Stuff About Ponymotes and Life

July 27, 2015

Seems like forever since I’ve posted. I’ve been so busy over the past month or so between work, a convention, and working on BetterPonymotes. Truth be told, the BPM Safari repo is actually pretty out of date now, but it’s not for a bad reason. As a matter of fact, I’m now a contributor to the BPM core repo! Since Typhos is busy working on other projects for the most part, he’ll just continue to add emotes as he has in the past, and I’m now part of feature development. I’m still maintaining the Safari build, but now it’s part of the core code, rather than a tacked on addition. I’ll get into the specifics of that later (though if you keep up to date with the release versions, you’ve probably seen them). Since it’s been over a month since I last posted, I figured that I should do a bit of a data dump, though I seriously did consider just posting each in thing in a separate series of posts. If you’re just interested in BPM stuff, just skip to the last bit.

A bit about life first.

Work has been fantastic, and I’m quickly becoming accustomed to the ways of C#. At this point, the biggest thing on my plate is just remembering where everything is located in the massive list of project files. Other than that, I’m learning general business rules such as on which level different fines and fees occur. I do kind of hope that I’ll run into a complicated problem that I can write about soon, but for now, I guess I’ll just say, do things the smart established way, and avoid kludges at all costs. I’ve been pretty busy most of these recent weekends because of car trouble. First I had to have my idle control valve replaced, then I had to get a couple of spark plugs. The first was a bit pricy, the second was fortunately quite cheap. My car is running quite well now, and hopefully I won’t have any problems with it for a while, but now may be the time for me to start looking around for good car deals. Last weekend, I went to a local anime convention (this is my third year attending), and while I don’t watch that much anime, it’s quickly becoming a pop culture convention in and of it’s own. Additionally, this was the first year that I cosplayed at some place that big. I was dressed in all purple with Sharpie tattoos marked down my arms. I was playing the part of Cecil Palmer from the anything but mundane podcast, Welcome to Nightvale. It was a bit weird having so many photos taken of me, as well as getting several hugs, but it was a really fun and different experience. Maybe it was a bit of confidence by the blond wig and headset, but I felt very outgoing throughout it all.

Things about Apple

So first off, my Apple Watch has been working quite well, and I’ve been impressed with it’s ability to keep me from sitting around too long. Its dictation abilities, even when the voice is barely a whisper, are still quite accurate. I’m really looking forward to Watch OS 2 and the capabilities that it brings to the platform. Second, regarding the Safari developer program, I don’t have much to say, and that’s mainly because Apple itself has not really said anything. It seems that they may have slightly revised the wording on the page a little bit, but since I didn’t make an archive of it, I have no way of knowing for sure. My certificate hasn’t been revoked yet, so I guess I have at least until it expires to keep updating the Safari port of BPM. Fortunately it is still valid for a little under a year, so there will be plenty of time to find out. The wording seems to suggest that the Developer Program is just for having extensions placed in the store, but it’s difficult to say with certainty. The biggest question is whether or not it will still be possible to request new certs from Apple. Time will tell.

BetterPonymotes

I wanted to use BPM on my Mac for quite some time, but Safari support was dropped way back when. I stepped up to fill the gap, and then I began hosting the unofficial Safari version. A few weeks ago, someone asked why the Safari version always seemed a little behind the official release. I explained that I only know to update it when I remember to check ponymotes.net to see the version number. After that, /u/Typhos contacted me and wanted to chat. He’s rather reserved, but a pretty nice guy. After talking for a while, I ended up becoming a bit of a feature developer for BPM. The biggest visible addition for all users that I made was a little dropdown box that lists all of the tags that BPM uses. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s difficult to say what a good solution is. The next was more of a merge of my Safari code into the core of BPM. For those who are curious, I have a previous post about what that entailed. The final addition was driven by a little revolution happening recently on reddit. In short, the admins have not been doing a good job recently, and both mods and users have been getting pretty upset with them. I could spend an entire blog post going over it, but that time has kind of passed for now, so I’ll save it for the next big revolution. Out of this, however, a small reddit clone rose to prominence. That website is named Voat. Anyway, lets just say that I’ve been trying to boost a couple of my favorite communities over there (which is a little tough with the invite only limitation at the moment), and one of those communities is /v/mylittlepony. Because there is no way to host images on Voat itself yet, I figured the best way to get the ponymotes that MLP subs are so well known for was to build in support for for the site in BPM. Now reddit’s comments are all clones of the usertext-edits element, and that makes things (generally) easy to account for. Voat however uses completely different nodes for each set of comments. Now I could deal with that easily enough with some case statements, except for one reason: the comment boxes for new comments are generated dynamically, and each of them has a name that is made unique by a string of numbers attached to it. This made it impossible to elegantly solve the problem, and the buttons attached to each text box proved equally troublesome. After a little bit of digging though, I found that the Markdown edit bar on each of them used the same class name (markdownEditerMainMenu). Once I found that, everything else was cake! So for anyone wanting to create an add-on that attaches to each comment, use that class. Next on the list of updates will be properly supporting night mode. From there, who knows…