Personal Log fully supports Balloon Help in every window and dialog.
Drag & Drop Support:
If you have Apple’s Drag & Drop technology available on your Macintosh, you may drag text from all text windows, although you only can drop text into editable entry windows. You also can import a text file from the Finder by dragging that text file’s icon from the Finder to the window of the entry or the Personal Log text file to which you wish to import it.
Apple Script Support:
Personal Log has limited support for Apple Script and other scripting sytems based on Apple Events. Please note that this version of Personal Log is not a “fully scriptable” program according to Apple’s standards. In fact, Personal Log’s current implementation of Apple Script support is considered improperly implemented because it does not use Apple’s recommended apple event suites but instead uses custom apple events. I, the programmer, just wanted to throw in some rudimentary scripting support. Apple’s recommended way of implementing scripting can be very complex even for simple tasks (and thus tough to program).
Note: Unless you have Apple Script installed in your computer, you can not utilize the scripting features of Personal Log. This, however, does not limit the utility of other features in Personal Log.
The WASTE Text Engine:
Personal Log v2.0 now utilizes the new WASTE Text Engine by Marco Piovanelli (piovanel@hp4.sm.dsi.unimi.it). This text engine replicates all the functionality of Text Edit , i.e., the Macintosh OS system text engine, with two notable enhancements. First, WASTE allows the editing of text that is larger than 32K characters. This is an imfamous limitation of Text Edit, and hence applications that depend on it, e.g., SimpleText. Second, WASTE allows the insertion of embedded objects into the text. Personal Log currently supports three kinds of embedded objects: pictures, sounds and file aliases.
Much credit for the WASTE Text Engine should also go to Dan Crevier (dan@rhino.harvard.edu) for developing the C language port of the WASTE Text Engine, which Personal Log uses.
Internet Config Support:
If you have Peter N. Lewis’s Internet Config package installed on your computer and it is properly set up, then you may open any URL simply by command-clicking anywhere in the text of the URL.
Future Plans:
I currently have several plans for version 2.1 of Personal Log. First and foremost, I plan to add Apple Guide support.
I also would like to add another feature, but have not received any “support” for the idea: fully implement Apple Events in the architecture of the program. This will have two impacts on Personal Log: first, Personal Log will be fully scriptable, and second, you may use third party spell-checkers in entry windows. If you would like to see such a feature, please let me know. It would be pretty complicated to do, and I do not want to waste my time if it is not wanted.
Localization and Non-US Systems:
Personal Log is a fully localizable program. If you are interested in making a localized copy and can help translate, please contact me.
Please note that Personal Log will have problems in the Search Setup & Entry Information dialogs when running on a two-byte script system, such as the Chinese or Japanese version of System 7. The problem is caused by the way the date picker parses a date string when the date string contains non-Roman characters. This problem can be fixed by setting the system’s date form to a fully Romanized form.
