Sneaky LEGO characters

[richmond62]

I turned off gatekeeper a while back.

Obviously, re the cartoon, your education has been sadly lacking in a certain area: I commend you to this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Molesworth-Pen ... 102&sr=8-4

Probably worth about 100 times what a PhD is worth nowadays.

[tperry2x]

Yes, Ronald Searle's work has indeed passed me by. I'll have to have a look at this sometime.

[richmond62]

I wonder if, after a restart the gatekeeper turned itself on again?

Anyway:
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[tperry2x]

Apple probably don't want you to turn it off, so wouldn't surprise me if it gets re-enabled regularly.

Sorry. I think I've gone full circle from an Apple Fanboy to an Apple Hater.

[richmond62]

Well, that did no good BEFORE a restart: let's see what 'gives' now . . .

NO Joy, I am afraid.

Bloody queer when your 'patched' version went ahead and behaved itself.

I understand your mood swings. What I do not understand is why, when I download most apps, after a dialogue telling me they won't run, a second right-click allows me to run them.

Let's try that one again:

No Joy, either.

[richmond62]

Well, !@£$%^&*(), after a spot of this:
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Screenshot 2023-10-31 at 21.22.57.png (202.66 KiB) Viewed 6587 times

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The version you sent me a link to earlier worked!
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So, it might behoove you [what a marvellous verb] you to do that code sign thing before you bung the thing inside a DMG image in future.
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[tperry2x]

I made a right mess of trying to codesign it last time, because all it generated in the terminal was an error saying 'codesigning found detritus' or a similar phrase. It definitely used detritus though.

I'll just make my changes to the changes stack, and people can roll-their-own as far as Mac stuff is concerned. I know TerryL has a version on his site. That might prove more useful, I'm not sure.

Screenshot_20231031-200837_Firefox Focus.jpg (186.77 KiB) Viewed 6581 times

Had to look this up, to see what you meant.

It is "only right or proper" that Apple should offer a reliable way of disabling the codesigning check as an option. But they won't.

[tperry2x]

Speaking of which, judging by that white preferences window, I think something is amiss.
Did you apply all the Darkmode changes in the changes stack? There were 3 in total.

[richmond62]

Well there is something anent 'detritus' in my last patching effort if you look back at the image: doesn't seem to have stopped anything dead in its tracks.

Mind you, what on earth is meant by 'detritus' in this context is a mystery to me.

[richmond62]

Speaking of which, judging by that white preferences window, I think something is amiss.
Did you apply all the Darkmode changes in the changes stack? There were 3 in total.

Nothing is "a miss" round these parts: my wife and I have been contentedly married for 32 years, and lived together for slightly more than a year before that.

No: the screenshot I sent you was the thing, post-code-sign, opened directly.

For "fun" I shall now faff around with the dark mode settings and swamp you with screenshots.
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That was odd: I opened the thing the second time, and 'blow me down' the Prefs stack opened in 'charcoal'.

And where, forbye, would the settings for dark/light modes be, as I cannot find them?

Mind you, you should give yourself a Great Big Pat on the Back, as when, via the System Settings I set my Mac settings to Lightmode, the IDE changed to Lightmode instantly. Bloody Brilliant!
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[tperry2x]

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[richmond62]

Very Droll Chubby-Cheeks!

I am not so daft that I do not comprehend the occupier's language, even if it were preferable if we could run our own affairs in Scots.

Ah nae that o a glaikit chiel that disnae thole til that colonial leid, e'en if it were fair mair jalousable if war kintra ran its policies in Lallans.

Eftir aa Ah wis skailt in Ingland, an ma frist Universitar wis in Ingland (Durham), an ma mither is hauf-sudron, an raxed up intil the sooth, as did mysen.

Their instincts warned them that someone was "a miss".

[tperry2x]

... you should give yourself a Great Big Pat on the Back, as when, via the System Settings I set my Mac settings to Lightmode, the IDE changed to Lightmode instantly. Bloody Brilliant!

That should really be passed to Paul, as that bit was poached from his rc3 and rc4 version.

Haha, yeah you lost me on the second paragraph.
Ich verstehe nicht.

[richmond62]

That should really be passed to Paul, as that bit was poached from his rc3 and rc4 version.

I feel that, just at the moment, there is something a bit odd going on between Paul and the rest of the "community" (even if I have to use what has become a tainted word): and I am not exactly sure what it is, but I may be the guilty party having scowled at his use of the word 'lame'.

[tperry2x]

I'm not sure. I mean I was a fly-on-the wall and read the comments as they unfolded, but I can see it from both sides.

