On the Horizon

Version 1.3 of Horizon went live this past week, with 3 major new features and a bunch of bug fixes.

Of all the features, I think my favourite is the cell comments. Cell Comments solve a number of problems and satisfied one of the major user requests I’ve received for the program. Thanks to Matt Gemmell’s great MAAttachedWindow code, implementing the comment pop-up was pretty simple. I really like the look of the floating comments, I hope you do, too.

Right now, I’m working on bug fixes to 1.3, so you can expect a 1.3.1 in the next week or two. The big question is, what should version 1.4 contain? Here are some features that I’ve been considering, or are in the works:

• Charts - I’ve been working on the OpenGL charts for a while, but I still need to learn more about OpenGL before I’m happy releasing the code.
• Applescript Support - This shouldn’t be too hard to implement, and would let people automate their Horizon documents.
• .Mac Integration - I could incorporate .Mac support for backup and syncronization of documents. I’d be starting at ground zero with this, but it looks like Apple has a pretty decent toolkit.

So my question is: what priority should I assign to these features? Which features would be most useful for you? Which features do you think other people would find the most useful?

Please let me know your thoughts on this. Please reply in the comments, or send me an email. Thanks.

This morning sees the release of Horizon 1.3. If you’re already running Horizon, you should be notified by the Software Update feature, or you can use the ‘Check Now’ button in the Updates Panel of the Preferences window.

Horizon 1.3 contains 3 major new features. The first is a Week view. You can access this from the View Menu, or the keyboard shortcut Cmd + 2. The week view lets you see a lot more cells if you have a lot of categories.

The second feature gives you an alternative to multiple categories. You can now add comments to individual cells. So, you can do something like set up an ‘Entertainment’ category, and then tag cells with comments like ‘Dinner’ or ‘Video Rental’. The comments appear in a little translucent window when you hover over the cell, so they’re easy to find.

The third feature adds the same kind of comments to categories. You can add and read the comments using the ‘Get Info’ Window on the categories.

I’d love to hear your feedback on these new features. Please let me know what works for you and what doesn’t, and how you’d like to see things improved. These last three features are a direct result of user feedback, so please keep it coming.

Also, I’m looking for ways to actively promote Horizon. If you’re a blogger or a software reviewer, please contact me, and I’ll be happy to provide an NFR code.

Sanjay Samani has a great blog post here. Luckily, I can no longer remember my 1.0 version (was May really that long ago?) but I shared the same dreams. And I still think Horizon has a long and prosperous future ahead of it. I just have to convince the rest of the world.

I’ve been downloading and installing my developer version of Leopard since last night, and Horizon is behaving normally on the final build of Mac OS X 10.5. If anyone has any issues in Horizon that they believe are related to Leopard, please let me know as soon as possible.

The next version of Horizon is feature complete, but these are big features and they need serious testing. So, I’m looking for beta testers again. Please email me if you’re interested in testing Horizon 1.3. You can use the contact link at the bottom of the home page for this. Please let me know if you’re running 10.4 or 10.5, and if you’ve got a PowerPC or Intel-based Mac. I’d like to get as broad a mix as possible, so I won’t be turning anyone away. Thanks in advance if you’ll help with the testing.

Yeah, I can’t wait. Ever since the iPhone was first announced, and before Horizon 1.0 was launched, I thought that Horizon would be a killer app for the iPhone platform. It’s going to be about a year later than I’d hoped, but it will happen.

I’ve got all kinds of ideas for the touch UI, but I’ll have to wait to see the SDK before I know which ones are possible and which make the most sense. Expect some zooming, sliding, and pinching, and I hope some form of data entry ‘HUD’ overlaid on the calendar.

Wow, I don’t even know what I’m going to call it. Horizon Touch? Horizon-To-Go? Hopefully something better than either of those.

This is where I really need user input. I’m hoping for all kinds of ideas and suggestions from users for how I can make the iPhone/iPod Touch version of Horizon the best app on the platform. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please let me know. I’ve had some terrific suggestions from users for features for Horizon on the Mac, so I’m hoping for more of the same.

The current version of Horizon has some unexpected behaviour; if you have the welcome screen set to appear in your preferences, it will always appear. You really don’t want to see it when you double-click on a Horizon document, or you drag a document or number of documents onto the Horizon icon.

This turns out to be a bit tricky to fix, but the fix is amazingly simple. As the program loads it calls the delegate methods applicationWillFinishLoading, application: openFile, and applicationDidFinishLoading in that order. Since the Welcome Screen is displayed in the applicationDidFinishLoading method, all I had to do was set a flag in application: openFile. Or so I thought. See, that method is actually supposed to load the file, and I thought calling the super method would be good enough. Wrong.

I actually have to load the file with the documentController method openDocumentWithContentsOfURL:display:error:. Now it works. And it works with a file dragged onto the icon, and multiple files dragged onto the icon. Nice.

I did a bit of a re-think on the charting project, based on the similarities and differences of the pie and bar charts. I’ve scrapped the original repository, and set up a new one at http://lucernesys.com/hzcharts. It’s read-only, like the old one. HZCharts is a better description of the project, and I’ve re-factored the code to eliminate some duplication, but more work is probably needed.

For a quick hit download the source, compile and run the program. Drag the mouse around in the pie chart window to move the chart around. Then hold down ‘ctrl’ and drag to explode the pie. Now, go to the ‘View’ menu and select bar chart. You can move that chart with the mouse, too.

Any suggestions, criticisms, and especially code improvements are welcome. Leave a comment or email me.

I have a bad habit of neglecting to announce new releases in this blog. Horizon 1.2.7 came out last week, with customizable holidays, CSV export, and enhanced cell editing. (Also added, a small window to enter your name and license code. The esellerate engine should do this automatically, but it was failing for some people. Now, there’s a manual option.)

That was quickly followed by 1.2.8 yesterday. 1.2.8 fixed a particularly nasty bug that occurred if you added a new category with the Summary View open. The summary view would be messed up as a result.

And, I’m still working on the charts. With the pie chart mostly solved, I’ve moved on to the bar chart. How does this look?

I’m starting to get the feeling OpenGL is a bit of a black art. That beautiful chart sample I posted yesterday throws a “failed to initialize OpenGL” error on the MacBook and my old G4. The code ran fine on my development machine, of course.

So, back to the books. The repository contains a version that should degrade gracefully on machines that can’t push OpenGL as hard as my new iMac with the ATI graphics card. Please let me know the results, and the machine stats, including the Graphics sub-system.

I would really appreciate it if anyone could grab the latest version from SVN and run it on a really old machine with OS 10.4. There’s no reason that the graphics shouldn’t work if the machine is capable of running Tiger.

Please let me know the results, and the machine stats, including the graphics sub-system. Many thanks.

Initial response to the charts project has been positive, and a few people have checked out the code. A number of folks commented on the lack of anti-aliasing, so I dove back into the OpenGL books, and came up with this:

Much better, don’t you think?