24h-payday

Archive for July, 2009

Twitter support will not be ready for release 1.1

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

The reason is that I found several usability issues while testing the twitter code, that also affect the other pingers. So rather to release new functionality at this point I rather focus on fixing this issue while improving the current user experience.

But don’t worry, release 1.2 is not as heavy as 1.1 and Twitter code is pretty advanced. I prefer to release more often than do a mega release, that is all 😉

Thinking ahead: StupidZombie 1.2

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

Yeah, release of 1.1 is one feature away and I’m thinking ahead for the 1.2 release; This one will be more focused on GUI improvements than anything else, no more functionality. Besides profiling the application with Yourkit, I plan to polish the Swing GUI by using Swing Explorer.

A quick preview of what is coming:

Use Nimbus!

Nimbus is beautiful, but will require some customizations. Good thing is that is based on Synth and everything can be tweaked using UIManager.

		for (LookAndFeelInfo laf : 
			UIManager.getInstalledLookAndFeels()) { 
			    if ("Nimbus".equals(laf.getName())) { 
			         try {
						UIManager.setLookAndFeel(laf.getClassName());
					} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (InstantiationException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} catch (UnsupportedLookAndFeelException e) {
						// TODO Auto-generated catch block
						e.printStackTrace();
					} 
			    } 
			} 

JavaFX GUI?

Very likely. Here I will try to come with something that looks totally awesome, less “Swingy” :). Still, the old GUI will be supported so you will have two flavors of it. Let’s see how that goes, but I expect it to be a combination of Swing + JavaFX.

More localization?

I’m thinking seriously to add more languages to StupidZombie. If the audience is global then it should, right?

OK, too much thinking, time to do some coding instead 🙂

World War Z movie: I hope they get it right!

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Well, not related with Blockhead or StupidZombie, instead is the movie of the book World War Z. Looks like its getting a new writer, hopefully they will get right this one.

The book is epic in size, you have to wonder if they will be able to pull something like this out!

StupidZombie wants to send you a Tweet

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Yep, the idea is that when you update your blog that becomes a tweet. No there is always the issue of build vs. buy and on this case I think I rather build functionality on top of existing libraries for StupidZombie. Not very concerned about speed and rather keep the project moving forward.

So which is the best Twitter library for Java out there? Looks like Twitter4J. I’ll give it a try, but that also means I may have to add Cryptography to StupidZombie as the API requires the user / twitter password in order to send tweets. Or maybe not, as the API seems to support OAuth.

Finished adding online manual browsing using default browser

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Using Java Desktop object I enabled this functionality for the 1.1 release. Now is time to code other features.

StupidZombie Blog has a new look and feel!

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Finally I got some time to do something about the look and feel of the WordPress template. I cannibalized the default WordPress template and made some minimal changes (that way I made sure it was compliant with WordPress standards). Looks good and will be improved over time for now at least the website and the Blog look more consistent!

To give something back the community I also made this a downloadable WordPress theme (it will take some time to get it added to the WordPress website, so I made a link to the Kenai.com site.). It is also on Subversion on the 1.1 branch (under website/blog/wordpress/themes).

Enjoy!