Monday, October 13, 2008

A few bug fixes

I made a few more bug fixes and some internal changes. The somewhat major but I fixed was aligning and coloring of text on Concord table and text view. If you use CasualConc only with English, you probably didn't see any problem, but if you deal with text with a lot of non-standard alphabet characters, the display was ugly. Now it's better (not perfect). There still is a problem with language that combine more than one characters to display one character on display. Other than that displaying text is less problematic.

The major internal change I made is using Shared User Defaults Controller to save Preference settings. This saved a lot of codes, but at the same time, this is not perfect. Somehow this doesn't remember that changes made by scripts, so for some text data, I have to use script to save the data properly. But I might have done something wrong, so if you find any bugs related to Preferences, please let me know.

I also made a major change to CasualTagger. CasualConc had hidden functions to help manual tagging, which I have never turned on officially. This was because I didn't have time to finalize/fix bugs, so I decided not to make it available. Now I took some of the features from it and added to CasualTagger. I haven't documented them, but I included a simple instruction in the application as a help file. If you are interested, please take a look at it. CasualTagger is on the main site under Utility Programs.

I also made more changed to IPATypist, which not a lot of people use. And I guess those people who have downloaded it might not read this, so they don't know if it's updated or not (though I'm not sure if they keep using it).

That's about it for now. I'm also thinking about adding tag handling features to CasualConc, but it doesn't look promising. I once wrote experimental scripts to handle some types of tags, but they don't work very well. Now if I want to seriously add this feature, I have to get rid of old ones first. It's not very easy... Also there are a lot of weird scripts in CasualConc because it includes some codes I wrote when I was just starting to learn Ruby. I guess I have to clean up old messes first before I add some significant new features.

In any case, if you use CasualConc and/or other utility programs, please let me know what you think. The current priority is adding tag handling features. East Asian language support might be dropped. It would be a separate program. Some people asked about parallel concordancer, so I might write a separate one for it, but I still don't have enough information to go ahead. If you'd like to see a parallel concordancer for Mac, please give me information. You can email me directly or make a comment on this blog or post on CasualConc Discussion Board. I need to know what are the most fundamental features and how they should be implemented.

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