Steve Lamerton's blog

The Help File

The help file is also undergoing, once again, major changes for version 3. Rather than integrating it into Toucan itself I have decided to split it out, into a separate pdf document.

Moving to CMake

Before releasing a version of Toucan on Linux the build system needed cleaning up. Rather than create projects on Windows and writing makefiles on Linux I decided to use a proper build system.

The Command Line

The other main weak point in Toucan is the command line interface, mainly because it breaks, a lot. So whilst reworking the scripting system I also decided to redo the command line interface.

To take advantage of the new scripting system the new command line interface is a front end to the script system itself, for example to enter a script you do the following:

toucan --script="print(2 * 10)"

Introduction

Once again the blog restarts! In the next few posts (hopefully every couple of days for the next few days) I aim to explain a bit more about my vision for Toucan, and what is being done and has been done to get there, hopefully culminating with the first development test of Toucan 3 at the end of the series. Topics will include scripting (in this post), Linux support, the improved command line interface, general improvements and a number of others. You might also want to check out the previous post Toucan 3 Teasers for a couple of quick pictures.

Just a couple of quick pics of some new stuff I am cooking up for Toucan 3:

What you can't see is the fact that Toucan should now run off a read-only device, anyone got a good way of simulating one if you haven't got one to hand?

Some time over the last couple of days Toucan hit 750,000 downloads! Thanks to everyone who has downloaded and used it, especially the beta testers and translators. More exciting news about Toucan and the future coming soon

I am disappointed to say that Toucan will not use the Volume Snapshot Service in a future version. The idea behind VSS is that it allows you to copy files which are in use, for example an Outlook .pst file whilst Outlook is open. As there were a number of requests for this feature, and indeed I too thought it would be useful I have had it on the todo list for a while, and indeed I intended to have it added for version 2.1.3 which is now in pre-release here.

As of the middle of last week Toucan now uses the Sourceforge Mercurial code repository rather than SVN.

The main reason for using a distributed system such as Mercurial is that it allows me to commit stuff even without an internet connection and then push these changes to the server later.

Just to let you know Toucan hit 2 milestones last week! The first was the release of Toucan 2.0.4 one week ago (January 15), the tenth release of Toucan. Also on Saturday (January 17) Toucan hit 500,000 downloads.

Thanks to everyone for their support in making this happen!

Well I have just posted a patch to the wxWidgets Trac system, as far as I know the first time that PortableApps.com has submitted a patch to an upstream project, and long may it continue! If you are interested the patch is here and it implements the setting of directory timestamps on Windows. Nothing fancy, but hopefully a solid start for PortableApps.com helping other projects.