As I finally reached a programming goal I had set – the tab hover javascript was working fairly well – I realised that users would want the option of positioning the tabs in the middle or corners of Slider’s four sides. Initially I had assumed it would be OK for users to have tabs positioned only in the center of either of the four sides.

Great, I thought. This shouldn’t be too bad – just increase the number of radio buttons available and position the tabs accordingly.

Four hours later, I “achieve” a build of Slider that exports without the dreaded Uncaught Exception 10.

None of the Javascript works, turns out that was where the final erroneous lines were. Not in the 6 other class files I combed through. Duh.

The radio buttons for selecting tab position changed from:

Ugh, these are so yesterday

to:

Positioning Radios as they should be.

Here is an example of the type of thing you’ll be able to do with Slider, when the rewrite is finally done:

It's getting there!

Finally, I feel like the hours I’ve spent mashing my hands on my keyboard are starting to show results.

Not working, releasable results, but results all the same.

Still not working: arrows, timer, content (!), table row repositioning, titles, text shadow, effects (or any sliding at all, come to think of it), cell links.

I have another project that I will soon have to devote serious time to, but I’ll continue plugging away at Slider, I’m excited about the new version!

Tags: Preview, Slider, Tabs

During the past week, I’ve been working on Slider’s new Tab option pane.

I took screen shots before making changes to the layout.

Here they are:

I hope I’m not tempted to change things around again… I really need to get the backend going now!

Tags: Cocoa, Objective C, Slider

During the great rewrite, I’ve been trying to focus on one section at a time. The first section to come under attack was “everything pertaining to the styling of Slider that is not Arrow-related”. After much mucking-about I decided to combine the Border, Rounded Corner, Background Image, Gradient and Background Colour onto one Pane.

I don’t know why I didn’t do this before, it is obvious and really the only logical way to present these controls – enabling some may disable others, it was confusing and clumsy when they were on different tabs.

Now users will be able to see what is being enabled/disabled without swapping between different tabs.

Here is a screenshot of the option page as it is currently:

Slider style configuration laid bare: Click to view

This is about the 10th layout redesign, I’m quite sure there will be no major changes from now on.

Still a long way to go, but progress *is* being made.

Tags: Development, Objective C, Rapidweaver, Slider

Another stumbling block on the road to Slider completion was this:

NSUncaughtSystemExceptionException — Uncaught system exception: signal 11

This vague and unhelpful error message (in this case) was caused by my trying to return an NSMutableString in place of an NSString:

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- (NSString *)generateHTML{
 
	NSMutableString *html = [NSMutableString string];
 
	@try{
 
	//Begin wrapper
	[html appendString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"<div id=\"slider%@\" style=\"height:%ipx;width:%ipx;position:relative;z-index:0;margin-left:%ipx;%@\">",
						UID, (int)portalSize.height, (int)portalSize.width, leftMargin, [self generateBGCSS]]];
 
	//Begin other content
	[html appendString:[self someYetToBeWrittenFunction]];
 
	//Close wrapper
	[html appendString:@"</div>"];
 
	}
	@catch (NSException *e) {
		NSLog(@"generateHTML: %@", e);
	}
	return html;
}

Googling resulted in this solution, from the Cocoa Dev Archives (which have saved me from suicide more times than I can count).

The successful code is:

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- (NSString *)generateHTML{
 
	NSMutableString *html = [NSMutableString string];
 
	@try{
 
	//Begin wrapper
	[html appendString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"<div id=\"slider%@\" style=\"height:%ipx;width:%ipx;position:relative;z-index:0;margin-left:%ipx;%@\">",
						UID, (int)portalSize.height, (int)portalSize.width, leftMargin, [self generateBGCSS]]];
 
	//Begin other content
	[html appendString:[self someYetToBeWrittenFunction]];
 
	//Close wrapper
	[html appendString:@"</div>"];
 
	}
	@catch (NSException *e) {
		NSLog(@"generateHTML: %@", e);
	}
	return [NSString stringWithString:html];
}

This should have been obvious, I regret the shame I bring on my family.

Some hours after posting the previous post, I received an email from John informing me that the 0.95b version of Slider was … broken.

Seems I had changed something, and Slider would no longer install properly.

I managed to fix the problem, accidentally.

(hand on heart) I, Michael Robinson, solemnly swear to never, ever touch Xcode build options that I do not understand while working on a release-ready project.

I am so pleased that it works now, for about 3 hours I thought I might need to rewrite everything from 0.93b up…

Tags: Products - 产品, Rapidweaver, Slider

Today a customer informed me that Slider wasn’t working properly on his webpage. They gave me the URL to the problem page, and for a page with a working (properly) version of Slider.

Initially I was perplexed, but it dawned on me that the code for parsing out the cell numbers can only parse single-digit numbers.

A classic case of short-sighted programming.

See the cells’ class attribute was put together like this:

cell + the cell’s number + unique ID.

Examples:

cell2page0

cell9page102

cell10page0

Code for parsing out the cell’s number:

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parseInt(jQuery(peeker).attr("class").substring(4,5))

Notice that it only gets one character.

To work correctly, two things needed to be changed.

First, I had to change the way the cells’ class attribute is put together:

cell + unique ID + the cell’s number

Second, the javascript for parsing out the number:

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parseInt(jQuery(peeker).attr("class").substring(("cell" + length of cell + unique ID),(length of class attribute)))

The updated plugin is available here: Slider 0.95b

I’m confident that I’ve fixed the problem, but if I haven’t don’t hesitate to let me know!

Incidentally, the customer’s website is extremely well done, go and check it out!

John Charlton Webdesign

Tags: Products - 产品, Slider