Written: November 8th, 2007, 9:35 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
Written: November 8th, 2007, 9:35 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
Written: July 15th, 2007, 23:48 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
First, some more progress. I have created two more patches and committed all of them to the cws for the address book integration: macaddressbook01. The two new patches are for better commenting and localization support (links are to the accompanying issues in OOo). Please note that I had a lot of help from Patrick Luby on the localization patch. (See our conversation in the issue.)
With localization and commenting done, there is only one more task that I have set myself: moving the address book integration to the Cocoa API. (Of course, there is still testing to be done, and there are probably more bugs to fix.) Since the Cocoa version will likely not replace the Carbon version, at least not for some time, I will probably create a new cws for it that will exist parallel to macaddressbook01. More on this idea as it develops.
Also, now that I have committed several patches, Eric Bachard suggested that I offer directions for testing them. Here they are:
If you have any trouble, please let me know! Otherwise, I will soon start on the move to Cocoa. P.S., for those curious, here is the Address Book at work in Spanish:
Written: July 12th, 2007, 22:26 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
Progress lately has been moving in bursts. There are times during which I feel like there is not much for me to do at the moment, as I wait for people to look at my code and my patches before I apply them. So far, Patrick Luby (of NeoOffice) has supplied two patches for my code. Then, for one reason or another, a specific task becomes available (e.g., fixing mail merge, for which I got some helpful advice by Florian Heckl that let me start working on it), and I work on it until it is complete. Progress on the Address Book Integration over the past week has been:
This work, if there are no problems with it, solves half of the issues presented in my last post, just leaving: Cocoa integration, commenting, and localization of labels. And, reading up on how localization of strings works within Mac OS X (specifically this article at MacTech), and testing things like genstrings, it appears that there is no way to specifically invoke Mac OS X's own localized labels directly (e.g., I cannot ask for the localized version of the constant string kABFirstNameProperty, at least not in Cocoa). It might be that there is some way to localize kABFirstNameProperty itself, but if there is, I cannot find it. It also may still be possible to use the Carbon function ABCopyLocalizedPropertyOrLabel, but I have not managed to use it successfully, and it is strictly for Carbon, so it couldn't be included in the Cocoa version. So, after a bit more testing, I might call the goal of localizing labels currently unachievable (for me), which would leave only two more goals (other than testing and debugging) : commenting and creating a Cocoa version. I'll let you know my progress!
File: abcocoa.tar
Written: July 7th, 2007, 4:04 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
Written: July 7th, 2007, 4:01 (UTC) By: omer 1 comment
I have neglected this blog lately as I've worked through various small bugs and features of the address book code, but there are several interesting new developments (or, at least, interesting for me). Most importantly, earlier today I did a compiled the X11 version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X and discovered happily that my address book code not only compiles on it but also works just fine. Other updates: OpenOffice.org no longer crashes on close (in fact, this was a bug outside of my code and was fixed by Frank Schönheit); the address book can now fully handle non-Latin alphabets (thanks to Florian Heckl); all data types from the OS X address book are now stored as the correct data type in OOo (so, for example, timestamps are now stored as timestamps rather than strings); fields from the address book are now displayed in a more logical manner (first name, then middle name, then last name, ...) rather than alphabetically; sorting records now works; and, if you have multiple groups in your address book, they'll each show up as a table in OOo.
I have also (finally) got my work in a presentable form. It is in two files, a patch file and a tarball, the patch for changes to files that already exist in OOo code and the tarball for files that I created. Apply both of them at the root OOo directory. The affected modules are connectivity, dbaccess, extensions, and scp2. Finally, I have created a cws for the address book integration (named "macaddressbook01"), and I am about to request that someone add those modules to the cws and apply the patch and tarball to them.
That said, here is what I think remains for my Google Summer of Code project:
Of course, these changes are assuming that others looking at my code are not appalled and demand that I start over or restructure the whole thing. If that happens, they'll all have to go on the backburner, and hopefully I'll have time to look into them later. I guess we'll soon see!
Oh, and finally, a fun screen shot follows of the addressbook working in X11. You'll see that one of the entries is written in Hebrew :)
Files: macaddressbook01_integrate_ab.patch and macaddressbook01_macab_driver.tar
Written: June 27th, 2007, 4:10 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
It has been rather a long while since my last post, and I apologize for the delay. I am often fool enough not to backup my work, and I had finally tempted fate one too many: my hard drive failed just as I turned my computer on to back up my work on the address book. Luckily, because of this blog, I only lost a couple of days of work, and while my Macbook was in for repair, I worked on my old Toshiba laptop (Ubuntu Linux/Windows XP dual-boot) to redo the work that I had lost.
Well, after some long days, and specifically a long day today (that resulted in one new line of code, I have an exciting new image for you:
There are several issues to fix with this version. Most obviously:
These are the main things that I want to change over the rest of the summer, and if I have time, I am also toying with the idea of syncing the Mac OS X Address Book and OOo driver so that changes in one appear in the other (which would allow me to make the OOo fields editable). The framework for doing so is, as far as I can tell, already built into OOo, so I just have to understand it and modify my own code.
Anyway, once I figure out a couple of these (at least the first, so that OOo doesn't stop responding based on my code), I will probably start looking into integrating the code with aquavcl01 (the child workspace for the Aqua port of OpenOffice.org. I am very excited!
