It was one year ago today that we brought the Tenseg website online and with that gave birth to Tenseg as it is known today. That first day all the website consisted of was your average raw WordPress installation. The appearance of this site today was not yet conceived for use here. However, it was pure hours that the site showed off its powerful WordPress core before we put a theme that Eric had recently designed for another site to use. After a couple of days we finally decided upon the theme that you see in use today.

The original push that led us to forming Tenseg was, as is well documented earlier on this Tenseg News page, my senior project at Avalon High School. We needed to have a company with which we could register for the iPhone Developer’s Program. Yes, individuals can register, but since both Eric and I wanted to have access to the vast resources Apple provides with the program, we needed to form a company. On top of the work for my senior project, we’d house all our existing and future software development projects under this company. Hence the basic working plan for Tenseg was born.

But we needed one final important thing before we could register it as a formal sole proprietorship company, a name for this company. Here’s what I remember of the path that led us to Tenseg as the final name. Over the past couple of years my dad had tentatively been using the name Appropriate Technology as a baseline. He’d started using it in product identifiers, created a logo, and also built a stub for a website. As you will notice the logo he designed is now Tenseg’s logo, and WebPDF is now a Tenseg software product for Mac OS X. I don’t quite remember what snag we hit when we tried to just use the name Appropriate Technology (it may have been that in Minnesota that name was already being used, or that the domain was unavailable), but we had to come up with another name. So how did we fall on Tenseg? Tenseg is short for Tensegrity, a term meaning tension with integrity. It is from this definition that we brought out the tagline “Software with Integrity” for Tenseg. My mom had already started using Tensegrity in her blog, Tensegrities. So we decided Tenseg was a good, and available, name for this company.

Once we had set up the website we needed some starting content beyond the “Tenseg is Born” post. We needed some actual software to publish here. So what we did was move a bunch of software that had been hosted on other sites of ours to Tenseg. I, personally, was maintaining most of the software that are now Tenseg software products. I’d linked a simple downloads page from my own Apple Home Page (this page now just links to the Tenseg website). As you can tell from the link above, Eric had been maintaining (and clearly still does maintain…) WebPDF at the old Appropriate Technology website. So between those two sources we immediately could publish software through Tenseg.

In this first year of life Tenseg has fully taken over the development projects we brought to it a year ago, and has started projects purely of its own (SubCalc and the two Useful but Random Scripts and Such). Further development on the existing software projects, and some new software products, are in the works, so there is definitely still improvements to come! This first year has been great, so lets see what this next one, and the ones to come beyond October 2011, bring us. Happy 1st Birthday Tenseg!

It has been a little less than a year since we last updated this widget just to come in line with the Tenseg company identifier scheme. Back in 2007 was the last functional update to the Blackjack widget. Today we’re releasing version 1.5, a minor update that packs in two significant changes and also includes two fairly insignificant changes. Let me start with the insignificant changes:

Now on to the fairly significant changes:

Head on over to the Blackjack Product Page to grab this update for yourself and enjoy the update goodness.

It has been almost a year since this widget got any update love, and a little more than 3 years since any important update was released. This v1.5 update is a fairly minor update, we’ve only really done two things. The first thing we’ve done is complete the transition to it being a Tenseg product. You will notice that instead of saying “Development by Alex Celeste” the widget now simply states “Copyright 2010 Tenseg”. Almost a year ago we made the underlying changes over to Tenseg terminology and web services, but now we have made the change visible in the end user interface. Along with this change we’ve taken away the Dashcode stamp to make the user interface a bit more consistent and to be rid of the visible attribution to Apple for the software used to create the widget. It’s more professional to leave out those kinds of credits, so we’ve removed it. The second change is the most important, and the reason this update is being sent out so soon without waiting for additional changes. We’ve fully implemented update notifications in soeMatrix (and to come to the Blackjack widget in the next update it receives)! You get the option for the widget to check for updates automatically on load, and then there is a button to check manually at other times. When an update is available (independent of if the check was kicked off automatically or manually) the button to check will be replaced with a button to download the update. To increase the update’s visibility, there will also be a button to download the update on the front of the widget, too. When one of the buttons to download the update is clicked the widget will take you to your default web browser where the download will begin. To install the update just double-click the widget file once downloaded (Safari will open it automatically). The updater isn’t as perfect as the one we use for our Mac applications, but it’s been functioning in our limited testing, so we believe that it’s ready for public usage. To grab this final update you need to get manually head on over to the soeMatrix Product Page.

Tenseg was born out of the beginning of my senior project at Avalon. Earlier today I presented my senior presentation at 2:30 pm and then finalized the senior project with my entire senior committee at 3:50 pm. I’ve put together a small page on the presentation that currently just contains the Senior Project Bio and the presentation slides but later on may include a video recording of the presentation. Later I had a meeting with my community experts from Project-Based Learning Systems to discuss the future of PF Touch. None of those details are final or public, but I can say that the future is looking quite bright for the central idea behind PF Touch. I hope you enjoy seeing my senior project presentation. In a way today can be considered the first birthday of Tenseg, even though its real first birthday is still a few months away.

