Most of the show stopper problems that I was having with Carbon apps under Leopard are getting worked through. The remaining memory leaks that Apple has found look like they will be fixed in 10.5.2 which means that server type apps like XTension, Whistle Blower and acgi dispatcher will once again be able to run on an up to date system. I was able to work around most of the largest problems, but for long term, unattended use carbon apps dont cut it on 10.5 or 10.5.1.

ACGI DISPATCHER link

At this moment acgi dispatcher is getting most of my time. I know folks have been waiting a long time for an update to this but the new version will be worth the wait. I am making good progress with apache2 support and support for the various applescript changes that came with 10.5. I am unable to give you an estimate on when the new version will be delivered as many of the issues are still up in the air and I fully expect new things to come up during the development cycle. There were drastic changes to some of the underpinnings that the app relies on in 10.5. Both to the web server system and to applescript and both needing quite a bit of first experimentation and then work to get stuff going again. Once it’s all sorted through though it promises to work really well. The apache2 support is working now and just requires an install process. I don’t expect this to take too much longer.

UPDATE: 1/17/08  The new apache communication is working really well. Apache 2 also changed some of the requirements for non parsed header scripts so I need to do some serious work on the header processing that dispatcher does as a go between. Just to make sure that scripts that only sent a content type and scripts that didn’t even bother to send a content type and scripts that send other headers will still work... And then I need to go back to apache 1.3 and make sure it all still works there. But the new system of communication is going to justify the work. No longer does the stub cgi app need to run as root so many security concerns are no longer concerns.

The script editor still allows you to save a script as an application or an application bundle. At the moment dispatcher requires that you save as a monolithic application and not a bundle. Other apps though can only come as a bundle and I”m not yet sure how to get around this problem. Apache simply doesn’t forward requests for bundles to the handling program. I have no way of knowing if you asked for /someapp.acgi if someapp.acgi happens to be a folder/bundle. What you get instead is a directory listing of the /Contents directory of the bundle. So real applescripts will work just fine, but we need a solution to the app as bundle problem. Perhaps just a simple empty text file with the real name and the program being smart enough to find the app inside the bundle next to it? That might work but will require a bit of extra setup that I dont like. Any thoughts feel free to email me about it.

UPDATE: 2/20/08 As of late last night a beta of the new version of acgi dispatcher is now available. It works with Leopard and Apache2 and it also allows the use of bundled applications as targets! Get It Now... I’ve also installed a bbs system here on the website to provide a forum for support and info sharing like I used to in the heady days before the children arrived and I had to take a hiatus... You can register and begin posting those difficult questions now.

Session Burner link

This app seems to work just fine under 10.5 just as it is. I have brought the source over to the new compilers and made the necessary changes to at least compile it under 10.5 so a native version will be coming as soon as I am able to work out the new iPhoto database format for that backup.

XTension link

XTension is now running on leopard! Support for full UTF16 strings in all applescripts was a “non-trivial” task but it’s working now. The beta for leopard is available on the shed.com site. There remains the possibility that applescript strings that you stored in a unit property or elsewhere might remain encoded in utf8 and if you try to compare it against a constant in an applescript it may not compare even if it is the same. It is actually do have a situation where something like if “hello” = “hello” return false under Leopard! If you run up against that with stored strings the solution is to convert the new string to utf8 or the old string to utf16 before you compare. Converting to utf16 is easy just

   set MyString to MyOldString as Unicode text

converting the other way is just as simple, but requires typing some of the fancy applescript special characters like:

  set MyString to MyNewString as «class utf8»

In addition to that I was not able to work around all the memory leaks in 10.5 and 10.5.1. 10.5.1 is absolutely required or you’ll leak memory all over the place. However the View windows will still leak memory during redraws. I hope that apple will fix this in 10.5.2 but I’m not going to announce it until they do. So dont leave view windows open when you walk away from the machine.

Whistle Blower

Whistle Blower remains about half finished. I have brought the new source forward through several major compiler updates and it does compile now. There remains tons of work to do though. I will be getting serious about this as soon as the new version of acgi dispatcher ships.