The Alchemist Guild’s Blog

A new backup application named Warehouse is currently in the final stages of development and planned to be released soon.

As of  10.5 Leopard Apple has released a great backup utility called TimeMachine which will keep incremental backups of your entire hard disk on a schedule of your choice. This may be appropriate for many users but for myself it’s overkill and too much of a “one size fits all” solution, like the one button mouse I haven’t used in many years.

Instead of relying on a single button, single backup interface Warehouse uses a task based system which lets you backup based on a task-per-task basis using a variety of backup modes (not just incremental archiving like TimeMachine) and unique destination devices (any mountable device even Macs connected via network). This means that you only backup the files you need, where you want thus saving time and disk space. The real power of Warehouse comes from setting up scheduled backups that run in the background (you can even keep the application closed if you want) so all your data is safely backed up while you work.

As was mentioned Warehouse doesn’t just create incremental archives like TimeMachine but uses other modes as well such as: updating (only new files are transferred), bidirectional synching (both new files on the source and destination are transferred) and synchronizing (newer files are transferred and missing files are deleted on the destination). This makes Warehouse an ideal solution for synchronizing folders across Macs or on removable media like USB memory sticks.

For only $9.99 you can get more control over how you backup your files.

Please visit the website for more information.

I’m sorry to say that WebScripter is officially on hold until a new direction for the application can be established. The current design is simply too large and complicated for me to maintain and has not competed well making the project far too expensive to develop. I have already started work on a smaller more robust design which has more in common with other popular tools but I don’t expect a release anytime soon since a massive overhaul is needed. Furthermore the Carbon API has been more or less totally deprecated and parts of the program will need to be rewritten in Cocoa, mainly the text editor which is the  most complicated part of the program.

When the overhaul is done WebScripter will emerge as a smaller program with stronger core features and cheaper price tag probably about $20.

I have gotten tons of feature requests all of which are great and I’m trying to steadily implement all of them over time, which will take some time. The version numbering is going a little too fast but the next version should be 1.3 (we’re on 1.2.6 as of writing this) and here’s what’s planned in terms of major features.

• Dragging cards to other sheets. This has been a very popular request and has already been developed and waiting for deployment into 1.3. When you drag a card over a sheet it’s image will scale to size then fall into the sheet where it was dropped. Quite nice.
• File/URL attachments (or clippings is another possible name). This is being developed now and I’m not 100% decided on all the details but files and URL’s will be able to be dragged onto cards along with some text (not sure about this yet). Then clicking on the icon will open the file/URL as it would normally in the Finder. This was requested often also by users who wanted to associate a file with a task for reference. Really good idea if you ask me.
• Navigating cards/sheets by keyboard commands so you don’t have to use the mouse.

Those are pretty major feature improvements but also just below them are synching sheet files from Mac to Mac, iCal support and printing. These will probably have to wait until 1.4 but it’s possible one of them could sneak in.

TaskCard now has Japanese and French localizations thanks to the support of caring users. Please support your language by helping to localize TaskCard.

Btw, I have started to port the graphics engine TaskCard uses to iPhone so there will be an app coming out eventually but probably not for a few months yet.

This is old news already but PasCocoaKit has been officially deprecated in favor of the native compiler dialect named Objective Pascal. Please visit http://www.thealchemistguild.org/objp.php for more information on Objective Pascal including installer scripts and example projects in PascalGladiator.

I spent more than a couple months working on this beast but at least most of the effort was placed into the Cocoa framework parser which has been used to support Objective Pascal so no real complaints. Now all Pascal users can enjoy making native Cocoa programs on OS X!