Permanent Eraser 2.3 is today. Enjoy.

14 March 2007

Permanent Eraser 2.3 is progressing very well and has entered beta testing. PE 2.3 will have some new features which will be useful for all Mac OS X users.

25 February 2007

On the anniversary of Untar's last update, Untar 1.3.2 has been released. French and Traditional Chinese localizations have been added, along with an updated Help system (to more closely match the cleaner appearance of Apple's Help Systems since Mac OS 10.3). However, the biggest addition to Untar is that it has been released as an open source project under GPL. If anyone has something to contribute to the project, certainly send in your contributions so the program can continue to flourish.

16 February 2007

Interjected a bit of work into the New Mystery Product. Untar 1.3.2 is coming along nicely, as well.

1 February 2007

The Help files for Untar 1.3.2 have been completed.

21 January 2007

The Edenwaith website has undergone several changes in phasing out the Old and unifying the website to a more cohesive appearance that started back in March 2005. In addition to the new appearance for the Company, Development, and main Products pages, one of Edenwaith's older applications, Journeyman FTP is being retired. After the lack of activity and interest in this project, it has come time to shelve this particular project and focus more on those projects which have more promise to them at this time.

17 January 2007

The ever-quickening pace of Permanent Eraser's development over the past month has been astounding. Each of the first five versions of this application were spaced out across six months for each release. Now compare this against the development of Permanent Eraser in the past month - three updates alone, each update even faster than its predecessor. If things go as planned (famous last words), there will be at least one more significant release of Permanent Eraser this year.

10 January 2007

The perpetual progress of Permanent Eraser in the past several months has been an encouraging sign that Edenwaith's focus is narrowing down to a select few products. There have already been three updates to PE since late September 2006, and another update is on its way.

Interestingly, the recent number of updates has stirred up some fervored (?) comments about Permanent Eraser's functionality. With a single click, Permanent Eraser will launch and erase the files from your Trash - however, this seems to have caught some people by surprise. Permanent Eraser 2.2.1 did add a new feature where it popped up a dialog box which warns the user that their files are about to be erased (Note: this warning only appears during the first launch of PE). The curious thing about this is that PE has worked the way it has for 3 years, and it is only now that someone (several someones, actually) have taken note of the lack of a permanent warning.

Yet, some good points have been made. What if someone accidentally clicks on Permanent Eraser and erases their Trash prematurely? Or what if they are dragging a file to be opened by one application and accidentally drop it on Permanent Eraser? No more file! Oops! That would be a sign of Permanent Eraser doing its job perhaps a little too well. Steps are being made to the future version of Permanent Eraser to have the proper warnings in place at all times, while trying to maintain the application's simplicity.

6 January 2007

The last release time between Permanent Eraser 2.2.0 and 2.2.1 was the shortest in PE's history (slightly under three months). That minor record has been shattered today with the release of Permanent Eraser 2.2.2 - coming in at a little more than two weeks. A Dutch translation has been added and the tracking is even more accurate, especially when deleting files which contain resource forks (i.e. files from the Classic Mac OS days).

2 January 2007

2006 Overview

• Permanent Eraser 2.2 arrives after nearly a year of development and testing.
• GUI Tar makes it to version 1.1 with additional support for file archive types not natively supported by Mac OS X.
• With Apple's transition to Intel-based Macs, Untar, GUI Tar, EdenGraph, EdenList, and Permanent Eraser were updated as Universal Binaries.
• After three years, EdenList has been updated, with support for multiple documents.
• Minor updates to Untar and EdenGraph.
• Continued development of the New Mystery Product.

In development news for 2007, I have finally figured out how to get a Cocoa application to detect if a file has a resource fork. It still involves a few lines of Carbon, but nothing too horrible. Just enough to get the job done properly and then continue on its merry way.

21 December 2006

Permanent Eraser 2.2.1 has been released, which also marks the fastest time between PE releases. If development goes as planned, look for Permanent Eraser 2.3 in 2007.

2 December 2006

Worked on a next patch release to Permanent Eraser 2.2, which has some minor interface updates and other functionality enhancements.

30 November 2006

GUI Tar 1.1 is out now (finally), a mere 19 months after its last update. In addition to being a Universal Binary, it features additional support for 7-zip archives, Bzipped tar archives (tbz), UNIX compression (Z), plus bzip and zip files can be uncompressed on Mac OS 10.1 and 10.2 even if you don't have the unzip or bzip2 utilities installed on your computer!

However, with this latest, shiny new update, there is some uncertainty to GUI Tar's future. This has been one of the toughest updates to get out the door, to complete the necessary work, and still provide as much functionality to as wide of a Mac audience as possible. With the introduction of new un/archiving applications like The Unarchiver, Springy, and BetterZip having all come out in 2006, they have provided a level of functionality, speed, and improvement that GUI Tar just has not been able to match. If GUI Tar does not see a new update for awhile, it is recommended to also try out these other fine un/archiving applications. But GUI Tar might see another update much sooner than later, so time will test this program's future.

In 2007, Edenwaith's focus will be narrowing on a few select products and continue to work diligently on those applications, instead of spreading itself thin and only be able to provide one or two updates to each application per year.

23 November 2006

The time in November has been spent on finishing off GUI Tar 1.1 and also pushing forward with the New Mysterious Product. GUI Tar 1.1 is in the final stages before it is released. Yes, it will be a Universal Binary. Yes, it will support 7-zip format. Yes, it will be able to compress files as bzipped tar files (tbz). This is a short list of the improvements GUI Tar 1.1 will have.

1 November 2006

Reworked the website header and menus to give a little cleaner and more consistent appearance across a wider range of web browsers.

The last several weeks have been spent working on GUI Tar 1.1 and the New Mysterious Product that was originally intended to be released late 2005, first half of 2006, late 2006 ... someday. It's a cool little application, and maybe it will finally see the light of day in 2007. Maybe. Many lessons have taught to never give an expected date of a product release, especially if the product isn't even close to being complete. Doing so will only shoot yourself in the foot...while your foot is coincidentally in your mouth. It's just not a good idea.

17 October 2006

Development of GUI Tar 1.1 continues — support for new file types, built as a Universal Binary, better zip and bzip2 support for older versions of Mac OS X, and other (minor and not-so-minor) updates.

4 October 2006

GUI Tar 1.1 continues forth in its development, which should be out by the end of the year, plus a patch release of Permanent Eraser is also in the works.

21 September 2006

Tonight is very likely the eve before Permanent Eraser 2.2's release. The work on this release has been in the works ever since PE 2.1.2 was released last October. Many of the features have been in place for many, many months, so hopefully all of the thorough testing has wrung out nearly all of the kinks. There was one show stopper which did appear if the program was run in Jaguar, but it appears that the small flaw has been fixed. Tomorrow, PE 2.2 should be available, which is the most significant update since the jump from PE 1.0 to 2.0. Serve and enjoy.

14 September 2006

Off track once again, and this time it is to improve upon Permanent Eraser 2.2, which will be the biggest jump in improvement in this app since the original PE 2.0.

7 September 2006

Continued work on The New Mystery App and also continued UI and coding improvements of GUI Tar 1.1.

13 August 2006

In the works is GUI Tar 1.1, which will introduce new formats to support (i.e. 7-zip). Yes, it will also be a Universal Binary.

5 August 2006

EdenGraph 1.2.2 has been released as Edenwaith's third Universal Binary application (after Untar 1.3.1 and EdenList 0.9). It also has beautifully reworked Help files and some cosmetic interface changes.

27 July 2006

The Help system for EdenGraph is going through a major overhaul, to give it a more modern appearance, while still making it accessible to earlier versions of Mac OS X.

19 July 2006

Worked on some improvements for the next iteration of EdenGraph.

