Jeremy Knope dot com

So I’m currently working on a new site for hosting my mac software projects and wanted to include support for some popular things used by mac programs. For example many programs use Sparkle for doing automatic updates, or even Sparkle+ for tracking system information from the updating applications. So I wanted to go about making a site that would let me manage programs, their downloads, and possibly auto-generate appcasts for use by Sparkle updaters.

So I currently have quite a bit of the front-end going, no administration yet. I have a system that has products, product releases (downloads), download stats, sparkle profile tracking and appcast generation, and download stats integration for sparkle downloads. A lot of this is or will be configurable if this proves to be useful for other people to use.

It’s using a PHP MVC framework also, providing nice URls for everything, some examples:

• example.com/products/view/MetaGrowler
• example.com/downloads/get/6
• example.com/downloads/product/MetaGrowler
• example.com/downloads/get/6/fromsparkle/MetaGrowler_0.1.1.zip
• example.com/appcast/MetaGrowler
• example.com/sparkleProfile/MetaGrowler?profilerArgsHere

That’s just some of the basic stuff I’ve got so far, I mostly wanted a nice way of managing various products and their downloads, I’d want purchase ability eventually too. I’ve heard there’s someone that might be working on a similar project too, mentioned on the macsb yahoo group but that’s currently not searchable due to some error.

I’d like to hear any feedback, and also see what the other projects are (only know of PotionStore as a similar rails-based project.) I’m mostly geared to build my own site right now but trying to keep in mind it might be useful for others, so any input is helpful. I hope I’m not duplicating someone else’s work, but maybe can work together if there’s similar goals, if anybody knows the post, or maybe if yahoo starts working again soon can see what’s up.

Email me at jerome AT jeremyknope DOT com to talk about it if interested or if you’re working on something similar and want to discuss it.

Technorati Tags: framework, mac, php, software

There’s a few random projects I’ve worked on, and some that I actually got to a releasable state, but I haven’t had them anywhere on the site like I should. First up is “PvPGN Files”:/pages/pvpgn page I added to my links area for the couple projects of mine related to “PvPGN”:http://www.pvpgn.org. There you will find currently MacBNetGatewayEditor, a battle.net gateway editor for Mac OS X, and eventually the latest version of pvpgn-stats will be available there.

Soon I will hopefully add a projects sidebar which will link to couple others like my simple “Delicious Library”:http://delicious-monster.com/ translator program, that makes a simple web site of your Delicious Library contents. Rawr-jour is another app I made but now is in the “Growl”:http://growl.info project and so I won’t provide download links, probably just a link there.

I just recently finished a ‘beta’ version of a ActiveRecord:Migration wannabe database schema migration system in PHP at work. It allows me to version the database schema/structure easily and allow for easy database structure updates when updating an install of a web app on some site. Eventually it could do downgrades like the rails version too but that’s not something I’ll worry about right away. It does function, isn’t as elegant as AR:Migration but it does the job which is pretty cool. It might join PHPFlash class as one of my most useful chunks of code.

I made a little program a while back that translates “Delicious Library”:http://www.delicious-monster.com/ data file along with copying the cover images all into a folder of static html pages. It’s not the greatest but it’s simple and pretty quick (except for image copying, only copies what’s used and one size) by using XSL to translate the XML library into HTML fast.

There is one known problem, .Mac users would probably see broken links to images because .Mac has a file name length limit that’s under the length of the image filenames that Delicious Library uses.

“Download Delicious Library Translate v0.21″:http://www.macsaresexy.com/files/DLTranslate-v0.21.zip

Sooooo apparently my name is now in print! As in the December 2005 issue of Macworld! Apparently “previous article”:http://www.macsaresexy.com/articles/2005/08/17/macworld-mac-gems-promising-prospect-rawr-jour has now been printed. Sweetness. Hoping to personally see the article sometime soon, my friend just mentioned this because he got the recent magazine and opened right up to the article. Coolness!

p. While working on a project at work I made a simple PHP class that I’m sure some people could find useful. A common thing I always have to do is error display, or even notices of something doing what someone expected to do. ‘New user created’, ‘failed to login’, etc. After learning and using Ruby on Rails I wanted their ‘flash’ utility that provides a simple way of posting messages to be displayed on the next page. So if you submit a form, process it, set a message, and redirect, the message will be displayed and only after that one redirect. So if your interested check it out.
See contents for example, index.php when loaded in a web server with PHP 5 will show you how it works and give an example.

p. Requirements: PHP 5 (Standard PHP Library used among other PHP 5 only things)

p. Download PHPFlash-v0.1

Technorati Tags: PHP, Projects, Rails, Ruby on Rails, Software, Web

p. Since I build websites for a living I’m always looking for anything that can improve what I do, make it easier and cooler. My current web framework of choice is definitely Ruby on Rails, has good documentation, easy to get the hang of and very powerful, not to mention I have a book on it. I’ve been looking for something to kick up my PHP web programming up a bit to make things easier. Currently I’m only using Savant2 which is just a template system, nothing fancy, but have been organizing code in a reasonable way and just writing my own ‘data object’ class wrappers.

p. There’s actually quite the slew of frameworks for PHP, from MVC(Model view controller) frameworks to ORM(Object relational mapping) frameworks but haven’t found one that I really like. I’ve used Propel for ORM before but ended up getting in the way after a while. I’ve also looked at Mojavi for MVC a framework but seemed to lacking in documentation for me to get the hang of it fast enough to want to use it, it also hasn’t had a new release. There’s a slew of Rails-esque PHP frameworks that have propped up and haven’t really given them a good chance, partly because some rely on rewrite rules which still don’t know if we can use properly on our servers yet, config just isn’t quite right yet. So I’m still curious about taking another quick look at Cake, Biscuit and PHPonTrax. PHPonTrax seemed the closest to rails on first impression, but I’ve only used it briefly, same with Cake. So maybe stay tuned as I might sometime actually really spend time and review each of the decent web frameworks for PHP. Seems like the biggest thing is that none of them have a strong enough drive and community behind them to make them great, not to mention documentation.

Technorati Tags: Frameworks, Projects, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Software, Web

Had a good read over at The Tick’s blog about the status of the Adium and Growl projects. Although if your interested in these kind of things you probably heard it from him or someone else on the team first. But if you happen on my site for who knows why you can see what’s in store for upcoming Adium and Growl. Both projects that rock.

So I got impatient waiting to see a script posted from the Zero to Rails in 2 minutes post made last month so I decided to investigate doing a similar script myself, good chance to learn some more applescript and entertain myself.
So I got basics working! Using simple stencil based off of UML-General’s simple class object, my script can go through all of those types of objects in the current document, creating a ‘CREATE TABLE’ query for each one with the table name and all the columns. No primary keys, foreign keys, or anything else like that yet. But was fun to figure out and might play more to get it more robust. It also will most likely screw up if there’s anything but those types of objects(graphics that are tables with rows of text-graphics in them). So check out the screenshot above, the script puts the SQL into the clipboard after running, not sure how else to do that, or if you can save a file in applescript, I’m a ‘newb’ with applescript. Ideally it would be more like zenspider’s script(s) in the end where it can also generate the Rails model objects and their relations based upon the arrows etc. Hopefully he’ll release what he’s got sometime because it sounds much more complete.

Technorati Tags: Cool, Database, Model, Projects, Ruby on Rails, Software

Rawr-jour will now be part of the Growl project as an extra, not sure which release it might show up in Extras with, it just initial got included so will be working on it through the Growl subversion repository with bug reports being able to be filed on Growl’s trac and everything, spiffy.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Projects, Growl, Software