This update comes not a month after the major version 1.3 update. That is no surprise, there were a few bugs that I didn’t catch until a day after the release and a few lose ends that I needed more time to complete. This update fixes a few bugs related to first-ever launch situations and main window images. In addition I got the feedback window to memorize its location and added a Release Notes menu item to the Help menu. The primary lose end that has been tied up is the ability for the automatic updater to send an anonymous system profile along with update checks. I’ve made this data public for all to see if desired. You can take a look at the Fact Triangles Release Notes for a complete list of changes since version 1.3. Fact Triangles v1.3.1 is available both from the Fact Triangles Product Page and by selecting “Check for Updates…” in the Fact Triangles menu.

Since releasing the Fact Triangles v1.3 update I’ve been hard at work on some major improvements to utilizing extra features of the updater Fact Triangles uses as well as other bug fixes. The main improvement has to do with users being able to submit anonymous system profile information to us while checking for updates. One of the evenings I was talking with Eric about these he gave me the idea to write a script that ran at boot to email off a full system profile. As some may know, like me, from experience, the times you truly need a system profile are when your Mac is inaccessible. So a few days ago I wrote precisely that script, and have now made it available to anyone here. After setup you can easily forget that this script is in place until you find yourself in need of the system profile it outputs, at which time you can know you have a system profile stored safely and accessible to you.

It has been a few months since Fact Triangles was last updated back in October purely to change its identifier to the scheme we use here at Tenseg. Before that the v1.1 release last May was the last significant update, and that was before Fact Triangles was under the umbrella of Tenseg. This v1.3 release has a long list of changes, some involve completing the migration to Tenseg mentions in the interface, some are the merging of menu items, some include really using user defaults, and yet others are the fixing of long-standing bugs. You can take a look at the Fact Triangles Release Notes for a complete list of changes. Aside from the visible changes the v1.3 update represents a complete refactoring of the source code. Since the initial release of Fact Triangles back in 2007 it was an old project that was originally built in 10.1 or 10.2. In the process of fixing some long-standing bugs (I couldn’t even use the Xcode debugger properly with the old project) I created a brand new project and copy-and-pasted the code into the new project. Thus leaving in the dust Eric’s old single-class application in favor of a proper application delegate and window controllers. The MVC model still isn’t fully there, but in a year or so I plan on building an iPhone version of Fact Triangles (likely to be named FT Touch) so once that is on the App Store I’ll bring the models used in it back to the Mac version for a v2.0 major update. A side effect of this new project is that the application requires Mac OS X 10.5 since my Mac has no 10.4 SDK installed, but it’s still a Universal binary, so I haven’t dropped PowerPC support altogether yet. Fact Triangles v1.3 is available both from the Fact Triangles Product Page and by selecting “Check for Updates…” in the Fact Triangles menu.

I noticed a minor flaw in the coin-flipping code of SubCalc today. In the process of cleaning this up I created a page that explains coin flips in SubCalc. What we do is actually more akin to drawing straws than flipping a coin, but since coins have traditionally been used for this sort of things in caucuses and conventions around Minnesota, that’s the terminology you will find in SubCalc. The update with the minor bug fix (v.1.0.1 of SubCalc) will go to the App Store today, we hope it gets published quickly, though most users won’t even notice there is anything wrong with v.1.0 anyway.

Apple took only three days to review the app Alex and I submitted on 1/25. Today SubCalc became a free app on the App Store.

SubCalc is an app to help convenors of precinct caucuses and conventions in Minnesota. The Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party uses a wonderful, but bit arcane, “walking subcaucus” process that is simple enough to do, but rather difficult to tabulate.

This app calculates the number of delegates each subcaucus gets when you enter the total number of delegates your precinct or convention is allowed and how many people are in each subcaucus. The rules it follows appeared on page 4 of the DFL 2010-2011 Official Call, including the proper treatment of remainders. It makes the math involved in a walking subcaucus disappear.

The app could be used to facilitate a “walking subcaucus” or “proportional representation” system for any group.

If you don’t have an iPhone, try the “web app” version of this subcaucus calculator for at http://www.sd64dfl.org/sub/. But if you do have an iPhone or iPod Touch (or iPad!) please give SubCalc a spin!

One of the key new features in the latest release of Xcode (v. 3.2.1) is the built-in Clang Static Analyzer. For those that don’t know, the Clang Static Analyzer has been around for some time as an extra tool developers can install. The extra layer it provides on top of the normal errors and warnings of Xcode is that it will look at your code, without executing it, and go down every possible path to find memory leaks or any other kind of logic error that may be in your code and easily missed when reading the code as a human. In my personal opinion every developer should regularly use the Clang Static Analyzer, which is why it was so nice when Apple included it as part of Xcode a little while back (I’d used the standalone version of the analyzer once). Only today did I finally get the built-in analyzer to properly function.

It took me so long to figure it out that I thought I should explain it here: With the default settings the “Build and Analyze” menu item in the “Build” menu won’t work (I kept trying this for weeks with no results). Nor will setting the active compiler in project settings to Clang LLVM 1.0 and using the menu item. Instead you can keep the compiler at the default GCC 4.2 and just check the Run Static Analyzer checkbox in project settings. Now each time you build your code (no need to build and go) it will be analyzed and the output embedded in the source code windows the same way that the errors and warnings are.