2 July 2006

Worked on some experiments to see if a future version of Untar/GUI Tar might be able to unpack .HQX files. This would be useful in providing an alternative to StuffIt, which no longer comes on new Macs.

30 June 2006

EdenList 0.9 was released yesterday, and hopefully the full 1.0 version won't take three more years. In the mean time, further work will continue on other Edenwaith applications.

2 June 2006

EdenGraph is now Universal, baby! After fighting a very annoying (and surprising) bug that cropped up with the Intel compiler, I managed to get both the front and back ends of EdenGraph to compile as Universal Binaries. When I was using Xcode 2.2, there was a definition missing in the /usr/include/architecture/i386/math.h file which defined the signgam variable, which is useful in computing factorials for real numbers (i.e. 3.1!). So, if you get a "signgam not defined" type of error when compiling with GCC 4 for Intel, I'd recommend upgrading to Xcode 2.3. This seemed to fix the problem for me. If all else fails, add the line extern int signgam; into the Intel (i386) version of math.h.

EdenList 0.9 is also quickly coming along, and should also make an appearance sometime in the middle of 2006.

1 June 2006

EdenGraph 1.2.2 is in the process of becoming a Universal Binary, along with a couple of minor enhancements/fixes. EdenList is still in progress, and version 0.9 might be released in the coming months.

19 May 2006

The pieces for EdenList 1.0 are coming together to form a much improved version of this simple To Do application (think a stripped down version of OmniOutliner). EdenGraph also received a minor tweak for its next version.

18 May 2006

The development of EdenList is progressing along nicely, and at the current rate, the final version should be released in several months - maybe sooner, maybe later. Maybe even never, but hopefully not.

4 May 2006

Good news! It didn't take another three years to make any extra significant progress to EdenList! Further coding was performed to move it closer to that golden 1.0 release!

3 May 2006

After several years of dormancy, EdenList is getting its long-overdue upgrade to version 1.0. It is moving over to a true document-based architecture. Hopefully it won't take another 3 years for its next update of any sort.

4 April 2006

Continued work on rewriting the backend for EdenMath. For those interested, GUI Tar will likely be updated sooner than later, which will bring support for 7z compression.

27 March 2006

The next iteration of EdenMath, version 1.2, is on its way, which will support a new backend which will provide for true scientific calculations.

13 March 2006

With the race on to rapidly bring Intel-compatible Mac programs to market, another Edenwaith product is being prepped up to be a Universal Binary. The next in line is EdenGraph 1.2.2, which will be available for Intel and PowerPC Macs, with a couple of small improvements to the application.

2 March 2006

Even though it wasn't announced here, Untar 1.3.1 was released several days ago, with the notable feature of being the first Edenwaith application to be created as a Universal Binary.

So what's next? At this point, most likely some continued development on Untar, GUI Tar, and perhaps even some Permanent Eraser.

12 February 2006

A major milestone was reached today, as Untar 1.3.1 will become the first Edenwaith application to be supported as a Universal Binary, so it should run smoothly for Macintosh users who use either PowerPC or Intel processors. So what does this mean for the users? Untar has been compiled so it will support as far back as Mac OS 10.2.8, while striving forward to be compatible with the future. While a few Macs may not be able to make use of the newer versions of Untar, hopefully this brings about a better good in the end. However, if you absolutely need a Mac OS 10.1 version of Untar, or any of our other applications which run under 10.1, just go to the Support page and send us a line and we'll see what we can do for you. [Note: After further testing, it was discovered that Untar 1.3.1 also works on Mac OS 10.1.]

3 February 2006

The next iteration of Untar has been progressing along nicely and should be revealed in the next month or two.

The new mystery product saw some great strides which completed one of the major milestones and best features of the program. The program should be released sometime in 2006.

23 January 2006

Worked on adding many new features (some small, others tall) to the next iteration of Untar. And once that is complete, hopefully work will continue on the next significant update of GUI Tar.

1 January 2006

2005 Overview - No new products were released this year, but several updates were made to existing applications.

• A major update to Untar was made with version 1.3.0.
• Permanent Eraser saw several updates, along with some other developments which have not been released yet.
• GUI Tar also saw a minor update.
• Journeyman FTP finally was updated after nearly 3 years
• EdenGraph was updated to 1.2.1 to fix some Panther and Tiger problems and to introduce a few minor improvements.
• The Edenwaith website underwent some cosmetic changes, starting with the product pages, and spreading throughout the rest of the site.
• Development of new mystery product.

10 December 2005

Winding down the wholesome development goodness of Permanent Eraser 2.2. There have been some great little features added, but the release date might become somewhat murky. More on this at 10. And now for the news...

5 December 2005

The progress meter in Permanent Eraser 2.2 works even better than before now, since some of the newer changes caused some odd tracking at times.

Looked at some potential areas to improve upon Untar and GUI Tar. As the Monty Python phrase would go: "I'm not dead yet!" And neither are these two lovely apps.

4 December 2005

PE 2.2 continues forward with some new experimental features. This next version will hopefully be out in the first several months of 2006.

19 November 2005

Permanent Eraser 2.2 is moving along with better progress tracking.

11 November 2005

The appearance to the EdenMath, Psychomancer, and EdenList product pages have been updated, giving the site a more cohesive feel.

GUI Tar is back in the works with additional features and archiving/compression types.

7 November 2005

Further research is going into PE 2.2 for some new features which should be beneficial to all users and make Permanent Eraser more than just a file erasing utility.

25 October 2005

Permanent Eraser 2.2 truly is in the works, with some nice additions for all PE users, from those still using 10.1 to those using 10.4.

22 October 2005

The latest iteration of Permanent Eraser (version 2.1.2) is now out. For most users, there won't be a significant difference to version 2.1.1, but for non-administrators and those who use German as their native language, there are some nice additions. Some great new additions to Permanent Eraser 2.2 are definitely in the works!

In conjunction with the PE release, the home page has been updated with a more modern look and feel, progressing the evolution of the Edenwaith website's appearance.

9 October 2005

The next iteration of Permanent Eraser is currently in its testing phase. The new mystery application progresses forward, moving toward a release date of the first half of 2006.

6 October 2005

The German localization of Permanent Eraser has been completed. Some minor enhancements are also being added.

2 October 2005

The next version of Permanent Eraser will have a German localization and other minor fixes and improvements.

The last post alluded to a perhaps not-so-positive future for EdenGraph, however, there has been some progress on the next version of EdenGraph, so development isn't dead. However, there is no promise if and/or when EdenGraph 1.3 will be released.

17 September 2005

Despite some larger competition available now (Graphing Calculator and Grapher), EdenGraph has been updated again, which supplies a few smaller features and better compliance with Panther and Tiger, while still being backwards compatible with Mac OS 10.1 and 10.2. This is the last guaranteed release of EdenGraph at this time. Any future development of EdenGraph will be dependent upon time, need, and requests.

14 September 2005

Corrected an odd table problem with the next version of EdenGraph, which solves one of the largest problems existing with the program. The next update should be out in the coming month or two.

4 September 2005

Finally released an update to Journeyman FTP, to bring it up to version 0.8.1. Not a significant improvement by any means, but its something at least. It has also been successfully compiled for Windows, but there are some problems with the Windows version before it will be released.

1 September 2005

Updated the Help files for the next release of EdenGraph, which should hopefully be out by the end of the year.

14 August 2005

Worked on some minor bug fixes which appeared in EdenGraph with Panther and Tiger.

26 July 2005

The new application continues onwards, day by day. Also worked on modifying some EdenGraph icons, but they ended up looking about the same. :(

11 July 2005

The new application has been coming along nicely. Expect its release before the end of the year. It's difficult for others to get excited about an unknown product, especially since it's...well, unknown. At this time, the details on this new app will remain very scarse. A lot of Edenwaith products have focused on utilities to provide extra functionality to the Mac OS X user, especially those with earlier systems (pre-Panther). This new application will be quite different from any other Edenwaith product and will require Panther or Tiger to run it.

