I-Spy Problems and Pending Features

I-Spy is currently minimally functional. I caught and fixed the bugs which were obvious in my environment, but I am sure there are a few more lurking about. That's why this is a beta release. There are some problems which are caused by the applications that I-Spy taps, and some which are caused by the nature of AppleScript itself. I also plan some improvements to current features.

Known Problems

• Due to invoked applications:

  MacPerl 4.1.8

  1. Does not always handle the DoScript() call
  2. Requires a tonne of memory to process large text files (e.g., more than 3MB of RAM for a 500KB file)

  MacPerl 5.x

  1. Chokes when sorting large pre-sorted files
  2. Requires a tonne of memory to process large text files (e.g., more than 3MB of RAM for a 500KB file)

  Netscape 1.1N delegating to Anarchie 1.6

  1. When Anarchie is set as the FTP proxy, Netscape fails to correctly dispatch FTP URLs of files that do not have a suffix (anything following a period).

• Due to AppleScript:

  Progress Bar 1.0.1

  1. I-Spy correctly tries to use and abandons the Progress Bar application if it does not respond during repeated runs. However, I-Spy will ask the user to locate Progress Bar the first time it is run on a new machine or any time it realises that its Progress Bar alias is stale. Due to a shortcoming in AppleScript, I must reference most applications by name in order to tap their custom handlers. This in turn requires that users locate applications thus referenced. A cheat around this is to select any application, and I-Spy will proceed to ignore it once the bogus application fails to handle Progress Bar's events.

Pending Features

• Directory listing and processing:
  1. Better detection of new directories
  2. Directory tunneling