This is a remarkable article describing how Faber & Faber (the publishers) are using a series of graphical parts and some custom software to automatically generate book covers for their new series of out of print works.
It works by using a standard layout for things like the title and the barcode, but then using parameterized graphics it generates a unique cover graphic for each book.
The covers fit within the style that has been chosen of course, but each is unique.
It’s really clever.
It’s been a little while since I wrote about the release of SQLEditor so it’s time to write about what’s been happening with SQLEditor since then.
SQLEditor 1.4.1.b2 (available now)
There is a new bug fix release of SQLEditor available in beta right now. If the “Check for beta versions” box in the preferences window is checked then you’ll get the offer of the upgrade to 1.4.1b2.
This is a minor bug fix release that fixes a few bugs that have been reported since the 1.4 release
SQLEditor 1.4.1b3 (available soon)
This release is going to fix a stupid bug that makes the file type selection in the export as image box not work correctly. The file types got mixed up in the code so the labels don’t match the output. It missed the b2 release, but it will be corrected in beta 3
SQLEditor 1.5
This is the next big release of SQLEditor. It’s going to have an entirely new SQL parser (written in ANTLR 3) and a major rewrite of the codebase (which moves almost all of the Java code to C or Objective C)
The new parser replaces to the old Java based parser (written in Javacc) with a new one that runs entirely in C and Objective C. Although I have found JavaCC to be an excellent tool, this replacement reduces the amount of Java code in the application substantially.
Plugins
The new code will also offer a much better api for plugins. The current api, which isn’t public, is used for the Rails import and export, but it’s annoying to work with, because the architecture wasn’t really built for it. The new codebase is much better for writing plugins.
JDBC / JNI Library for Cocoa
SQLEditor 1.5 also uses a new Java JNI and JDBC library for Cocoa which I’m hoping to be able to make Open Source soon. It allows you to access a database using JDBC rather than ODBC. This may not be as efficient, but it’s much easier to install drivers. If you would like to try these new libraries in your own application please send me an email and I’ll send you some code to try out. The final libraries are probably going to be BSD licensed, but it’s still being worked out exactly how it will work.
In case you missed it version 1.4 of SQLEditor was released back on July 8th.
If you’re using 1.3.9 you might like to consider upgrading.
The 1.3.9 upgrade system will be set soon to recommend this upgrade
(though 1.3.9 doesn’t use sparkle, so it can’t actually do the upgrade for you)
SQLEditor 1.4
(3.6 MB DMG File)
Lots of great new features and various bug fixes and improvements to the existing ones.
Media Temple are running a beta programme for virtualized Mac OS X server hosting (Using Parallels Server)
This sounds really interesting, it would be nice to be able to rent a Mac OS X box and run services on it.
It might even be useful for things like running a build system or even as a testing server.
The question is how much will it cost. That isn’t entirely clear yet, apparently because they’re not entirely sure how much each instance will need in the way of resources.
How it compares to SliceHost and Bytemark will remain to be seen.
(It must surely be more expensive, but how much more?)
SQLEditor 1.4b26 is now available for download.
It fixes only one problem which is related to auto increment and SQLite.
This should hopefully be the final beta version for 1.4
🙂
The next version should be the 1.4 final release which will probably happen later this week or early next week (assuming no more problems are reported)
SQLEditor 1.4b26 Download [3.6MB DMG]
SQLEditor 1.5 is making good progress. The latest thing that I’m currently working on is to extract SQL Views from a database. In theory this should be just like extracting tables, but it’s looking much harder to work out than I ever expected.
The new SQL parser is mostly finished. It’s been completely rewritten using ANTLR3. This offers a number of really good improvements, the most important one being that it’s not running in Java anymore. The parser is now completely native code.
Also pretty much finished is the new document model code, the new document export code and the new JDBC handling code. I’m hopeful that it will now be possible to run JDBC drivers that use AWT (which I’m informed the IBM DB2 driver may do).
SQLEditor 1.4 is just about finished too. There is one change that needs to get beta tested and then the 1.4 final release should be available.
Watch out for a new 1.5 download soon and of course the final candidate for 1.4
Handy new tool I came across today which allows you to test regular expressions and see what they select.
A cool new online presentation tool:
The slide show application is really nice in that it feels very much like a desktop application when in use, even down the way buttons and key presses behave. The object rotation is particularly clever.
Another thing that makes this one clever though is the underlying framework, which is said to compile cocoa like code into dynamic web pages. It will apparently even be opensourced at some stage!
Because I can never remember where this list is kept: