(To see the screencast, visit this link and download 20080601_osmarender_frontend_screencast.zip file – 14 Mb)

Despite my weekly report’s title, this week I’ve obtained the first successful step of my project!

New features

These are the new features:

• I’ve seen that my application is now compatible with Firefox 3 RC1 for Windows (worked in beta 4 but didn’t in beta 5)
  
• Don’t really know what’s happened (perhaps some issues with my previous Kubuntu installation? perhaps some Firefox 3 module kept when downgrading in my 8.04?), but I’ve seen that the application seems to be compatible even with Firefox 2.0.0.14 for Linux
• Can load a predefined rule file or a custom rule file, giving its name in an input box
• Thanks to this CSS Parser, with some modifications, the application will parse the CSS section of the rule file
• A combo box will appear in the application, and selecting a CSS class, you can modify any preset
• I’ve written a little function for CSS Writing, so the application will automatically store in memory any new value
• I’ve found a little trick for saving to disk the edited XML file, and successfully reloading it.

Screencast

So what about the title? As I’ve done during application phase, I’ve produced a little screencast to show those features. In the screencast you’ll see the real meaning of this weekly report’s title

So, if you have time (it’s 10 minutes long, but I’ve spent 3-4 hours to produce it, so give me some satisfaction ), you can download and view this SWF screencast! (download the 20080601_osmarender_frontend_screencast.zip file, about 14 Mb) After downloading, unzip it in a directory of your choice and point your browser at 20080601_Osmarender_frontend_screencast.html, playing it in full screen mode (F11).

Next steps

During next week I hope to achieve the following tasks:

• Refactoring of all my code (now it’s a mess)
• Begin using JSDoc for documentation
• Create new CSS properties/classes or delete them
• If time helps, I would like to enrich the internal CSS data model to let the frontend know how to edit single properties with a proper widget. To do this I’ll try to encapsulate some existing JS libraries in the future.