Hiatus

September 28th, 2023

Dear Pedia Users,

I hope this post finds you all well and thriving. As can easily be noticed, from the last post being from 2019 and presence from forum missing since also 2019, much has changed in my life in the last few years. My time for the Pedias has slowly become more and more limited, to the point where I don’t bene get around to emails but every other week. After much consideration, I have decided to take a hiatus from programming to prioritize family life and spend more quality time with my kids. Striking a balance in life can be challenging, and in introspection, family emerged as a domain calling for my omnipresent devotion for a little while.

During this hiatus, sales of the applications will be halted, it will always be available for all current owners. Ans please be assured that they will continue to be maintained with the limited time I have. Updates will be fewer and centered around maintaining the essential functionality, compatibility, and security, rather than expanding features.

Over the past twenty years, I’ve had the incredible fortune to be a part of the ever-supportive and vibrant Mac community. The journey has been rewarding and immensely satisfying. Interacting with you all, as we passionately worked on crafting the Pedias, has been the highlight of my career and allowed me the freedom to be where I am today. I deeply appreciate all the love, support, and constructive feedback I’ve received over the years and the financial support to make it all happen.

Although sales for Pedia applications are on hold, I still hold an untamed enthusiasm about future possibilities. I hear from older parents, there is a time when kids become teenagers and then you are free again devote more time to loved projects. The promise of future innovation is, after all, a cornerstone of what made me so attracted to programming in the first place. Therefore, when the time is right, I genuinely hope to come back to MacOS and iOS, whether to work on new renditions of the beloved Pedia projects or to introduce something new and exciting.

It’s a transition phase, mostly a ‘catch you on the others side’ than a ‘goodbye.’ Who knows, a few years down the line, we might be diving into another incredible project together! I do have ideas for the Pedias and new apps, just not the time I wish I had.

Until then, I wish each one of you success in your endeavors and happiness in all walks of life. Stay safe and keep being the amazing community you are. I’ll be looking forward to the time when we cross paths again in the future.

Warmest of regards,

Conor (TopDog)

Changing Colors

September 27th, 2019

For those customizing their details view it’s always been a request to be able to change the background color of the image well and the color of the banners that appear over the image to indicate a status, so that they match their main window style.

Matching the Pro Look Dark Style

It’s now possible! With a hidden preference for now. With the beta version of the programs you can use the program called Terminal (located in your Utilities folder) to change the colors. It’s a window were you can give your Mac written commands. Here are the commands you would copy paste with little tweak:

To change the background color of the image use:

defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia "Image Background Color" -string "{200, 200, 200}"

Restart the Pedia and the background of the image will be the above color. The above is a gray. What are those numbers you ask. The numbers are the amount of Red, Green and Blue from 0 to 255. Must color tools will give you those values for a specific color, including Apple’s own color tool in the RGB sliders. Also it’s Pedia specific, be sure to change cdpedia above to the Pedia name you want to modify.

For the banners it’s the same, but they have a gradient, so there are both a top and bottom color (also no restart needed, simply change items in the view).

defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Coming Soon Bottom Color" -string "{255, 126, 76}"
defaults write com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Coming Soon Top Color" -string "{255, 237, 76}"

More yellow pop for those around the corner releases.

The other two remaining banner keys are as follows for the four colors:

Banner Borrowed Top Color, Banner Borrowed Bottom Color, Banner Overdue Top Color, Banner Overdue Bottom Color

If it becomes very popular I can then expose these options in a preference in future version. The good news is you need only change them once and they will stick around forever.

If you ever want to go back to the default colors, here are the reset commands to copy paste into Terminal.

defaults delete com.bruji.cdpedia "Image Background Color"
defaults delete com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Coming Soon Bottom Color"
defaults delete com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Coming Soon Top Color"
defaults delete com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Overdue Bottom Color"
defaults delete com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Overdue Top Color"
defaults delete com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Borrowed Bottom Color"
defaults delete com.bruji.cdpedia "Banner Borrowed Top Color"

Pedias 6.0

June 20th, 2019

With the release of 6.0 the age of the big cats has come to an end. From now on Pedias will run on MacOS Sierra and beyond. I know we are way behind in catching up to Apple and dropping support for yesteryear’s OS, but we like to keep compatibility as long as possible. Yet the future doesn’t stop and we were spending half our time fighting Xcode to support the older MacOS.

Version 6.0 sports a whole new core, thoroughly tested for several months by our dedicated beta testers. Thank you so much to everybody that downloaded the beta and has been helping out. 6.0 is a faster and more robust program yet with the same interface you love. Changes in interface, Dark Mode and a few adjustments for Mojave users coming soon.

The really good news, 6.0 is a free upgrade to all 5.0 Pedia users. I want everybody who has access to new hardware and the latest MacOS to be able to enjoy the best that the Pedias have to offer in terms of stability and future updates. It does mean that updates on version 5.7 effectively cease today but will be available for download for all those with older MacOS versions.