2 July 2005

Steady progress has been made on the new mystery app, which has been taking up all of the development time during the past week. Expect this new application sometime this year.

23 June 2005

Some great progress was made on the new mystery product, so the initial base functionality is already up and running! However, there are a lot of other details (interface, icons, etc.) which still need to be sorted out before this application is released.

22 June 2005

A new Support section has been finalized which organizes the available support and contact methods for Edenwaith.

18 June 2005

Things have not been lax for the past several days. It is somewhat debateable right now if PE will have Services or not. Due to how Services work with the application, they might interfere with the current functionality, which would not be a good thing. If a proper solution is found, then they might be added. In the meantime, work has started on a new application which has been brewing for the past two years.

9 June 2005

Things have been relatively slow at Edenwaith for the past month software-wise, but a lot of focus has been targeted on website design, especially for compliance for web standards, CSS, 508 accessability, and other related web design topics. There have been some plans for the next iteration of Permanent Eraser, however, which will likely include Services for Permanent Eraser.

9 May 2005

Made some changes to some of the icons for EdenGraph, so this is another small addition to EdenGraph which should hopefully lead to the release of EdenGraph 1.2.1 sometime by mid-2005.

28 April 2005

In the first time of Edenwaith's history, two applications were released on the same day: Permanent Eraser 2.1.1 and GUI Tar 1.0.2. Both updates are mostly small bug fixes and cosmetic improvements. However, due to Mac OS 10.4 Tiger being released tomorrow, the software sites (MacUpdate, VersionTracker, etc.) are pretty busy with many developers releasing their Tiger-compatible software.

20 April 2005

Apparently the Ritalin isn't working! Made some minor updates (mostly bug fixes or interface tweaks) to Permanent Eraser. Look for it in May (if not earlier, who knows...)

17 April 2005

The GUI Tar 1.0.2 coding phase is nearing completion, and the testing portion is beginning. On the early end, GUI Tar 1.0.2 will be out in April 2005, on the later end, probably in May 2005.

10 April 2005

Worked on adding some new features (such as Favorites/Bookmarks) for Journeyman FTP 0.8.1.

The next version of GUI Tar (probably version 1.0.2) is in the works with a few minor improvements. Look for it sometime in the next several months.

6 April 2005

Get this man some Ritalin! Going in six directions all at the same time, yet more projects are having incremental improvements made to them. Journeyman FTP 0.8.1 for Mac & Windows has been receiving a few additional features, but it is still far from being feature complete. The next version of GUI Tar is in the works, correcting a few small points here and there, and if you are all good and say "Please", it might even come with a nice new feature or few.

1 April 2005

Despite that it has been nearly three years since its last release, Journeyman FTP 0.8.1 is in the works with a few minor additions, features, and tweaks. A Windows version has also been successfully compiled, so a Windows version of Journeyman FTP may also appear sometime in the future.

17 March 2005

I recently upgraded my iBook's memory from 320 MB of RAM (64MB on-board RAM + 256 MB) to 576 MB (64 MB on-board RAM + 512 MB). It's interesting to see how hungry computers have become with RAM in the past several years. When I got a computer for college back in 1996, I was somewhat disappointed that it only came with 32MB of RAM, and my dream amount was 64 MB. Funny how 64 MB is a paltry amount now. Now modern operating systems require at least 128 MB to even function semi-functionally, 256 MB to run adequately, and 512 MB to run fairly well without bogging the system down. Lately I have found that 320 MB of RAM just wasn't cutting it any more. Firefox with multiple tabs open, alone could consume 70-90 MB of RAM, if not more. Combine that with the RAM hungry Mac OS X, which will pretty much eat up as much RAM as you can give it for better performance, and 256 MB (or 320 MB in this case) seems pretty paltry and inadequate. Try opening up too many applications at once, especially if they consume copious amounts of memory (MS Word, any Adobe product, Firefox), and you will quickly find your memory shrink down to nothing. Upgrading my iBook to 576 MB of RAM has helped by allowing me to open more applications at once without fearing that I'm going to soon run out of available RAM and virtual memory will be needed, which then can slow down the entire system and reduce available hard drive space. So, my recommendation is that if you are running Mac OS X and run more than one application at a time (most of us do), then equip your machine with a minimum of 512 MB of RAM...more if you can get it. There does seem to be a spot after awhile that too much more than 512 MB (perhaps closer to 640 MB), that adding more RAM really doesn't help unless you open 100 different applications all at the same time. On a desktop system I have, it has 896 MB of RAM, yet it rarely goes over the 500 MB mark when using the RAM.

In Edenwaith news: since Untar 1.3.0 is finally out the door, the next version of EdenMath is already in the works. The idea behind EdenMath so far has been that EdenMath 1.0 was to be a replacement for the Mac OS 10.0 calculator, EM 1.1 for Mac OS 10.1, and hopefully EM 1.2 will be a better calculator than what is supplied with Mac OS 10.2.

10 March 2005

Untar is coming! Untar is coming! And it is here. It has been a year-long journey from incorporating some of the improvements of GUI Tar and adding a wheelbarrow-full of new improvements and additions, including a whole new set of web pages dedicated solely to Untar. This new design will eventually spread its way throughout the rest of the Edenwaith web site.

2 March 2005

Untar 1.3 is coming! Really. Honest. Someday, that is. The newest version of Untar is coming very close to completion, and it should be out this month.

27 February 2005

Same ol' situation. Continued work on finishing off the "paperwork" details of Untar 1.3 (Read Me files, licenses, web pages, Help files, etc.) It should all be complete in March.

22 February 2005

The Help System for Untar 1.3 is now complete.

16 February 2005

Edenwaith just passed its 4th anniversary since its inception. Yea! In that time, quite a few products have been released, with several updates on most applications. Here's to the next 4+ years, which should herald in the next major updates of several apps, plus perhaps a new app or few along the way.

Past that, nothing too new other than finishing off Untar 1.3. Help system is nearly complete, and it's a massive improvement over Untar 1.2's Help system.

2 February 2005

Untar 1.3 is coming down to the final details, mostly the small stuff which is the difference necessary to make a good application great. Each major incarnation of Untar has made significant strides in becoming a more useful and professional-looking application.

23 January 2005

Continuing improvements to Untar 1.3 to wrap up the smaller details.

8 - 9 January 2005

Untar 1.3 is starting to look reeeeealy nice. You should take a look at it. Really. Or perhaps you'll need to wait a few more months for Untar to finish up. Mostly smaller details have been worked on during the past two days (READ ME, file compatability support, uninteresting things like that).

4 January 2005

Researched new archive/compression types (cab, lhz, lza, arc, bin, hqx, 7-zip) for Untar and GUI Tar.

3 January 2005

Continued development of Untar 1.3. Further work on Internet Version Checking. When selecting folders and files, the last viewed directory will be shown in the open panel, instead of defaulting to the home directory.

2 January 2005

A new feature for Untar, Check For Updates, is going to be in version 1.3. This feature has been included in several other Edenwaith applications, such as EdenMath, EdenGraph, and GUI Tar.

28. December 2004

The past several days have been spent working on Untar 1.3. With continual work, Untar 1.3 should be released in the next several months.

22. December 2004

Some minor bug fixes and cheats were made to the upcoming Psychomancer 1.07. Untar 1.3 should be released sometime in the first several months of 2005.

5. December 2004

GUI Tar 1.0.1 has been released. The most notable features are full compatability with Mac OS 10.3, and file support for svgz and rar.

1. December 2004

GUI Tar 1.0.1 is in the works, which will feature some nice little improvements, but not as feature-rich as Untar 1.3 will be. The next version of GUI Tar should be out by the end of this year.

