Radio UserLand Notes

Where's Steve?

We are prepping for a Radio release in September, so I've been a bit busy. In the last month I've learned:

• How much I don't know about HTML/XHTML. Ouch.
• How much I love Radio's outliner. I've been writing the new themes in the outliner, saving them in a table in the object database. When I save the theme and ask Radio to apply it, it politely renders the outline as neatly indented text files. God bless the people who wrote the outline rendering system.
• If you write UserTalk and you don't know how to use the debugger, than you don't really know how to write code. It's easy to find out where you made a mistake when you can easily follow the code's progress. Amazing.
• That the people who created Radio wrote some ingenious code. Did you know that the preference system is just a rendered outline? Seriously! One outline handles the core text and Radio inserts checkboxes, textboxes and editors based on macros in the outline. It's part of Radio's localization infrastructure, allowing UserLand to write versions of Radio in many different languages by changing a few outlines.
• A nice person named David Brown wrote a Python IDE for Radio two years ago. Two years ago. Like Python? Want to keep your scripts in a database and write them in an outliner? Use Radio and David's tool. I sends your code to your local copy of Python and returns the result to Radio.
• Patrick Ritchie has got a magic touch when it comes to UserTalk. I can't tell you what he's done yet, but man, it's impressive.
• There are plenty of motivated Radio users. Brian Ross with MLN Sports Zone is using Radio to become an information network powerhouse for minor league sports.

I've been reading normal news and not just soaking in Radio stuff, but with a September 1st deadline approaching, my nose is on the grindstone. Next week, look for beta software available.