A bug was brought to my attention.
I recoiled in horror, because I don’t like bugs.
The bug persisted, empirically existent.
Two brave lines of code were added.
The bug squashed in severe principal.
Fin.
(Fix described in download section.)
Who Invited Web Application?
Within the last couple of years, a phrase has begun to emerge in the digital context of the internet:
“Web Application”
(Hopefully the enigmatic blue gives it a nice effect.) Some have sneered at it, others poked it with a stick, many started abusing the phrase because they thought it made them sound cool (like “The Cloud”, oohhhhh! Servers!), and, lastly, many programmers bemoaned that they’d been making them for years.
So what is a Web Application?
Simply, a web application is an executable that sits happily on a server somewhere, and is accessed via web. (Huh, sort of sounds less glorious when put that way.) This definition is almost unhelpful, however, as most people hardly even stop to consider how a web page is constructed at all, much less where it comes from. I might as well say that it’s made by tiny gnomes that live in a server far, far away. Who cares? The real question is: “Why? what’s the advantage?” I’m glad you asked! Let’s work our way up.
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Listening to the Deaf and Destitute
This last Christmas I was blessed to be able to fly down from Michigan to Georgia to spend Christmas with my sister and her family in Atlanta. I absolutely love this. My sister and her husband are students, and they have two bright-eyed little girls. One was born a true sanguine princess, destined to be adored; while the other, after my own heart, was born a rosy phlegmatic with a slower, but exciting perspective on life. I love them both so immensely. As such, I’m only able to see them one or twice a year, and at 2 and 5, respectively, that’s a lot of missed time.
My time down there was splendid, and I drank in every moment with ease and joy like a fine wine. The final day, in particular, my brother-in-law gave his consent to watch the girls while my sister and I took a haphazard tour of Atlanta. On the way out, I indulged my inexplicable of of bananas and grabbed a bunch — “Rations!” I explained to my sister. We purchased day-passes for the metro and made our way into the city, our minds set on adventure, and my cargo pockets bulging with my potassium enriched rations.
Project Updates and Precision Numbers
Quickly: I added a couple of new classes in the Downloads section. Namely, how to send emails and MMS via Real Studio, and the Canvas Button class (the “Hello World” of custom classes, to quote a clever fellow programmer). Enjoy!
Anyway, working on a project today, I found an odd bug in my INI classes. I have a Double being stored as a Variant, then converted to a String to be written to the INI file itself. Great stuff. But consider the following:
|
1 2 3 |
Dim Value As Variant = 2.0005 MsgBox Value // Shows "2.000500000000e+" |
What!? I find that offensive!
Yeah, me too. That is a problem. So, what the heck is going on? I’ll explain.
WebCalendar 1.1 Released!
I’ve been working hard to improve the class and, though I’ve said it already, I’m very glad with how it’s turning out. You’ll notice the thumbnail for this post looks rather different from the previous snapshots. That’s because I wanted to show off the calendar’s visual versatility, as well as a couple new features in this version; namely, text color for weekends, and the ability to hide the days of adjacent months. As always, these are changeable in both code and in the property list in the IDE. The other shots looked a bit crazy, but this one I think has a nice, sleeker look — as may be used.
Head over and download it!