Monthly Archives: March 2006

I just released a new version of PackRat today. It adds the following new features:

and fixes these bugs:

- Better handling and reporting of errors during sync.
- Completed list items are now displayed in the correct order
- URLs on a page are now turned into links, just like Backpack does

Overall, mostly some more polish. My next step is to start work on editing. This could be tricky, so you may not get a release next week, or even the week after that. But, I’m excited about starting it, and looking forward to using it, as I know you are too.

I’m trying to raise some money, so I’m selling off some stuff. First on the block is a Behringer electric guitar amp. For the specs on this, click here. I’m asking $100. It’s a great amp for the money and it barely used. If you’re interested, send me an email.

I’ve posted a new release of PackRat (0.60, build 153). The one new feature I added is that PackRat is now a Universal application! The other changes are bug fixes to syncing. Notes, emails, links, and tags that have been deleted in Backpack are not deleted locally when you sync.

I had to update the data file format so you’ll have to delete it and resync with Backpack, but PackRat tells you what you need to do.

We interrupt the current “All PackRat All The Time” theme for this blog for an announcement. This Wednesday (March 8th), I’ll be driving down to Provo to give my Ruby Cocoa presentation to the BYU Ruby Users Group. I’ll probably have some repeat visitors from URUG, but it will interesting to meet some more Ruby people interested in Cocoa.

For some reason, the folks down in Provo seem to be a little more interested in non mainstream technologies like Ruby, NeXT (in its day) and hence Cocoa, etc. I wonder why that is? As a University of Utah alumni, that bothers me a bit. Are the Utes turning out Java, .NET lemmings? The answer is probably another post, but you can look at Alan Kay and his talk entitled “Are Computer Science and Software Engineering Oxymorons?”. He gave this talk at the University of Utah last month and I found it quite interesting.

I’ve posted a new release of PackRat (0.53, build 139). This one is a
bug fix release. Some of you were having problems with syncing. Those
problem should be gone now. Here’s a list of fixes:

- Sync was failing when the page body had illegal UTF-8 characters

- Sync was failing with the message ‘emailAddress is a required
value’ or ‘multiple validation errors’. This was caused by the
Backpack API returning links to pages that no longer exist.

- Sync was failing when the XML response from the Backpack API
contained HTML that was unescaped causing an XML parse
error. Now we tidy up the XML before we try to parse it.

- List and list items are now all displayed and in order. Completed
list items are displayed but out of order

There are some more bug fixes coming, but these were the big ones
that were getting in people’s ways. If you’ve been having problems,
download the new version. it should solve your problems.