Up next, resurrecting Spotlight for Mojave and Dark Mode. As usual if you run into any issues or have suggestions on the latest version don’t hesitate to write us an email with feedback.

Pocketpedia 3.6

January 18th, 2019

The new Pocketpedia 3.6 is out with a number of small fixes. The big change is, it looks better for the latest iPhones. On that note, there are still a few more updates to do for the latest iPhones resolutions, but those require to drop support for the old iOS. So this will be the last version supporting iOS 8. The next version will be iOS 11 and above only so that we can take advantage of the new APIs for supporting the notch and other new features.

The original iOS 1.0 release.

Since the next version will be 4.0, it was time to change the name from Pocketpedia3 to avoid confusion. We are owners of the original name belonging to the above icon attached to the original debut of the App Store. We finally gathered the courage to say goodbye to the original app and freed the name to use again. From now on Pocketpedia will simply be known as Pocketpedia no matter what version. Next step is to add PocketpediaTV into it and make it universal.

Pocketpedia 4.0 has been on parallel development and works well with Pedias 6.0 that are also coming soon. The Pedias 6.0 will be released first and then I will be able to put the final touches on 4.0 to release that version and get everybody on the future and drop support for older OSs that have been slowing us down these last few years. For those of you stuck on an older Mac, iPhone or iPad, the old version is still going strong and will stay around for download.

Pedia Versions 5.6.1

June 9th, 2018

This will be the final release of the Pedias that support MacOS 10.5 through to 10.11. If you have the latest MacOS feel free to jump on the now public beta of version 6.0 which we’ll release in a couple of months (fingers crossed!). Version 6.0 is 64-bit only and supports only the latest 10.12 and 10.13 MacOS systems. Depending on testing with 10.14, might actually only support 10.13, but that is yet to be determined.

Due to many regressions in 10.13, we highly recommended the beta to those on the latest MacOS. It will also let us widen the beta pool now that the release date for 6.0 gets closer.

The UI changes will be minimal and the update free so that we can properly drop support for the older MacOS. We do apologize for those running the older OS, but hopefully version 5.6.1 will serve you well for some years to come although we will not maintain it, expect for crucial fixes. On the flip side, we’ll be able to concentrate on the latest MacOS and develop features quicker and with less hassle. It currently takes Xcode 8 to build the previous version of the programs and we are on the cusp of the Xcode 10 release, so it is high time to drop support for 10.5.

I hope you enjoy this small bug fix update. Links to the beta versions for those interested:

Bookpedia Beta
CDpedia Beta
Gamepedia Beta
DVDpedia Beta

Pedias Updated for Amazon US.

May 9th, 2018

If you are having trouble with the Amazon US returning no results for searches please update to the beta version of the Pedias. This will have the nice side effect of increasing the beta testing pool as well as let me know how many users roughly are having issue with the search. The beta version is very stable and will soon become the 6.0 release of the next version. There is one small caveat, it’s 10.12+ only. So you need MacOS Sierra or High Sierra installed on your computer for the version to run. Here are the links to each pedia beta version:

Please feel free to rename the beta and use it as your regular version. It will update more often as I close in on the release of 6.0 and then will update to 6.0 automatically a few days before the release. If you run into  bugs, do send me an email so I can get those fixed

Also working on adding a few enhancements to the fix and will port it back to the old version and release one last official update of the old version to leave it with all the updated search plugins for users who do not have Sierra or High Sierra.

Free Developer Christmas Gifts

December 22nd, 2017

Yes, the footer displaying the current mouse-over link in the beta is back.

Brent Simmons, a developer I have never met, has sent me a christmas gift. As those of you in the beta know, the web view that displays the details for an item is all brand new in the latest version and based on WKWebView. One of the features that got lost in the beta was the mouse-over link being shown in the footer bar.

The method for showing this information is there in WKWebView but is marked with the dreaded underscore prefix, which means it’s for Apple use only. I left it as a todo a few weeks back, I figured that with some JavaScript I could get a call back when mouse entered a link, but did not want to switch from programming in Objective-C to JavaScript at that exact moment.

Luckily for me Brent ran into the same issue and his project being open source and MIT license meant it saved me a lot time. I was able to piggy back off his code, without having to write any JavaScript, simply using his.

For those looking for an Objective-C version here is mine. I have templates being loaded from many places including user generated ones. So instead of embedding the JavaScript in the file, I inject it with the same WKWebView userContentController that handles the call back.

First the Javascript, pretty much the same as Brent’s.

/* From Brent Simmons https://github.com/brentsimmons/Evergreen/blob/master/Evergreen/MainWindow/Detail/ArticleRenderer.swift */

function startup() {
    var anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
    for (var i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
        anchors[i].addEventListener("mouseenter", function() { mouseDidEnterLink(this) });
        anchors[i].addEventListener("mouseleave", function() { mouseDidExitLink(this) });
    }
}
function mouseDidEnterLink(anchor) {
    window.webkit.messageHandlers.mouseDidEnter.postMessage(anchor.href);
}
function mouseDidExitLink(anchor) {
    window.webkit.messageHandlers.mouseDidExit.postMessage(anchor.href);
}

/* Gets loaded by the WKWebView addScript: */
startup();

Then the code to receive the call back in Objective-C when the mouse enters and exist any link.

