Frequency and Tangelo Update

I’m posting this entry with Frequency 1.6fc3. I’m hoping to release 1.6 final this week or early next week. 1.6 has all sorts of new goodies, especially in terms of adding more HTML tags to your page more easily. There’s now a popup menu on the editing window that offers 13 HTML elements you can add to your posts, in addition to the venerable bold, italic, and underline buttons. 1.6 also introduces the ability to save and retrieve draft posts on your local drive. Pretty sweet. You can also easily tell Frequency to open your links in new windows. Oh, yeah, and you can choose whatever font you want for editing and for previewing your posts.

As for Tangelo… I’m making progress on the interface, and rolling in any changes from Frequency as I go. The post editing window in Tangelo will be very similar to the post editing window in Frequency. I’ve gotten many compliments on it, and I find it very easy to use, so why mess with a good thing? The biggest question now is what database to use for the backend? I figure I have five choices. The first, and cheapest, is to use REALbasic’s built-in database. The downside is that the database files are quite fragile. I’ve learned to handle them gently, but they can only hold 8K per record (yes, Mike, you read that correctly: 8 kilobytes). This makes storing things like web page templates pretty much impossible. Scratch that. The second choice is Valentina. It would be lightning fast, to be sure, but I don’t have that kind of money to plunk down on Tangelo just yet. Scratch that. Then there’s SQLite Plugin. SQLite is quite cool, but I don’t know if I want to deal with its API. I like the RB DB API a lot, a whole lot, and I’d prefer something that works with it. That gives me more flexibility in the future. There’s SQLite Plugin Pro, which uses SQLite and does use the RB DB API. That’s an option, but not a super-cheap one, unless Will wants to cut me a break. ;). The final choice is to upgrade to REALbasic 5.5 when it comes out and use the new database engine it includes (it removes the 8K limit on records). That’ll cost a bit more than SQLite Plugin Pro, though. But it’s something I want to upgrade to anyway. What to do, what to do. I think I’m going to get SQLite Plugin Pro and upgrade later.

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