The week ending 27th August 2006

In Carl's Rebol 3 blog it was announced that Ladislav Mercir is now in charge of REBOL 3.0 test suites.
Rebol 3 blog article

Rebol 3's ordinals (FIRST, SECOND etc.) and APPEND have become native! functions.

Henrik Mikael Kristensen published a VID style, PAN-IMAGE, which allows panning of large images and scrolling of small images, with keyboard and scroll-wheel control.

Henrik's LIST-VIEW has been updated.
See Henrik's blog for more details.

Henrik's Tester is now at version 0.0.7:

My site, Site Anton, is semi-operational once again since the last move.

Gabriele Santilli released the first public version of a client-side Qtask Markup Language editor, QML-Ed

Some test output from Gabriele's PDF-Maker2 is now also available.
PDF-Maker 2 is experimenting with a new type-setting algorithm, which figures out how to break text (adding hyphens etc.) so it flows into desired shapes (columns).

The week ending 20th August 2006

Rebol3
Carl has indicated that Rebol3 will implement a class based approach to support object methods. The driving force for this is a better C interface, and ease of implementation.

Ladislav Mercir has been appointed charge of developing the test suites as well as other duties. So, if you need a particular test case, contact Ladislav.

Carl has also updated his blogging script to support comments - source available. It looks pretty nice.

Rebol.org
Cyphre has released my-http.r which allows transparent cookie handling in http(s). It looks like this was funded by qTask.

Edgar has updated his imagemagick script to support the latest version. I have not been able to get this going yet, but I have been able to use the comlib with the imagemagickobject.dll com server.

For example using the Com+ server and the comlib, if you need to display an image in View that is an unsupported format such as PDF, or Tiff, you can use imagemagick to convert the file to png, and then display it.

file: %mypdf.pdf
im_obj: createobject "ImageMagickObject.MagickImage.1"
objectMethod im_obj {.Convert(%s,%s,%s,%s)} compose [(file) "-format" "%m,%h,%w" "temp.jpg"]

will convert a pdf to jpg though I believe that ghostscript is also required for this particular conversion.

The week ending 13th August 2006

Pdf-maker 2
Gabriele continues to make progress with this long awaited upgrade to pdf-maker. You can see his current development status http://www.colellachiara.com/soft/PDFM2/ though the source remains in a state of flux.

Rebol Timelines
It appears that RT has taken some umbrage at the suggestion that they appear to jump from project to project. Of course, we only said that in order to extract more information! And here is their response - a timeline of current activities http://www.rebol.net/projects.html

QML
QML is another markup language used exclusively by the developers at qtask. Head honcho Reichart promises more open source:

"We will be providing the source to a client level QML to HTML generator next week."

MikeL was asking for Textile support instead of make-doc, but Gabriele feels that QML is more powerful.

I personally have a deeper interest in producing PostScript for high quality printout .. and perhaps I will post my solution another day.

Reboltalk
Newbie, Barry, was complaining about the lack of organised documentation while praising it

"I am amazed at the genius of this little piece of code"

Shades of Mark Antony! Of course, those of us who have run with Rebol for years read the documentation as it was produced and likely don't notice the lack of organisation so much. Still, this is a priority too for Rebol Technologies.

Barry did point out that Rebol might have a place for embedded devices and the like. For instance, my HP Laserjet 3015 uses Tomcat, a java Apache servlet engine to control the printer from the windows desktop, when Rebol/View would be a much nicer solution.

The week ending 6th August 2006

Recycle Refinements

Carl asks whether garbage collection should be triggered on each recycle for Rebol3. Experts : post your opinions!

LDAP and Radius

Reichart let slip that they have ( nearly ) working support for LDAP and Radius. He also said

" We have not published that source, but I'm cool with it being published. It is not fully tested yet, in fact it will be tested very soon. You have to pound on Edgar to get him to post the source."

So, if you need this, pound away!

PDF Maker

Gabriele announced that everyone using the PDF Maker on View 1.3 should update to his latest version, as previous ones contained bugs.

He also offered a preview of what you will be able to do with PDF Maker 2.