20. November 2004

Permanent Eraser 2.1 is nearly complete, and now is in the testing stages.

19. November 2004

Untar 1.3 will be further delayed due to other updates (GUI Tar and Permanent Eraser), and a broken arm. Trying to program with one arm is slow work. Pacific Tech has finally released a Mac OS X version of Graphing Calculator...however, there is a catch. They don't seem to be offering a trial download. Ah, well.

13. November 2004

Since the release of Untar 1.3 may take a little while longer, a minor update is being created for GUI Tar, which should be released this month.

2. November 2004

Watching the results of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election while adding unrar support to the next version of Untar.

20. October 2004

The past few days have been spent on making improvements to various applications, including future versions of EdenGraph, EdenMath, and Untar. A new mathematical evaluator will see its way into EdenMath and EdenGraph.

11. October 2004

Small addition to EdenGraph so the graph can shift by using the arrow keys. This feature will appear in a future version of EdenGraph.

10. October 2004

Worked on additions to Untar 1.3/5 so it tracks the uncompression more accurately.

4. October 2004

Why bother waiting? Untar 1.3/5 is already in the works, which will have some nice additions, most notably the removal of unnecessary OS or developer tools support. This means that even Mac OS 10.1 users should be able to uncompress zip and bzip2 files. That is the plan, at least.

30. September 2004

EdenGraph 1.2 has been released after nearly a month delay.

29. September 2004

Final preparations for EdenGraph 1.2. Mostly the boring stuff to make sure everything is ready. Read Me files, web pages, etc.

28. September 2004

A large bug with Mac OS 10.3 and EdenGraph 1.2 has finally been resolved, so the next version of EdenGraph will hopefully see the light of day by October.

17. September 2004

Considering how bad WS_FTP has become, work has begun on porting Journeyman FTP to Windows, and making a decent, no-nonsense FTP client for Windows.

Graphing calculator news: AppleInsider has reported that Apple acquired Curvus Pro from Arizona Software. It will be interesting to see what happens in the graphing calculator front in the coming year.

14. September 2004

EdenGraph 1.2 is undergoing some of the final stages before it is released. Now final testing is underway.

After long last, Pacific Tech has announced that they are currently testing a Mac OS X version of Graphing Calculator, which will now make use of OpenGL.

31. August 2004

Today is EdenGraph's 1 year anniversary since the official version 1.0. It would have been a nice day to have released EdenGraph 1.2, but upon testing, a pretty serious problem was found under Mac OS 10.3. So, more time will need to be spent on resolving any issues between versions of OS X, and perhaps adding a few smaller touches. In other graphing calculator news, it was announced at MacWorld Expo Paris that Tiger would contain a graphing calculator. Whether this is the same beloved app from Pacific Tech or Apple's own creation is unknown at this point.

29. August 2004

Final preparations on EdenGraph have been coming to a close. EdenGraph 1.2 should be released within the coming weeks.

16. August 2004

The window scrolls faster when dragged outside of the view now. This was quite a bit more complicated to get to work properly, but it finally works right. This is one more feature which is now complete for EdenGraph 1.2.

2. August 2004

I've been very busy with moving (again) and my new job. The new job does plenty of wonderful Java development, so I've returned to Journeyman FTP. A few minor improvements have been added for the time being.

29. July 2004

Returned to do a little work for the next version of Psychomancer with a background timer.

13. July 2004

EdenGraph is sporting a new icon, which is a great improvement over the past two icons, plus it has some (intentional) similiarities to EdenMath's latest icon. Like the past several Edenwaith icons, EG's latest icon is not nearly as much of an eyesore as some have been. EdenGraph also now supports three more functions: round, ceil, and floor. Combine these with the new absolute value function, and EdenGraph can create some interesting stair-step patterns (which were not possible to make in earlier versions).

4. July 2004

Worked on correcting some small issues on how EdenGraph responds to the user. Worked on a new icon design.

2. July 2004

Lessons in using other people's code - Part 2: The open source movement is a tremendous boon for the computing community, however, with this freedom comes the lack of censorship (and editors). It has been said that if a million monkeys had a million typewriters, they could theoretically create the entire works of Shakespeare. This has (essentially) been disproven -- it's called the Internet. The point is that with open source code, any monkey, good or bad, can post their code. Making use of it is another matter entirely. Code (especially of a UNIX background) which has been around for many years and has matured to an adequate state, can be extremely useful. New code, even code which is published in books, can be rife with problems...some minor, others major.

With that little rant out of the way, a long standing issue with EdenGraph was solved today so an equation such as x=3 will properly graph now. The next version of EdenGraph may see a summer 2004 (or winter for those in the southern hemisphere) release.

30. June 2004

EdenGraph 1.2 now appears to be (about) feature complete. The new, intended features seem to work pretty well without any glaring problems. The next month (or few) will be spent on polishing this next version of EdenGraph off.

27. June 2004

EdenGraph will now recognize absolute values, by either using abs(x) or |x|. Just one more thing to continue making EdenGraph a great little piece of freeware.

18 - 19. June 2004

One of the new features to EdenGraph 1.2 will be adding/saving and editing your favorite equations. This feature is moving along nicely and is nearly in a "beta" mode of development. It works, but not everything is quite 100% in place.

17. June 2004

Continued work on EdenGraph 1.2. This version will pretty much involve adding new features to the program.

2. June 2004

Today's piece is titled "How to go everywhere and get nowhere fast". I was diverted again by adding some new features to EdenGraph. There is no say on how soon or delayed the next version of EdenGraph might be, but it will have some nice and useful features to make EdenGraph an even more complete graphing calculator.

1. June 2004

EdenwMath 1.1.1 was released yesterday which features extensive improvements, additions, and modifications to the tutorial. This release took the greatest amount of time to develop since the original 1.0 release due to the increased focus for detail in the documentation, tutorial, program correctness, and icon/interface design. The last several days made some corrections in the code and added the new graphics in the interface for the buttons which use exponents (e^x, x², etc...). This last feature was originally intended for the next minor release of EdenMath (1.2, or whatever), but since I was able to get the graphics created and to look decent, they were added to EM 1.1.1.

30. May 2004

First addition to PIGE in several months. Added the ability to show the frame rates, which involves calculating the frame rates and displaying them on the screen via bitmap fonts.

26. May 2004

Although it has been quiet on the Web front, EdenMath 1.1.1 is in the final stages before it's release. Even though it appears to be only a patch release, it has plenty of improvements and new features on both the front end and back end of the calculator. The interface has some minor improvements, there is a new application icon which is more visible, factorials can be calculated for non-integers, the tutorial has been updated, and several other smaller additions and fixes.

9. May 2004

Progress on EdenMath 1.1.1 has been moving along nicely. EM has an updated icon which is the best so far. Tons nicer in appearance, and easier to click on, also.

8. May 2004

Made some small fixes and additions for the next patch release of EdenMath.

7. May 2004

Worked further on cleaning up some bugs for Psychomancer 1.07. Some code to create a point system has been created. Also further flushed out some design documents for the full version of the game.

29. April 2004

The last several days have been spent on making improvements to Psychomancer. The MathLink tutorial was updated with some small changes and mltest.c was updated so it compiles correctly and without warnings.

Journeyman FTP 0.8.1 was recompiled on Mac OS X and Windows XP. So...there might be a Windows XP version available sometime in the future. But most importantly, Journeyman FTP needs to go through some huge interface improvements to become even semi-useable. It is certainly no Transmit, folks.