#define MOUSE_DID_ENTER @"mouseDidEnter"
#define MOUSE_DID_EXIT @"mouseDidExit"

- (void)MyInit {
    [self.configuration.userContentController addScriptMessageHandler:self name:MOUSE_DID_ENTER];
    [self.configuration.userContentController addScriptMessageHandler:self name:MOUSE_DID_EXIT];

    NSString *webViewFiles = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"InfoTemplates" ofType:nil] retain];
    NSString *pathToJavaScript = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/includes/bruji.js", webViewFiles];
    NSString *javaScript = [[NSString alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:pathToJavaScript encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:NULL];
    WKUserScript *script = [[WKUserScript alloc] initWithSource:javaScript injectionTime:WKUserScriptInjectionTimeAtDocumentEnd forMainFrameOnly:YES];
    [self.configuration.userContentController addUserScript:script];
}

#pragma mark - WKScriptMessageHandler
- (void)userContentController:(WKUserContentController *)userContentController didReceiveScriptMessage:(WKScriptMessage *)message {
    if ([message.name isEqualToString:MOUSE_DID_ENTER]) {
        NSString *link = message.body;
        if ([link isKindOfClass:[NSString class]]) {
            [self setFooterLink:link];
        }
    }
    else if ([message.name isEqualToString:MOUSE_DID_EXIT]) {
        [controller setNumberOfSelectedInFooter];
    }
}

Now included in the latest beta for those that mourned the lost functionality.

On a related note, I can’t wait for further improvements on Brent’s latest newsreader project: Evergreen. I’ve been using version 3.1 of NetNewsWire for ages now, as the new versions were never as great as the original. Sadly feeds are starting to go dead, I think due to some type of HTTPS compatibility.

With this christmas gift we are getting closer to that inevitable 6.0 release. But first it’s time to take a little break. Happy holidays everyone!

Happy Pedia Giving: Beta for Sierra and High Sierra

November 23rd, 2017

The first beta (5.9) for what will then be version 6.0 is here. We will be rolling out changes slowly throughout the beta to better isolate where bugs still need fixing. The most important thing to know about this beta is that it only supports Sierra 10.12 and High Sierra 10.13 MacOS. If you have an older MacOS, the old version 5.7 will still be available for download, but will only get security fixes if necessary.

This first beta is mainly about changes for the details view, including fixes for those experincing issues with the links in High Sierra turning the program unresponsive.

 




Even if you are already running a beta, you must manually download one of the betas above, being the beginning of a 10.12 version only. Please jump on board the beta train if you wish to help out getting the next version ready. The beta programs will self update as we go along. If you run into any issues don’t hesitate to send me an email, so that we can roll the fixes into the next beta.

For those of you in America, Happy Thanksgiving! Let some beta tryouts be the best way to digest that turkey.

MacOS High Sierra

November 1st, 2017

Sierra

All the Pedias have been updated to version 5.6. Although we had rolled most of the MacOS High Sierra changes into 5.5.2, there are a few tiny fixes that trickled in as more users moved to High Sierra. There are still a few rough edges, for example in the web view when browsing links, that will be fixed in a future version. Which brings us to the announcement that this version or one close to it will be the last version to support MacOS 10.5 (Leopard).

The era of the big cats is dead and with it soon support for those older systems in the future Pedias. We have been working on a parallel version that will only support 10.12+ and above. This is why some of the rough edges exist in High Sierra with 5.6, as we need to drop older system support to modernize the web view and bring all the new enhancements to the new version.

In short if you are on an older MacOS, be sure to grab this version to stay with the latest version that will run on your system. Soon the open beta will move to the 10.12 only version and that will be announced here, for those that want to test the new version early.

As usual the self update should take care of updating for you, either our own or the Mac App Store. Otherwise click the links below and replace your current version:

Bookpedia
CDpedia
DVDpedia
Gamepedia

Pocketpedia 3.4.4: The Move Edition

January 24th, 2017

Version 3.4.4 brings the ability to select covers while editing from your own media library. So that you can select those images that you took a quick snap of while at the shop. Also has the ability with tap and hold to use copy paste, if you are bringing in an image from a website without having to save it into your own media library.

Pocketpedia Swipe Gesture

A common feedback is that the move button is buried in the footer of the edit screen. Which means tapping edit, scrolling down and then using the move button, when doing several items this quickly becomes tedious. The move is now available directly from the swipe options, instead of just delete. Also the ability to mark something as played, seen or read. Should an entry currently be borrowed the read button will become return, giving another quick access to a common action.