Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Opie-ate of the masses

Thanks to Lorn Potter I now have Opie CVS write access, so I've committed almost all of my patches. Most notably, after sitting stagnant and buggy for some time, TinyKATE is finally usable - only minor changes were required such as providing access to the already written find/replace functions, and prompting the user to save changes (very important). OpieRecorder is now a lot easier to use as well, and I've fixed a number of minor bugs in various parts of Opie that have annoyed me for a while. There's lots more stuff to be done, I just need to keep finding the time and the motivation.

The OpenSync Opie plugin gained initial support for syncing of notes this week. Since Opie provides a text editor rather than a "memo" application like most other platforms, the plugin just looks for and writes .txt files in the user's home directory on the handheld. It seems to work fairly well in testing for me - try it and let me know how it goes.

In other news, the "new" Battlestar Galactica rocks! I hadn't seen it until last weekend and I was really impressed. All those people who told me it was good previously weren't kidding.

Some random cool stuff I discovered lately:

Monday, January 08, 2007

A PDA in the hand...

It's now the beginning of week 3 of my holidays. So far I've had a fairly quiet break - I've taken the opportunity to do lots of reorganisation at home and do a bit more of my own coding. I've been submitting patches for Opie itself, which I've done before, but this time I'm delving into lots of different applications and areas. Most of the fixes are fairly trivial, but the bug reports they address (some of which were submitted by me, some by others) have been around for several years (!) Hopefully now one of the developers can spare the time to review the patches.

Some people have been suggesting that Opie is dead. While it's true that many of the developers have moved on to other things, and Opie II is now on the horizon, I think Opie still has some life left in it. I imagine it'll be a while before Opie II reaches the level that Opie is at in terms of application availability and features, so there'll still be users around that are interested in using the original Opie for some time to come, and that justifies me spending time working on it. I'm hoping also that the recent development of a viable syncing solution (at least for Linux, anyway) might increase interest levels amongst users.

In related news, I've bought yet another second-hand PDA for Familiar testing and/or actual usage - this time it's an iPAQ h2200 (that's my fourth iPAQ now). It's slightly smaller than my other iPAQs, so it should fit in my pocket. Linux support for this model looks good, though I'm not sure about Opie. At least if I have any problems with the latter I'm a bit more confident I can help debug them now.