21. April 2004

Edenwaith's first 2.0 product, Permanent Eraser 2.0 was released today. Even though many of the intended features were completed several weeks ago, spending the extra time has helped polish PE with a better application icon and several 'minor' features which give PE a better feeling. It is interesting to look at how Edenwaith's standards of software production have grown over the past two to three years, with increased focus on design and documentation. There are several new additions which are already planned for the next update of PE. With PE 2 updated, there is a brief sense of accomplishment, and that sense of "Okay, now what's next?" Work will likely turn over to Psychomancer 1.07 and try and get that out mid-year.

Fixed the form so it will send e-mails to Edenwaith properly at the Feedback page.

19. April 2004

Cleaned up PE's code, and added another small feature to recognize bundled/packaged files (.app, .rtfd, et cetera). Still trying to decide whether or not to try and implement PE as a Service or not. Hmm....maybe in a future version.

12. April 2004

Continued work on both Permanent Eraser 2.0 and Psychomancer 1.07. Further features have been completed with PE. Psychomancer was further refined with error corrections and some minor additional features.

11. April 2004

Jumping around again, work has turned back to Psychomancer. It is interesting (if not appalling) to view how ancient some of the code appears, since a majority of the code was originally written in 1999. A great deal of additional programming experience has brought new insights to good coding practices. Fortunately, PIGE is available to act as the supports for the next Psychomancer game engine. The current underlying code is looking quite old and fragile, and major future versions of Psychomancer will require large amounts of rewritten code. A cankerous error in properly accepting bounded integers has been fixed for Psychomancer 1.07.

10. April 2004

Excellent progress was made on Permanent Eraser in getting the progress notifications to be more precise. Instead of just saying a directory is being deleted, each of the contents will be shown to be erased.

9. April 2004

PE 2.0 has better support for long file names, so an ellipsis replaces excess characters.

8. April 2004

Restarted the EdenList project, and put some real content to the associated web page.

4. April 2004

Permanent Eraser 2.0 has its major features complete.

2. April 2004

Worked on Permanent Eraser 2.0.

1. April 2004

Since it's April Fool's Day, I spent a good amount of time creating a nice little hoax. Using a combination of OmniWeb 5, Photoshop, and BBEdit, I was able to create a convincing mock site that Doom 3 had gone gold. I substituted an image on the real Doom 3 site for the word GOLD, and linked it to a mock press release, which sounded pretty good. The joke went off great...maybe a little too good. But I imagine Doom 3 will be released eventually.

30. March 2004

I played through Psychomancer for the first time in awhile. It has been good to get away from the game for awhile and let it breath so I could get a fresh perspective on the game. I was somewhat appalled by the number of problems I found in the game. However, considering that the last real update to the game was over two years ago, Edenwaith's standards and experience have risen considerably. Psychomancer 1.07 will be released sometime this year with a few minor additions and many corrections to the game play.

Permanent Eraser 2.0 is coming along quite nicely. It now securely erases files from the trash and can erase files which are dropped the application, too.

28. March 2004

Began work on the next version of Permanent Eraser, which will be MUCH more secure (~10 times more) than the older version.

20. March 2004

The final version of GUI Tar was released.

17. March 2004

Not necessarily Edenwaith related, but the last few days have been spent in updating some client web sites. Yeah, I do that, too. But GUI Tar is rounding off nicely, and a few small touches have been added, including the ability to use the Backspace or Delete key to remove records from the file table in Compressor.

14. March 2004

Following in the steps of its bigger sibling, EdenMath is also undergoing some minor additions and refinements.

11. March 2004

The latest (and consequently, the best) version of EdenGraph is out. It supports factorials, plus, when it zooms in or out, it focuses on the center of the graphing area.

9 - 10. March 2004

I received an e-mail which noted that EdenGraph cannot handle factorials, so x! will not graph. After a bit of brief research, I could not find any function called fact() or factorial in the C math library. After several hours of research, I explored the lovely world of factorials, definite integrals, and the gamma function. Eventually I came upon the function lgamma() which can solve factorials for real numbers. In addition to supporting factorials, several other small improvements are being made to EdenGraph.

7. March 2004

Worked on compiling some of the latest versions of gnutar and bzip2.

6. March 2004

Worked on German and French localizations of Untar.

4. March 2004

The next version of Untar incorporated several features from GUI Tar, such as drop down sheets with a progress bar, plus file-specific icons for tgz, bzip2, zip, etc. Also added a new icon, which is a tremendous improvement over the old Untar icon. The redirection of output from NSTask was solved. Just remember that some UNIX tools spit their info out to standard error, and not standard output.

3. March 2004

The next version of Untar is underway. A new application icon is now in place. Having trouble with redirecting NSTask output, however. Hmmm...

2. March 2004

GUI Tar is finally out, so the next month (or so) will be spent in fixing any last minute details. Had to change the GUI Tar download file from guitar.dmg to guitar.dmg.gz since some browsers (like Safari and OmniWeb) would try and read the dmg file instead of just downloading it. The next incarnation of Untar (probably version 1.3 or 1.5) has already been in the process of being created, with a whole host of new additions. Once the next Untar is out, those improvements will be incorporated into GUI Tar.

29. February 2004

GUI Tar 1.0 Beta 1 was released today. The next month (or so) will be spent in trying to finalize GUI Tar before its official release.

26. February 2004

Added further information to the Help system.

23. February 2004

There is an 80/20 rule with software design. If 80% of the features are implemented, then the product will get out the door (hopefully on time). But if 100% of the features are to be implemented, the project may never be completed. GUI Tar is coming really close to being finished for the 1.0 release, but some additional features have been made to make the interface even easier to use. Drag & Drop is now implemented to add files into the Compressor table.

15. February 2004

Today was spent in error checking and continual polishing of GUI Tar.

13. February 2004

Worked on fine polishing some final areas of GUI Tar.

8. February 2004

Even small developers experience many of the same difficulties that large developers face. GUI Tar is nearing its final stages of development for version 1.0, but for it to be released before June, some trade offs have been made. Some features have been sacrificed for now (wait until the next significant update), but several smaller, but useful, features have been added in the past two days.

2. February 2004

GUI Tar is coming along nicely. Development is coming to an important juncture whether to finish off a few small items, or continue development for a few more months and really make GUI Tar shine. An old project was resurrected, and some experimental work will be performed to see if it is viable to work on further.

29. January 2004

The file icons are now complete for Untar and GUI Tar. A compressed/archived file can be dropped on GUI Tar's icon, and Extractor will uncompress and/or unarchive the file. Compressor now allows for the selection of multiple files, instead of having to do one at a time. I'm especially finding with this program, that some of the best testing, is to just run the program for myself, and find areas that could work better or have some odd effect.

28. January 2004

Today can only be described as a good day. After some contemplation, trial, and error, the problem of communicating between Cocoa classes was solved by using notifications in a manner which I haven't tried before.

26. January 2004

Not much for coding, but the file icons for Untar and GUI Tar were developed.

25. January 2004

One must wonder if Murphy is God. If not, they are both omnipresent beings, at least. Just went GUI Tar seems to be in the final stretches, other odd errors appeared. If a selector is called on a Cocoa save panel, and then a drop down sheet is called in the selector function, the main window disappears. Odd. However, this problem was resolved by using a different path and not calling a selector method.

24. January 2004

GUI Tar was hitting a few snags in how it was going to 'tar' files, but it is finally over that hurdle. Once GUI Tar is released, it will probably be one of the most (if not THE most) flexible and powerful Mac-based tools to (un)compress and (un)archive files in a variety of formats (gz, bz2, zip, tar, tgz, etc.).

19. January 2004

I think it's time for me to sue. Apple's latest software offering GarageBand sports a guitar for its application icon. So where did they get this absolutely fantastic idea? From GUI Tar, of course! Seriously though, GarageBand is a pretty sweet application, but not as sweet as GUI Tar when its dipped in chocolate. GUI Tar is progressing even further. It has a nice guitar icon (GUI Tar...guitar...get it?), and the Extractor seems to be working quite well. At this pace, GUI Tar will be released before the end of the world.