Paul probably meant it as a joke, and he points out that he considers it a "lame" version because it contains only a subset of the improvements he's made. I can see how that could be particularly annoying, to have put that much work in, only having to back-track and essentially make a version where all that is left out. Might make him feel like why did I bother?

But I can also see it from the point of view of others, myself included here - who were interested in reducing down the perceived bloat of Livecode. Does it really have to be as large in size as it is? Turns out most of the 'bloat' is the browser CEF engine (which is non-functional in Linux anyway for most distros, and could perhaps be replaced with something else.** more on this in a moment)
I still wonder if standalones can be honed so they generate smaller apps, but this isn't a reflection on Paul or his work - it's just that in the interests of efficiency, I think people may have wondered if more bloat was being added.

Turns out, I really don't think there has been any added. The features I've seen and incorporated into the OXT Lite version (visual guides, dark mode, script colourisation themes), I'd consider things that any good IDE should really have.

Size breakdown: (at least on Linux). The CEF engine is a 200+MB, but the real things that add to the size are the runtime engines).

size-breakdown.png (59.44 KiB) Viewed 6533 times

If we wanted to go really minimal, we could use OpenXION-1.4, which is essentially command-line xTalk. No IDE. The site is mostly down, and what I've got - I grabbed from thewaybackmachine and archive.org snapshots.
The same way that Runrev have done, they've essentially put an interpretation layer on top of xTalk to make what is now Livecode. We could do the same with OpenXion with a Page TKinter python IDE on top of it. So it walks the xTalk walk, looks like we want it look, and we have absolute control over how we script everything. No dependencies on engines which contain nasty surprises or code errors from Livecode.
I'd like to go this approach with a minimal version, but it does mean having to re-invent the wheel so to speak. A lot of work would be involved in getting a useable GUI on top of OpenXion, but the result would be a lean efficient IDE.

I don't want to offend Paul, because it's very evident he's put a ton of work in, for what is essentially a thankless task. We are all doing this for free because I think we share a common goal of getting this thing (whatever you call your particular fork of it), to be as good as it can be.

From that point of view, I think we are all on the same page.

[tperry2x]

** thoughts on what we could replace the large CEF engine with?
Well, I had a thought about using NetSurf.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetSurf

It's open source, supported on pretty much every main platform Livecode runs on, is actively being developed, is standards compliant and is receiving security updates. (With forks of it being actively added to)
https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/11/visu ... ement.html

I'm wondering if they'd let us incorporate it as our rendering engine of choice?
If so, it would shave hundreds of MB off the size of OXT and might mean the browser widget works on Linux, meaning I could revert back to the generic sql dictionary-generating method, knowing that it would work the same across all platforms reliably.

There would then just be the lack of a reliable video player 'widget' - hate the term. "Control" or even Object is better.
Could we get the VLC team to kindly create us a working VLC addition? Is anyone reading this friendly with the VLC team? Or, even are the VLC team reading this? - if not, can we send them a link if this idea has merit: We could have the traffic-cone-vlc icon shown in OpenXTalk as a nod towards their plugin contribution if they were to create something.

These are only random ideas I have floating around in my noggin.
But it's now getting on, and I've had a full on day of providing IT support, so that's all folks for tonight at least.

[tperry2x]

Hmmm. Limited success
https://tsites.co.uk/otherstuff/kind-of.mp4

To get the video to play (only once on import, no play/pause controller support), I had to install the mplayer and gconf-2-4 packages.

In other words, I had to add:

libaudio2_1.9.4-7_amd64.deb
libenca0_1.19-1.1_amd64.deb
libvorbisidec1_1.2.1+git20180316-7_amd64.deb
mplayer_1.5+svn38408-1_amd64.deb
gconf2-common_3.2.6-8_all.deb
libgconf-2-4_3.2.6-8_amd64.deb

Interestingly after this, the browser 'widget' "kind of works", it places an object on the card, but I can't do anything with it. I can't then save the stack either. But at least it doesn't lock the whole program up and I can at least close it and reopen it without resorting to task manager.

[richmond62]

Sorry, been out of 'it' today as made a large raised vegetable bed and my back, arms and brain are aching like buggery. As had a half-week holiday from teaching, and as everyone knows, holidays are when you do real work.
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Teaching tomorrow.

BUT, as in November I get a 4 hour mid-day break, will be moving my Mac Sonoma Mac Mini down there so I can dedicate that time to OXT.

[richmond62]

On starting your thing just now (with MacOS 12 in DarkMode) I got this:
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Which is strangely inconsistent.

[richmond62]

And what happened with the Application Browser was a bit odd:
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