the finger-keyboard synapse - February 2005 Archives

February 2005

BlowSearch Messenger just plain blows, part 2 (19:14) - I got a comment today on my BlowSearch messenger review from Joe, who wrote on behalf of Blowsearch. Since I doubt anyone is following comments on entries that old, here it is: Thanks for your comments and we'll take them into consideration as we upgrade BSM. BTW, there is a complete description of the encryption mechanism used in BSM available on the site. There's nothing shady about it. It's proprietary and patent pending. Did you think we would open it... | 9 Comments

Yes, Dorothy, there is a Javascript Blowfish implementation (20:07) - When trying to come up with something interactive for the new web site to demonstrate encryption, I thought to myself, "Self, what if we could let people encrypt text and see what encrypted text looks like, right on the web site?" Brilliant! Initially, I was planning just to do some lame transformation that wasn't really encryption but would give the same appearance. Then for fun, I thought I'd search and see if anyone had actually implemented Blowfish in Javascript. Imagine...

"Cross-platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets" coming to a store near you (22:15) - The manuscript for the wxWidgets book is due March 1st, and we (OK, Julian mostly) are calmly scrambling to get everything in order. New material is still being added in small doses, and we're getting some great feedback from the other wxWidgets developers who volunteered their time to read through it. Some other new information for you: The book is being published in the Bruce Perens' Open Source Series, which has its own web site: http://www.phptr.com/perens The official title is... | 1 Comments

Three years and 1 day ago, there was no BitWise (14:01) - It was three years ago today that Jon McKenzie and I first conceived of creating a new instant messaging system, although the name BitWise wasn't created until a few weeks later. During its first weeks, BitWise was simply called Chat Client and Chat Server. True confessions: Jon actually worked most of the next day, unbeknownst to me, coding the proof-of-concept server in Perl. I had no idea how eager Jon was to start, but it was his initial enthusiasm that... | 2 Comments

Image opacity is the joy of my life (18:13) - I've learned more about image opacity in browsers than I thought there even was to learn. Turns out that Internet Explorer has it's own alpha filter style tags for opacity, Mozilla invented a MozOpacity style before CSS added an official opacity style in CSS 3, and Safari, in version As much as I hate to do it, Opera users are just going to miss out on a snazzy interactive feature of the new web site. The effects are way too... | 2 Comments

Why does Mac OS X include IE? (20:09) - Today was a day of battling browsers. Victory was sweet with all but IE 5.2 for Mac OS X, which I hope has been banished from OS X 10.4. The latest version was released in 2001, and it shows. A couple of places on the new site make clever use of iFrames (which probably could be "better" done in CSS, but that's a discussion for elsewhere). In particular, two places resize the iFrame based on the content, which was relatively...

Inverted sliders will make me famous yet, darn it! (22:59) - On January 24th, I posted about the slider widget and the concept of inversion; rather than the slider having the maximum value at the bottom, having the maximum value be at the top. The short recap is that someone submitted a patch for wxWidgets to add inversion, the patch pretty much sucked, and because I needed inversion for BitWise on OS X, I went ahead and worked on the inversion. On Thursday, I finally added inversion for the Windows version,... | 1 Comments

Always do the eas[y][ier] parts first (22:32) - I've received lots of positive vibes about the change to the web site, along with offers to help. They are all much appreciated, and we'll definitely need all the feedback and testing we can get once we're ready for it! I suppose a little information about the layout couldn't hurt. :) As indicated previously, it's going to be simpler. The double-layer menu from the current site will be no more. The site's areas will reflect the main reasons to come...

Web developers are the losers in the browser wars (12:00) - We announced last week that a new BitWise web site was underway, and so far we're extremely pleased with its potential. There is still a lot of work to do, but one thing slowing us down is browser compatibility. The new site is going to be a bit more dynamic (nothing revolutionary, don't get too excited), and dynamic content is always a risky proposition. Consider our browser compatibility list (each item represents a distinct testing entity): MSIE 5 on Windows... | 7 Comments

BlowSearch Messenger just plain blows (13:39) - "Know thy competition;" yesterday, a BitWise user brought to my attention a new IM program called BlowSearch Messenger (BSM). (BSM is a terrible acronym, IMHO, given its similarity to the acronym BDSM.) Keep in mind that their big focus is encryption/privacy. Even though it connects to the big 4, you still have to register separately with BSM. Not only that, they require all sorts of information, like your full name, city & zip, email address, your birthday, etc. While you... | 2 Comments

Kind of changing the name, kind of not (09:11) - About two and a half weeks ago, I announced in the forums that we were re-evaluating a lot of things, all the way down to BitWise's name. We received a lot of good, interesting and creative name suggestions. In the end, however, we've decided to basically stick with what we have, with tweaks. BitWise is currently presented as two divergent products, Free BitWise (commonly called BitWise Chat) and Professional BitWise (commonly called BitWise Pro Groups, or BitWise Communications), with two... | 1 Comments