15. January 2004

Progress on GUI Tar is going well and a few odd complications have been fixed. Development on the next version of Untar has begun, implementing some features from GUI Tar, plus some new features which will appear in GUI Tar 1.1.

14. January 2004

I've found with some experiments that trying to use other people's (freely available) code can be a horrible thing. Yes, it can help solve problems I didn't know how to solve before, but the time saved can be lost in trying to fix problems in their code. But, hey, I guess that is what the GNU license is for...group work.

GUI Tar is progressing nicely. It appears that the Compressor is just about ready. Drop down sheets have been implemented for the Extractor and Compressor to display when the program is running a task.

11. January 2004

Resolved some long-standing issues with NSNotificationCenter in GUI Tar. The program should respond appropriately after a task is completed. Drop down sheets are also being implemented for a nicer looking interface.

10. January 2004

Researched the possibility of large number support for a future incarnation of EdenMath. There is the GMP libraries which might be a viable solution. Also worked further on GUI Tar in updating the Help System.

8. January 2004

More work has continued on GUI Tar. One of the last major hurtles is being completed at this point.

2. January 2004

Next month, Edenwaith.com will have completed its third year. This coming year will bring updates of current applications, and perhaps even one or two new products.

29. December 2003

End of the year round up
Let's take a quick look at some of the more important Edenwaith events of the past year:

• Untar 1.1 and 1.2
• EdenGraph 1.0 and 1.1
• EdenMath 1.1
• EdenMath ML
• PIGE
• Permanent Eraser
• Edenwaith 3.0 web site design
• EdenList 0.8

28. December 2003

A new job and my guitar has kept me busy with other matters, but I have done some work. After much fighting with compilers, Windows, and several different versions of GLUT, I now have the Psychomancer/PIGE demo working for Windows. The Codewarrior project, source code, and demo executable are available from either the PIGE product page or the standard Edenwaith Downloads section.

15. December 2003

Added the source code to the Mac OS X PIGE project. I intend on translating this to the Windows version and getting that posted, also.

9. December 2003

Yet more additions to PIGE. Added the Crate and OpenAL demos (along with the CodeWarrior project). Updated the Windows Compilation page for easier instructions to create OpenGL and OpenAL applications under Windows and CodeWarrior.

8. December 2003

Additions have been made to PIGE. A Windows version of the OpenAL demo is available.

2. December 2003

It's the monthly "2nd of the month" report time again. EdenMath ML, a 4-function calculator which uses the Mathematica kernel for calculations will hopefully be released today. Or tomorrow. Or maybe next week. But soon...hopefully.

26. November 2003

EdenGraph 1.1 was released yesterday. Some serious bugs in graphing correctly have been fixed. One feature which has been requested several times is for the inclusion of a grid. Now EdenGraph has that, plus the ability to change the color of the axes and the grid.

24. November 2003

Despite the lack of development notes this month, there has been progress in several areas. EdenMath ML will be a new addition to the MathLink Tutorial. EdenGraph will see its first update since its initial 1.0 release which will resolve some critical function evaluation errors and make some small feature additions. The PIGE website has had some additions and modifications over the past month, also.

10. November 2003

The continuing development of Untar would be a good sample chapter for Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man Month. As the project has grown and become more complex, so has the number of deeply hidden bugs. Combining Untar 1.2 into GUI Tar has dug up some interesting problems, such as incorrect message boxes appearing upon repeated uses of Untar, or the resources not being released appropriately. These problems have been fixed with Untar 1.2.1.

9. November 2003

Work on GUI Tar continues. One benefit of this project is finding even harder to find problems (or areas for improvement) in Untar. Several oddities have been found, so Untar 1.2.1 will probably be coming out sometime before the end of this year. Hopefully in November, but no promises. :)

In other news, the first version of EdenMath ML, a 4-function calculator which harnesses the power of the Mathematica kernel will be making an appearance in the coming months.

2. November 2003

Time to kick off a new month's journal of development. The last few days have been used to sprucing up small areas of the Edenwaith web site. Development continues on GUI Tar, especially by bringing up all of Untar 1.2's functionality into GUI Tar's Extractor.

30. October 2003

After months of experimentation, Permanent Eraser, a utility to securely delete files from your Mac OS X Trash, has finally reached Version 1.0 status. This is just a minor start, but PE 2.0 will be tons more robust and secure in its file deletion which will put it on par with other file shredders like ShredIt or SafeShred.

28. October 2003

Permanent Eraser will soon be ready. It works fine under Mac OS 10.2, but it is having a few odd problems under Mac OS 10.1. If these problems cannot be resolved soon, then it might be 'suggested' to run PE under Jaguar. However, the ultimate functionality of PE still works under OS 10.1, there are just some odd cosmetic issues and bugs with Mac OS 10.1.

Edenwaith has returned to work on GUI Tar, which will have all of the functionality of Untar 1.2, plus the power to compress and archive files as .gz, .bz2, .tar, .tgz, or .zip. And it won't even cost your first born child to own this someday-to-be-uber-cool-software!

19. October 2003

Untar 1.2 : smaller in size, better interface, and more features, and it was released today.

18. October 2003

Untar 1.2 has been in the process of thorough testing, and it can be amazing how many issues and problems can still arise. The Help Viewer for Mac OS 10.1 is particularly slow and will crash if some help files are too large (which will then completely break Help Viewer unless the offending app's help documentation is erased.)

12. October 2003

Currently I am without an internet connection, but when I do, there will be a prolific amount of new material coming from Edenwaith. Untar 1.2 is nice and polished, Permanent Eraser is working smoothly, and EdenMath ML, an extension to the MathLink Example and tutorial, will also be available soon. The main brunt of EdenMath ML took only an hour or two to code, with the majority of learning being with NSMatrix.

10. October 2003

Untar 1.2 is coming real close to completion. Some final touch-ups are being made. Permanent Eraser had more work done on it. Panther's release date has been set for 24 October 2003, so hopefully PE will beat it out the door, but no guarantee.

3. October 2003

In light of noticing that the PIGE OpenAL Tutorial is on the front page of the OpenAL web site, the on-line tutorial has been completed (finally). This tutorial is also (currently) the top search on Google for OpenAL Tutorial. Very cool. :)

Did a little extra work on Permanent Eraser. Hopefully it will be released before Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) is released sometime later this year.

2. October 2003

Spent the last several days working on some small additions to Untar 1.2 and trying to decide what will be added and what won't.

26. September 2003

I have done a very bad thing. I have decided to make Untar 1.2 even better. A few improvements, such as a progress indicator are in experimental stages. The source code is also being cleaned up. It will be released along with the program and other project files as it always has.

22. September 2003

Final testing is going on for Untar 1.2.

21. September 2003

It unfortunately appears that Untar 1.2 might be delayed a few more days to make sure everything is working properly. There are a few small issues which are still being worked out for optimal results and error checking.

A new application, Permanent Eraser, has been announced. It's functionality is working now, it just needs some improvements to the user interface. It will hopefully be out before Mac OS 10.3.

18. September 2003

Worked on some cosmetic improvements to Untar 1.2.

17. September 2003

Continued work on Untar 1.2. Some kinks still need to be worked out to make sure it works smoothly.

16. September 2003

Added a small, but smooth looking cosmetic feature to the Edenwaith web site. The drop down menus now use a semi-transparent PNG background instead of a GIF image. The PNG image provides for a much cleaner looking transparency. To create the semi-transparent PNG image, I just needed to create a 32x32 pixel image of pure white and set the overall transparency to 75% (this is using Photoshop 7.01). Then I saved it as a PNG image, and it worked! Forget the Export Transparent Image option. This worked easier.

