Logger-TXT

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing a fairly major change to Logger-TXT OSX that adds autocomplete to the type and project inputs. I’ve spent a while sitting on this change as to make it happen, there were some large, behind the scenes, changes that needed to be made. There’s a few bugs that were caught, like adding extra blank lines to log files, that were uncovered throughout this process.

Since Dev Diary #3, a fair amount of work has been done due to trying to get NSPopovers to work reliably with the rest of OSX. Though in its previous state it worked, the overall user experience was unacceptable due to too many unreliable behaviours stemming from trying to use a popover from a menu bar status item.

Issues with the Menu Bar Popover

A few issues that were present with the popover implementation were:

Over the past week and a half I’ve been working on getting what I previously had moved to the menu bar. Popping open a window was alright but I’ve always wanted to create a menu bar app and this was a perfect fit. Already, after just a few days of testing, the menu bar pop-up feels a lot nicer than a regular window opening for input.

It wasn’t an easy transition as there was a fair amount of learning to be done and there are many ways to achieve the same general result. Apple added NSPopover in OSX 10.7 but never really intended for it to be used from a menu bar item, so there were/are some quirks that need to be worked out to get it all done. Overall, using NSPopover was a decent solution as it lets the OS handle the pop-up animation, styling and nitty-gritty work. Due to my in-experience, just getting it all working properly was a decent challenge.

Development of Logger-TXT OSX has been coming along since Dev Diary #1 and is at the point that I can use it daily for log input. I still have my primary script around for accessing recent items, search, corrections, and general comfortability, but overall, I have the OSX app in use for all input.

The focus for the past week was getting the preferences window and its various settings to work. This involved getting the following to work:

With some free time that has presented itself in the past month, I’ve decided to clear a few things off my back burner that have been nagging me for a while. One of those things was to learn some Objective-C in order to create OSX and iOS counterparts to my Logger-TXT script. Not everyone enjoys interacting with shell scripts all day so a nice GUI has been a long time coming. Though mobile is a pretty big logging hole at the moment, I figured an OSX app would be an easier place to start.