Fact Triangles Additions

/ 5 August 2007

After I finished adding Sparkle into all my applications I turned my thoughts to the old Fact Triangles application Eric had written for me when I was in 3rd grade and I had just added Sparkle into. I turned to it essentially as a start to possibly learning Objective-C. In the process I realized that it had no bundle identifier. So I looked in the project for Computer Maintenance to copy out it’s key/ value pair for an identifier. It had one, but the default one. So I changed the identifier to the one I wanted it to have (set from “org.clst…”). I did the same to my Quicktime Assistant project and then went and copied out the entire key/ value pair and pasted it into Fact Triangles for usage there. Immediately after doing that to all 3 applications Sparkle began to use those plist files as a record-keeping location for the updater. That proved to me that those plist files are indeed linked up to their applications.

So I then started to wonder why Fact Triangles until that moment was using a plist file named after it. I next looked deeper into the code and quickly realized that the other preferences Eric already had in Fact Triangles weren’t actually being saved into any plist file. So I started to read though the built-in ADC reference library to see how exactly to go about giving those preferences access to plist saving as well as the checkbox I added with Sparkle access to really changing the already-existent preference key/ value pair. I’m now at the point where I have added (inside comments) alternate ways of handling the checkboxes and radio buttons that should write them down to the plist database as well as setting the variable internally. Equivalently I’ve (inside comments, again) added alternate code for the initial setting of the internal variables where it reads it off the plist database and at the same time changes the interface accordingly. I have NO IDEA if I got the syntax right, but at least the ideas are there for future incorporation into the real running code.

So I’ve now got a version of the application project that ought to have the basic ideas for some very important and useful additions to the application. Given that Sparkle is fully implemented already, I’m thinking about possibly publicly releasing a version soon, and releasing updates once these other changes are made. If I do publicly release the application I’ll (of course) provide a download link here. Enjoy, Alex.

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