15. September 2003

The last few days have lent themselves to finishing off Untar 1.2. In addition to its regular features, it will also support taz, bzip2, and zip files, plus it now has a Help section with the man pages of the tools used by Untar. Untar will be out this summer (for those of you in the northern hemisphere, that is), so the final version should be out in the next few days. Some final testing is necessary so that nothing is being missed.

12. September 2003

There has been some work being done in the background, but not as much as I'd like. There is an odd problem with EdenGraph where the minus sign will be seen as the unary negation sign, and then the evaluation backend thinks that there is an implied multiplication operator, so some graphs come out wrong. This will be corrected soon with a minor release, which might severing off some other functionality to correct this problem. A new product is about to be announced, just once the web content has been put together in a decent manner. Oh, the excitement!

1. September 2003

EdenGraph is now out, so it's time to set off onto other projects. Continued work on a tentative project which is finally working after several months.

31. August 2003

Added a few final touches of improvement to the Evaluator to EdenGraph. Now it also recognizes ** (exponent) and % (modulus division), in addition to the ^ and mod operators. The last few days have been spent improving the Help system for EdenGraph. The final version of EdenGraph (finally) was released today.

25. August 2003

It's amazing how a well constructed piece of code can be modified with only a few lines. EdenGraph's speed when shifting has been increased SIGNIFICANTLY...with only three or four extra lines of code. The final version of EdenGraph will hopefully be released by early September.

On a negative note, the SoBig virus has been affecting even us non-Windows users. I have been receiving over 100 pieces of junk e-mail to just one account, which is getting very annoying. I'm just hoping that things settle down soon so I can return to my normal amount of spam-- such as hearing from Nigeria offering me the sum of Fifteen Million US Dollars ($15,000,000). To add onto many other people's wishes, I hope that the person(s) involved with this virus are [censored censored censored].

20. August 2003

Worked a little further on the Help sections for Untar/GUI Tar. Also worked on some web site design changes which will appear in the future.

19. August 2003

EdenGraph's Check for Update feature now responds appropriately if there is no network connection. Began work for the Help sections for Untar/GUI Tar.

13. August 2003

Took a few more steps in getting GUI Tar completed. The major features are now working, but some major clean-up and perhaps some re-design work is necessary to make it a nice lil' app.

12. August 2003

The good news for now is that the compression/archiving feature of GUI Tar is now working. Just forgot to add a bit of code so it wasn't working previously. This goes to show how useful just taking some time off and returning to the project at a later time can lend itself to finding a solution. The bad news is, however, that GUI Tar's expected release date has been pushed back to Autumn 2003. Untar 1.2 will probably still be released this summer, though. There is just too many features in GUI Tar which aren't 100% complete to truthfully promise the GUI Tar will make a summer release date.

7. August 2003

EdenGraph Beta 3 has been released. There was much rejoicing.

5. August 2003

Funny. One little line of code literally solved months worth of pondering and experimentation. By adding one extra line of code to my evaluation program for EdenGraph, it corrected the largest flaw, that being assuming an implied multiplication when no operator is present, such as 3x or (2)(5). Adding this nice little bit of code practically eliminates most of the code I created in my own pre-parser...but not entirely. Also cleaned up some toolbar icons for EdenGraph.

2. August 2003

Fixed a small problem with the EdenGraph parser for Mac OS 10.1. Remember to test other minor versions of an OS, the small differences might reveal large problems. However, it also showed that EdenGraph may not be able to use other programs' kernels if a proper work-around or installer isn't made available.

31. July 2003

Added the latest PIGE/Psychomancer demo to the PIGE download page. Also, made a small addition to the MathLink Tutorial regarding the MathLink framework and Mathematica 5.0. Worked on getting the precision control in EdenGraph to work better and in a more intuitive manner.

29. July 2003

User preferences are now automatically saved in EdenGraph. Beta 3 will be coming in August.

27. July 2003

Learned how to use and save preferences in Cocoa. This will prove useful for current and future apps. If the inspiration strikes, a tutorial might be created since there weren't really any straight forward tutorials on using preferences in Cocoa.

25. July 2003

Made small improvements to the MathLink Tutorial.

20. July 2003

Updated one of the most requested improvements of EdenGraph -- the icon! It's not perfect, but it is a lot easier to click on now, unlike the previous icon. For a 'beta' program, it certainly is adding a lot of new features and additions, which probably isn't right...perhaps it should be released as version 1.2.

19. July 2003

The MathLink Tutorial has been completed and been released.

One thing which is sweet about Cocoa is that it is pretty uniform, and after enough experience, one can just guess the names of function calls, even without having to look them up. Such happened when I guessed to use setTitle: for a window to change the window name. How sweet. This provided to be very useful and it added a nice little feature to show the zoom level in EdenGraph.

18. July 2003

Started the first real work on a new application which has been a kernel of an idea for quite awhile.

17. July 2003

Continued work on the MathLink tutorial. Also, the road map for EdenGraph 1.0 has been planned out. If everything goes well, EdenGraph 1.0 should be released by late August or early September. Several small additions and improvements are being made before the final version is released.

16. July 2003

Prepared and released PIGE for public release. Worked on getting MathLink to work from the command line and a Cocoa program.

11. July 2003

Once again, back to work on EdenGraph. Worked on smoothing out some wrinkles and trying to optimize the drawing.

10. July 2003

Been working on another project which will be displayed in the next few weeks.

Continued on co-development of Untar 1.2 and GUI Tar 1.0. Untar's functionality will increase by adding both bzip2 AND zip (not to be confused with gzip) support. It looks that Untar 1.2 will be released first, making sure that everything works well. If so, then all of Untar's functionality (new and old) will also be integrated into GUI Tar. A Linux version of GUI Tar (and perhaps Untar) are still being heavily considered. However, a Windows version will not be created since it is not UNIX-based.

3. July 2003

Spent the past few days working on a variety of projects. Further work is being employeed to Untar 1.2. Also, research is going into MathLink and the feasability of linking Mathematica's power to Edenwaith products.

23. June 2003

Bzip2 support is being added to GUI Tar and Untar for OS 10.2 users. It is doubtful that 10.1 users will also get this functionality, but it is not completely ruled out that an alternative solution won't be found in the future.

Also returned to Untar for version 1.2. As promised, it will have BZip2 support for 10.2 users, plus a few other goodies to go along.

20. June 2003

GUI Tar is up to version 0.7 now. Extractor is working and the main framework for Compressor is in place. The final three-tenths of development will be additional features to make GUI Tar really slick (or sticky, since it is "GUI").

17. June 2003

Mmmmm...portable code. GUI Tar is already up to version 0.4, mainly because it was mostly copy and paste from the Untar code base into GUI Tar to uncompress/extract files. Compressing files will probably be even easier, it is just the front end which will take a little more time to manipulate. I'd like to be able to say GUI Tar will be available in July, but I've learned not to make early promises since things seem to always come up to delay projects.

...several hours later. Now GUI Tar is up to version 0.6. Added some cool window shrink-grow effects and learned more about how to work with NSTabView. If all goes well, GUI Tar might be in good working shape in a few days. But as I said earlier, I'm not going to make no promises that my body can't keep.

16. June 2003

The first real work on GUI Tar has begun.

13. June 2003

Worked on the parser and adding new features to EdenGraph. Beta 2 was released today.

10. June 2003

Started work on EdenMath 1.2. Mostly some new enhancements and visual improvements.

4. June 2003

Back to EdenGraph after taking a break from it for a few days. Getting to the last milestone before the final candidate, which is checking the formula for validity. Some equations won't display correctly or at all and this is being fixed. The final version of this equation parser might eventually be released.

3. June 2003

Added the two new advertisement pictures on the main page. This balances out the two sides of the front page, especially if there is a lot of news being reported. Plus it also highlights some of the newer releases.

