Little Updates¶
349 words on earthlingsoft
Following last week’s Mailboxer v5 release which got quite widely linked on English, German and French sites - matching the the three localisations it now has - a few e-mails made it our way regarding some of our older and almost forgotten little projects. Most of them have the handicap of still being PowerPC only.
For two of them that has been improved now. The Address Book plugin Touch Tone Checker which as a plugin wouldn’t run at all on Intel is now Universal. As the Waveform generation involves a little bit of mucking with raw numbers this one even needed a small Endianness fix to play actual sounds rather than just unpleasant static on Intel systems.
With more and more people using digital phones from ISDN to mobile phones to VoIP in which those sounds won’t be able to actually dial, I suspect that Touch Tone Checker’s days are over before they really started. But with the fix being reasonably easy, it wass still worth doing - particularly as our general Waveform Checker class that is used by Touch Tone Checker will benefit from being Intel compatible and thus other applications using it will benefit as well. In addition, the speakers of current Macs seem to be good enough to make the dialling actually work for those people who do have an analogue phone (with my TiBook the speaker quality used to be a real problem).
The other project that saw updating was the sweet ASCII Projektor. While it did work on Intel without problems, throwing a highly compressed film at it while running in PPC emulation could hurt performance. Thankfully Apple updated the sample code we use for the Terminal output to be Intel compatible, making this just an exercise in merging their and our changes to the project together.
Actually we have had a much better and cooler improvement of ASCII Projektor almost finished for months now. We’ll just need to get our act together and iron out the remaining glitches, so this update may be good thing to pass the time in the meanwhile.
