Tip: Add / Set Resources Easily

For those unaware, Haiku applications have certain information stored in resources. This includes the version, short and long descriptions, and a duplicate of the signature specified in the application object's constructor. You can easily set this information quickly by adding an .rdef file, which is a text-format resource file.

To quickly create and edit this information, add a new file by pressing Alt+N or choosing Add New File from the menu and enter the name of the .rdef file, such as Resources.rdef. Double click the file's entry and when it opens, you will be greeted with a text file where you can fill in the information for your application with a minimum of fuss.

Editing .rdefs not to your liking? Make a Resources.rsrc file instead, right-click on it, and choose "Edit Program Settings" to do the same thing with the FileTypes app. Either way, simple and fast. That's the way we like it. ;-)

Introducing Paladin Tips, Symbol Finder

Paladin has grown quite a lot since its inception. In fact, it has a lot more features than BeIDE now. I worked extensively with the venerable tool when I was reverse engineering the .proj file format. Having gotten accustomed to Paladin, BeIDE seems kind of sparse. Some of Paladin's features aren't necessarily as obvious as others, so from time to time, I'll be posting tips on making your use of the IDE better, faster, and more convenient. What better way to work more effectively than from the author himself. :)

The Symbol Finder tool was introduced in version 1.3. It's a search engine for libraries. Did you ever have a time when you were receiving linker errors for a symbol that was missing, but you couldn't figure out which library it was in? Symbol Finder to the rescue. It's kept in the Tools menu, but it's also a separate application, too. Once started, enter the name of the symbol and hit Enter and it will search all of the libraries in the system library folders for it. Any hits will pop up in the search results.

Haiku Alpha 2-based Paladin Build Available

After yesterday's release fiasco, I quickly reinstalled Haiku using the alpha 2 branch in the source tree and while the version number hasn't changed, the Paladin 1.3 packages available via the links in my previous release post will work on alpha 2. My apologies for any inconvenience this oversight has caused. We now return to our regularly scheduled program. ;-)

Building Paladin from the Source: Not Necessarily a Bad Idea

It never dawned on me that people might want to install Alpha 2 and continue to use it. Personally, I can't fathom not using a nightly. I'm big on stability, but considering that Haiku is very much in an alpha state, I expect problems. Some revisions are better than others. Right now, one of my machines is running r38082, which is a nice, reasonably stable build, but it apparently has some symbols that Alpha 2 lacks. Looks like I'll be putting out an Alpha2 build tomorrow. ;-)

Using development builds of Paladin are not normally what you might expect of a development build for other projects. I don't use release builds of Paladin -- I use the bleeding edge. If something breaks, I un-break it because otherwise I can do any further Paladin development. Using a development build of Paladin also tends to have newer features and fixes than can be found in the releases.

If you want to continue to run Alpha 2, that's fine. I'll be posting an Alpha 2 build soon. Here's how to build Paladin from source. You'll need Mercurial installed to do so.

From the Terminal run these commands:

hg clone http://paladin.hg.sourceforge.net:8000/hgroot/paladin/paladin
cd paladin
buildsuite.sh

This will actually build Paladin, PalEdit, and parts of the as-yet-unreleased packaging system and create a package on your Desktop. Open it and it will install Paladin on your system. If you want to use ccache or fastdep, copy them from the Paladin install folder to /boot/common/bin. The bug causing them to be installed in the wrong place is the reason why the packaging system isn't officially released yet.

Release Day: Paladin 1.3 is Out!

It is my pleasure to announce the next version of Paladin, now available from Haikuware and DarkWyrm's Library. Although it has only been about four months since 1.2.1, a lot of work has gone into this release. Probably the single most noteworthy feature in this release is source control integration. Although it is just at a basic level at the moment, commits, diffs, and other common tasks are either a keypress or a couple of clicks away. Subversion and Mercurial are supported with Git support in development. BeIDE projects can now be imported. ccache has been updated to 3.0.1 and now dependency checking can be done with fastdep -- much faster than gcc's dependency checker. Some (accidentally) broken features, such as Run in Debugger and the Program Settings item for resource files have been fixed. Projects in the Start Window can be opened from the list using Alt + a number key, so Alt+1 opens the first project in the Recent Projects list -- this little feature has made a big difference in my own ease-of-use while using Paladin.

Some features didn't make this release, which I'm kind of bummed about, but I'd much rather get a stable release out now than a buggy one or a stable one 6+ months from now when I sort-of have time during the school year. The release doesn't use the new packaging system because I just couldn't get it stable enough in time, but Paladin 1.4 should use the new system. I can't wait for that because with it I can literally build the entire Paladin suite from source and package it with one command using a shell script -- truly One Command to Rule Them All.

As always, bug reports are genuinely appreciated. Enjoy!

Update: The binaries require at least Haiku r38082 because of some of the bugfixes that Paladin depends on.

Crunch Time with Surprises

It almost sounds like I'm eating Lucky Charms, but it's true. 1.5 weeks until school starts and already I'm getting my mind into that mode. I've gone into testing mode for Paladin so that, hopefully, it will be ready to ship by the time that school time hits. I've found a few weird things, but there's just a lot of stuff to test and use day-to-day. I had plenty of chance to break things in this weekend. How?

I spent Friday night in a daze, just playing around with unzip, curious if there is a way to create self-extracting zip files in Haiku and Linux. It turns out that it is. Literally it is just a matter of tacking on a zipfile to the end of an stub program which more or less runs unzip on itself. This led to a realization that hit me like a lightning bolt while I lay in bed early yesterday morning. For a while I've had code that I wrote for a packaging system for BeOS / Zeta / Haiku sitting on my hard drive, collecting proverbial dust because I couldn't figure out the best way to store the files. It was a large percentage of the way to completion, too. This connection put me into coding overdrive yesterday and I spent a generous amount of time on it tonight, too. The result? PSfx. Of course, this isn't news if you subscribe to the checkin RSS feed for Paladin. Natch.

PSfx is a package building app which works very much like the PackageBuilder app which is bundled in the BeOS 5 Development Tools. The difference is that, when finished, it will work *much* better than PackageBuilder and won't require any extra tools. The new format uses ZIP compression leading to smaller file sizes than the equivalent for SoftwareValet packages. Like Paladin, it has a scripting-friendly command line interface, perfect for integrating into other build systems or hacking together a quick shell script to automate the building and packaging of a project. The build scripts that it uses are a similar format to the Paladin project files, which makes them friendly toward source control and also easy to read and write even with just a regular text editor. Also, even though the executables will run only on certain OSes, it will be possible to build, say, a Haiku GCC4 package from my Zeta install.

All of this is not to say that it's finished, however. While the install engine and command-line interface are mostly finished, the GUI still needs more work. There are some bugs I need to fix and some other miscellaneous stuff needs done. While PSfx certainly won't be ready for the Paladin 1.3 release, Paladin's next release, in theory, will use this new install system. While these self-extracting packages probably won't be as elegant a solution as what the other Haiku developers will be coming up with at the proper time, it sure beats waiting a few more years for decent software distribution tools.