Written: June 18th, 2007, 23:59 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
I have two major updates for you today. The first is a rather modified version of my test Mac OS X Address Book program. It is called ABColumns because it prints out information about all people in tab-delimited columns. Two notes: first, although this version is specifically designed for people, an earlier version of the program could also easily handle groups, until it became apparent that a "group" in the Mac OS X Address Book is really just a holder of people (which makes sense, given the name) and has all but no other properties to it. So, although it would be pretty nifty to be able to choose a particular group as your data source or to switch to a particular group in OpenOffice.org, it isn't very high priority. Second: this version, in addition to printing columns, can also handle UTF8, rather than simple ASCII. Although I don't know of a way to write UTF8 to a file so that it can be imported into OpenOffice.org (or Excel, or any other program, for that matter), this version of the program, because it is tab-delimited, can be imported into either Excel or OpenOffice.org. I've tested Excel, but have not yet test OpenOffice.org, in order to move to the second, more exciting update.
The second update is that I have begun the process of actually integrating the Mac OS X Address Book into OpenOffice.org. Based on the suggestions of some people at the dev@dba mailing list, I am basing it heavily on the structure of the KDE Address Book code. And, I am including four files from the ABColumns program (everything starting with MacabRecord), though I changed them to handle OUStrings instead of STL strings. Over the past few days, I managed to get the code to compile and now have the following two screenshots. The second, though an error, is exciting because it is an error that comes from my code, which means that my code is being run:
Tomorrow, I will be traveling to Oregon, where I will (finally) once more have a decent Internet connection and be able to lurk on IRC again (my apologies for having disappeared recently), and that's where I'll be for most of the remainder of the summer.
File: abcolumns.tar
Written: June 14th, 2007, 20:23 (UTC) By: omer 2 comments
As an update to this post on working with the Mac OS X Address Book, I now have another deliverable: a program that prints all of the properties available on the address book. It's still only printing ASCII, and it's not in the correct format to be imported into OOo as a text file, but these issues are hopefully not hard to fix, and since they don't actually involve the Mac OS X Address Book API, I'm not sure that I'll actually take those final steps. I'm also not yet handling groups (the Mac OS X Address Book is split into two databases: groups and people), which is a more important lack and one that I will likely spend some time exploring soon. Anyway, the tarball for the program is available here. A brief description follows.
Basically: the the most important parts of the program are two method, one called printInformationForRecord and the other called getStringRepresentationOfPropertyValue. The former (by using the latter) can print any property in the address book (at least any one that I've been able to create so far). It doesn't assume that it is working with people, though I haven't tested it with groups yet. The latter can turn any type of value into a string (with the exception of "data" values, which are basically byte arrays and thus could be storing any kind of data), where the types are any of the ones listed in Apple's list of possible types. Although these methods only print a property to STDOUT, they are general enough that only a few manipulations would be enough to get them to do more complex things. This might even become the skeleton for handling the Mac OS X Address Book in OOo, though the complexity of OOo code will likely prevent that.
P.S. Thanks to Florian Heckl for correcting errors in the original program that helped me make this new one!
File: abpeople.tar
Written: June 11th, 2007, 2:34 (UTC) By: omer 0 comments
So, after all of my digging, I've finally managed to get a few meager results out of the Mozilla Address Book (or, more specifically, out of Mozilla's Thunderbird Address Book) inside of OpenOffice.org. The process described in my previous post on the subject let me to change the mozab lines in the "pre" files (see that post for details) and remove the "!defined(MACOSX) &&" in each block. Unfortunately, this solution only led me slightly forward: selecting Thunderbird or Mozilla gave me the error that "No Thunderbird Addressbook Directories Exist" -- see it here. After some more digging, I discovered that OOo was looking for the wrong profile for Thunderbird (looking for a directory called either ".mozilla" or ".thunderbird" in "~/Library/Application Support/" while the correct folder is called "Thunderbird" and is in "~/Library/" -- with this fix and another few tests, I finally have something worthwhile to show you. Here you go! A (somewhat) successful integration of the Thunderbird Address Book into OOo:
The original Thunderbird Address Book:
The Steps to add it to OpenOffice.org:
And, the result (after view->data sources) :
There are still quite a few bugs to figure out. (OpenOffice.org has been freezing a lot more lately, and I'm not sure if it's my new code or not... And, I still get the "No Thunderbird Addressbook Directories Exist" error when I open OOo outside of the debugger...) I'll investigate these more in the future and hopefully soon get started working on the OS X Address Book integration itself. But, this is definitely a happy step in the right direction!
Written: June 11th, 2007, 1:08 (UTC) By: omer 3 comments
Another development from over the past few days is my first application that interacts with the Mac OS X Address Book. It is available here. Basically, all it does is tell you how many people are in your Mac OS X address book and lists their names. It currently can only handle ASCII values (just so that it can be easily printed to the terminal), and it's an entirely terminal-based application, but it is a first step for interacting with the Address Book. And, perhaps more importantly, it is a first step using the Address Book Carbon API (Carbon is what OOo uses) rather than the Cocoa API. Meaning: it should be possible to integrate the Address Book using Carbon and C (both supported by OOo) rather than Cocoa and Objective-C (which are not). Enjoy!
File: abnames.tar