2. June 2003

Started work on a new application today. Already it is in a prototype stage, version 0.4, but no formal announcement until I can verify that it will work properly.

31. May 2003

Big day on updating EdenMath. Originally it was going to be a minor point release (from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3 or 1.0.5), but so many new changes and improvements were put into it that it has become EdenMath 1.1.

30. May 2003

Thanks to an e-mail alerting me to some problems with EdenMath, I've returned back to EdenMath. There have been some plans to get back to EdenMath, but it was undecided when to get back and fix up some problems. I worked with changing the interface and improving its look.

27. May 2003

Per a wise suggestion, some new features have already been added to the EdenGraph beta, which was not in the original beta released yesterday. There is now a Preference window which allows the user to change the color of the screen's background and the graphed line.

26. May 2003

EdenGraph - beta has been released. Please download it, give it a spin, and send feedback so it can be improved.

25. May 2003

Merged two different development branches of EdenGraph together, so the beta is just about ready to be shipped. It now has an application icon, can graph 2D functions, track, shift, print, and save the image as a EPS, PDF, or TIFF.

22. May 2003

Spent the last day or two working on EdenList. This version isn't final, but the 1.0 release will contain the source code and it will also be a little more complete. Edenwaith had some troubles two days ago, so I had to go through all of the pages and fix them so the PHP scripts would work correctly again.

14. May 2003

Finally updated the look of the web site. This new design has been in the works for the past several months, but grad school tends to take up a huge amount of time, especially when orals and a thesis are involved.

5. May 2003

Time to get back to work. Added support for the scroll wheel to zoom in or out in EdenGraph. Hopefully a beta version of EdenGraph will see the light of day in the next month or two. There are many other goodies in store, including a new web site design and some updates on products. Once EdenGraph has been released, the main focus will be on Untar and GUI Tar.

13. February 2003

Edenwaith has released its first Windows product -- Psychomancer 1.06 for Windows.

11. February 2003

Made a few other modifications to Psychomancer to get ready for Windows. Originally, Psychomancer 1.07 was going to be the first Windows version, but there have been some long-standing complications with some added features and improvements, so it was just faster to recompile Psychomancer using version 1.06. Psychomancer 1.07 is still in development, but it will probably not be released until the summer time.

9. February 2003

Worked on some initial build of Psychomancer 1.06 for Windows using Visual C++ and Windows 2000. After getting it to compile finally, the game would crash when changing rooms. No idea why, however. Recompiled the same exact files under CodeWarrior under Windows 98. It worked fine after that.

5. February 2003

EdenGraph can now save in TIFF, EPS, and PDF formats. Yes, things are moving along. Two more milestones to reach to make EdenGraph more user friendly, and then it should be ready for a beta release.

2. February 2003

Spent the last few days working on EdenGraph. The tracking now works, and two new features have been added: saving & printing. EdenGraph can only saved as a PDF right now, but that will soon change, and EPS and TIFF options will be added. If possible, JPG and/or GIF formats will be added, too. At the current rate, a beta version might be available by April, if not sooner, depending on how much work is completed in the next few weeks/months.

23. January 2003

Added some new menu icons to EdenGraph. It is looking pretty slick now.

22. January 2003

Recoded the To Do app and tried to get check boxes implemented, but not much luck yet.

21. January 2003

Got saving features working on the To Do app.

20. January 2003

Worked a little bit on some Psychomancer 1.07 related code.

16. January 2003

Began work on a To Do list type application, and made pretty good progress.

4. January 2003

Worked on Untar 1.1. It will be ready for release tomorrow.

25. December 2002

There are no breaks here at Edenwaith, even during important holidays! Psychomancer is back in the works. Version 1.1 will have to hold off for awhile, but version 1.07 will be made available for the hungry masses. Improvements will be small, but have their own special significance.

13. December 2002

Added the Cocoa Presentation, which gives a brief overview of Cocoa and a few simple apps.

11. December 2002

Began work on a new project, simply dubbed Time Card. This will hopefully be completed by Feburary 2003.

23. November 2002

Got back to EdenGraph and was able to add some new mnemonics functionality for zooming.

21. November 2002

Began work on a new application which will act as a To Do list. This will prove for an interesting exercise with tables, which will be useful when development on GUI Tar continues.

25. October 2002

Made further progress on Untar 1.0.2. Started on a new application which will remain secret for right now.

23. October 2002

While things might have seem somewhat quiet on the homefront, never fret blessed readers! EdenGraph and a new web site design have been in the works, plus the further development of an undisclosed project which has already been in progress for well over a year (oh, the suspense!). EdenGraph is in the alpha stages right now. It works, but it still needs a good polish to make it shine. It would be great to get something newsworthy out this month, but you have all seen way too much crap-ware.

18. September 2002

Pretty successful day in terms of EdenGraph. Got the axes to appear when it starts up, mouse responds a lot more as the first listener, the tracking is a lot more precise, got new menu items for zooming and clearing the screen.

15. September 2002

Finally came back to work on Journeyman FTP. Now it tells the current remote and local directories. Also there are plans for an About box and perhaps even compile and make a Windows and/or Linux version.

9. September 2002

Cleaned up the project and code for Untar. Version 1.0.1, which includes the project and source code, is now available.

8. September 2002

While taking a shower, I came upon an idea on how to get past a nasty hurdle with Word Crammer. I checked the Java API documents on-line, found a function which I was looking for to dynamically update JLabels, and there I went! Word Crammer is back on its way to getting finished off...someday. Perhaps if I focused all of my energies on just one product I'd probably get more products out the door. But, alas, this is my nature to skip from one activity to another so I don't get too bored.

Worked on Untar a bit more to clean up the code and try and optimize it a tad.

7. September 2002

Worked on adding a tool bar (like in Omniweb or Mail) to EdenGraph.

2. September 2002

Finished off writing and optimizing Untar 1.0. It has been uploaded and is now available for your use. I'm coming after you StuffIt!

1. September 2002

Untar is getting close to completion. Need to shuffle some code around to improve it.

Finally compiled a RedHat 7.3 Linux version of Psychomancer 1.06. Sorry for the delay, especially since I didn't have to make any modifications to it from the Digital UNIX version.

31. August 2002

Finally figured out how to do drag, drop, & launch for an application. There is a setting in the Targets->Application Settings->Document Types which needs to be specified so a file can be dropped on the application icon to launch it.

19. August 2002

Untar 0.9 is being made available for download. It can now uncompress .tar, .tgz, .gz, and .tar.gz file formats. Tutorial and 1.0 version of Untar to come in a few weeks.

15. August 2002

Untar is getting close to completion. It can select a file, destination folder, and uncompress a .tar file.

14. August 2002

Began work on Untar, the decompression utility. User interface and initializing code is set up and working.

21. July 2002

Further work and design done on GUI Tar. Built the web pages for it.

20. July 2002

Started initial work and design on GUI Tar.

19. July 2002

Discovered that the name of my idea is called a wrapper. Looked through some documentation and tips at Cocoa Dev Central on how to create a tar wrapper.

18. July 2002

While reading through a DOS to Linux HOWTO, I pondered the possibility of making a graphical version of the tar utility.

13. July 2002

The tracking is now working. However, it only seems to respond to the mouse moving after the mouse has clicked in the view.

12. July 2002

Shifting the graph works...somewhat. It is not nearly as accurate as my earlier attempts of EdenGraph. There are some odd drawing problems, too when shifted at times. However, zooming in or out tends to clean up the problem.

11. July 2002

Zooming functionality is now working with EdenGraph. Tracking and shifting the graph should be integrated soon as long as there aren't any major problems.

8. July 2002

Version 0.8.0 of Journeyman FTP has been publicly released. There may not be any updates on it for awhile. This program has been quite a bugger, and it's time to move onto something else for the time being and get the J-FTP out of the system before attacking it again.