Mac Forum / Programming / Perl / January 2007

In a message dated Wed, 17 Jan 2007, Sherm Pendley writes:

I think that's my conundrum too--my own itches are usually best scratched
with a CLI or web interface, so after creating an initial test app with
CamelBones, I haven't felt much need to do more.

But I haven't felt the need to do *any* GUI app creation, and knowing
CamelBones is out there is quite comforting for if and when that day
comes.

The recent "My Dream App" competition reminded me of exactly how much of a
market there is on the Mac for just repackaging Unix tools (or better yet,
CPAN modules) in a Macish form.  Make a pretty interface, and what the
software does underneath almost doesn't seem to matter to some folks.
Maybe there's opportunity there.

Trey

Now that you mention it, a walk through ShuX would probably be useful in
itself. Is it available somewhere as code? I'm only seeing a final app.

dha

I entirely understand your concern. A (non-Perl)
project of my own[1] has been indefinitely stalled
since we can't think of much else to do with it and we
basically finished what we set out to do. Without a
buzz it's hard to keep things going, especially solo
projects.

As for CamelBones, I'm glad to know it's out there,
but I tend not to do many GUI projects. Most of my
project ideas tend to be small one-off tools for
sysadminning at work or foundational things like
frameworks and other meta-tools. I've also been too
busy of late to work on any personal projects, which
doesn't help.

The one GUI project I would like to do when I get a
chance is actually a menubar thing, but I can't seem
to find my way around the Cocoa docs well enough to
figure out how to do one rather than a normal app. In
general when I've messed around with CB, trying to
figure out the Cocoa side of things tends to be the
stumbling block. It's entirely unreasonable to expect
you to make sense of Cocoa for us, but when working on
new examples it may help to focus a little more on
crossing over from Perl-land into Cocoa-land rather
than from Cocoa-land into Perl. Just a thought for
when you get enough buzz to want to work on it some
more.

[1] A newsfeed aggregator called Paperboy RSS
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/paperboy/> for the
curious. It's actually a CLI front-end for applying
XSLT via LibXSLT, so it's more than just for
newsfeeds.

Version 2.0 -- which makes the core of the project a
library interface tying LibXML and LibXSLT together
with the CLI being an example program using the
library -- is (stalled) in the works; The library
works, as does the CLI, though the batch processing
program which makes the thing most human-useful as an
aggregator is where things are stalled at the moment.

I've been thinking about doing a CB front-end so users
can play around with posts like they do in Thunderbird
et al, but that would take getting the Version 2.0
ready to minimize changes. Of course, I don't know how
useful such a thing would be for the amount of work it
would take. The big strength of Paperboy is in giving
a CLI where most other newsfeed tools are strictly
GUI.