Chipping Away

Even with my newfound lack of time, I’ve had the occasion to dabble in some tech now and then, even if furtively and guiltily while the kids napped and at (further) expense of my own rest.

For instance, I’ve alternately been fiddling with YQL to scrape news out of poorly designed web sites with Pipes, to do some UI elements for web apps, and (which, to my surprise, now allows you to create both desktop and mobile versions of web apps in the same project, with the desktop version looking suspiciously like the default layout – but, alas, redirecting to the mobile one on an actual ).

My current mid-term project, which I’ve been pursuing at a sedate pace of perhaps ten lines of code a week, is an import module for , which I’ve decided to do based on the (so far rather spurious) notion that I will eventually be getting an and the fact that I draft most of my stuff on despite the (current) lack of rich text editing there (I use and a custom service to preview notes).

This because thanks to and a few extra knick-knacks I can post to this site trivially from any normal computer, but the team doesn’t seem to have time to implement basic text editing on the iPhone app (go and vote for it, be a nice fellow) despite it already working on the one.

Which is, in my opinion, odd, given that they actually pushed out an update for the recently and adding an editor for plain text files doesn’t seem like that much of an extra effort considering that on an is just plain weird as a viewer.

So I decided to roll my own web UI to publish content here, and there are several things I’m looking at:

  • Using the API, which is fairly straightforward to do in but which may entail my fiddling around with “OAuth”:WIkipedia:OAuth, something I’m loath to do at this stage.
  • Building a decent web UI for previewing and importing notes into , which I’d very much like to use from both an and an (despite my looking at , variants of iUI and whatnot, I’m liking jQTouch a lot).
  • Patching a bit further to allow for digest authentication and/or TLS in a sane way.
  • Converting rich text notes into content, because I’m hopeful that some day I’ll be able to at least use basic formatting and sane URLs ( keeps adding http:// to whatever I type as an URL on a link, which is wrong and still not fixed, despite my complaining about it for ages now…).

And, as backups:

  • Parsing documents (although I’m unsure of how I’ll transfer/upload them into in the first place – probably e-mail, given that there’s already a simple listener in the source tree).
  • Looking into the new generation of web-based editors, skipping the hideously big Bespin and looking at stuff like this great Textile editor (which doesn’t work well on Mobile Safari at all – yet).
  • Looking for an programmers’ editor that does (seriously). There are already a few interesting ones out there, but I’m very curious about this one and hope it comes out soon.

None of these are trivial, but most of them are interesting intellectual pursuits that give me a good feel of how their respective fields are progressing (parsing new file formats is always interesting, for instance, regardless of how passé it may seem…).

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