While making the changes to Mori’s code for 1.7, I encountered some oddities in test results, and it turned out there was a bug which I had introduced in an earlier release. While it doesn’t appear to endanger data in Mori notebooks, it might not return all the results you expect in a search, or in entry summaries.

In addition, it has what I hope are a couple of performance improvements, continued improvements to Italian localization, and a work-around for Leopard’s insistence to treat non-Apple Spotlight metadata files as third-class citizens.

Normally when Spotlight discovers a file has been created or changed, it will ask the responsible program to figure out what’s inside, and feed it back to Spotlight. But one of the drawbacks to Spotlight’s design is it lacks the ability to define containers, or documents which contain logically distinct elements such as the chapters of a book, pictures in a photo album, or entries from a Mori notebook; and which can nest other containers as well. Treating a document as a single entity, Spotlight will open a document at the beginning (or maybe the place where the cursor was the last time it was open), even if what you’re looking for is somewhere near the end.

Because it doesn’t understand that a file can have distinct elements, the development teams for other Apple software (e.g., iPhoto, Safari, Stickies, etc.) came up with a scheme to trick Spotlight by creating new files with the data for those elements. So that’s how Jesse coded Mori’s behavior: duplicate the data for that logically distinct element in its own file. A separate copy of each element’s data in its own file. One extra file per element. That means the space taken up by your data is easily half again more than if Apple just added a container definition for Spotlight metadata (once for the notebook, another for the entry metadata file, and the third copy in Spotlight’s database).

But that isn’t all. While we’d like to keep all those extra files inside a notebook bundle (a directory which Finder treats as a file), because Spotlight treats a document as a single element it won’t look for those files inside the bundle. So Mori creates those files in the metadata cache folder (in your Library/Caches/Metadata folder), along with the metadata files from some of Apple’s programs. If you open the metadata folder and look at these files, you’ll see they have numbers to help Mori figure out which entry contains that data. But when you do a search using the Spotlight menu, and when you select menu item ‘Show All’ and the results are displayed in the Finder, you won’t see the numbers; you’ll see the titles for the entries they represent.

Leopard however, isn’t so democratic; which is why users where complaining about the entries when Leopard was released. First off, it ignores any non-Apple metadata files in the cache folder unless you set your Spotlight preferences to use those files. Secondly, it will ignore the title info embedded in the entry metadata file and just display the file’s actual title, meaning the number. How’s that for Apple undermining the work of third-party developers?

So the workaround I came up with is to add the entry’s title (or Untitled, if it has none) at the beginning of the filename, so you at least have an idea which entry matches your search terms.

(Thanks for wasting about a whole month total of my development time on that alone, Apple. I feel the love.)

I am, of course, more than happy to eat crow should I be proven to be completely mistaken or speaking from out-dated information. It’s easily worth it in order to improve the user experience.

Regardless of the rationale for the design decisions, enjoy, and thank you for being part of the community and continuing to support Mori!

This has taken much longer than I hoped for, and it lacks the features I wanted to add in there, but due to another empty-window bug I’m releasing Mori 1.6.9 today as a stopgap measure.

I had hoped for a quick release to get the fix out to those who are upgrading now (particularly from older, Hog Bay Software versions), but I had upgraded my Xcode installation mid-stream, which is generally a bad idea if you can’t test the effects a tool migration will have on your projects. And Mori is quite unique in the way it’s constructed, being almost entirely plugins, and plugins which run plugins.

It took a week to resolve unit testing problems, some of which were due to Mori’s unique project files, some of which were due to changes in the layout of Xcode’s tools directories and one due to a bug in the unit tests for the ‘Check and Repair Notebooks’ functionality (which I wasn’t going to risk going out with a bug whose cause I hadn’t determined).

Anyway, testing problems aside, I’m packaging the latest for release now. You’ll be able to read the release info shortly.

it’s been excessively frustrating and tiring. To cap off the season I was hoping to release the overdue 1.6.8 today, but there are still difficulties in getting the new defaults system working correctly.

The debugger is failing in the middle of an initializer method (self becomes 0×1, and the argument becomes invalid), which typically indicates an invalid pointer, but I’m just using -[NSCharacterScanner scanInt:], which shouldn’t be so problematic. (But it is, after all, Cocoa.) And it turns out that isn’t the correct tactic to use anyway as I want to extract info from the internal version number (MMmmb.bs.rr), not the public (MM.mm.bb[s[rr]]), and Cocoa doesn’t have an API for handling fixed-length records. (Possibly the only functionality from COBOL I actually miss! I mean, there are BCD libraries for C, right?)

So I’ve spent much of the day tussling through docs and links for various RegEx frameworks for Cocoa, and trying to add RegexKit to the Blocks plugin framework; first 0.5beta and then 0.4beta via compilation. Now I’m attempting to use the prebuilt binary, which is problematic because frameworks are normally used by applications, not plugins, so it doesn’t exactly fit right (or run). But as the clock’s been ticking, it looks like it’s time to punt and attempt another tactic by hard-coding a parser for the internal version scheme or using defaults for the optional fields in the public version scheme.

This is just to fix the bugs in the version class I added in an earlier version, which I have to get out of the way to continue fleshing out the revamped defaults system I created with unit tests and component code in order to release! Argh!

It hasn’t been all sweat and tears, though. I went through a period of idea generation (both software and marketing/entrepreneurism) early during the process and also, last night as I was organizing several years of accumulated papers, bills and what-not, found several new UI ideas I had come up with (and forgotten) and the missing FreeHand install CDs.

Now to get these final PITA problems licked so I can continue to move Mori forward!

As I was reviewing the code changes I had made, I slowly realized that the Mac’s user preferences system had a minor philosophical flaw which makes for dangerous situations in the program.

One of the goals of this version is improved recovery from faulty stored values relating to the preferences and UI, so you can continue with only minor inconvenience and perhaps a need to again set preferences to your liking. Not adequately performing this resulted in some of the missing toolbar and empty window problems that were experienced before. (For a more exciting example of cascading faults, read about the 2003 Northeast blackout.)

So after some delays in getting the unit tests for this new component to execute properly, I’m now adding that component into the program. Once I have the Cocoa preferences system replaced, I’ll be releasing 1.6.8. Then I’ll work on the possible fix for the SpotLight ‘odd name’ bug for a quick-turnaround (later today) 1.6.9.

If that particular bug can’t be quickly fixed, I’ll work on some other long-standing issues in Mori for an update that will be released after a few days.

Incidentally, Tobias had a valid concern regarding the update process: “Where does testing feature in this? In olden times an update was a build with only known problems since a few people played with it for a week before it was awarded a version number. WebKit offers a choice between bleeding edge nightly r1234 and release 3.0.”

I plan to continue to rely on the Beta Test Group for testing updates, with a release candidate at least one version ahead of what is shipping. However, at the time of this writing there are 320 open bug reports for Mori, even after having pre-release testing candidates as part of the process. That just isn’t right.

I’m primarily depending on the unit tests to prevent shipping defects to you. They serve to expose bugs in existing and new code; and by adding tests for the types of bugs identified in the bug reports, the tests will continue becoming more valuable to the release process.

The purpose is to continuously speed up the process by improving its results. It shouldn’t be a shock when a program works right off the bat. The delays are (partly) associated with having so many steps of repeated inspections on the same system. It multiplies the time it takes to get a new release out the door. The less I tolerate it, the quicker it gets done correctly.