Cactus 0.4.2f and Summary

[Karsten Wolf]

I just saw that I never announced Cactus 0.4.2f which was out since
the end of january.

It has preferences and can open iTunes XML files.

The work on Cactus seems to follow a pattern where I rush during
december, contemplate from spring on about what needs to be done and
then rush again at the end of the year.

Last year it was the cocoa NSDocument integration, next time it will
be an overhaul of the outline innards. Getting it to work on so many
file types left a certain hunger for more and Cactus being the memory
hog it is, crawls to a halt when opening 50+MB files.

I used it to look at FileMaker Database Reports (smaller ones, these
can be 100+MB), hundreds of websites, RSS and property lists. The
number one roadblock is memory. I observed Cactus using 25x the size
of the corresponding XML file. So there needs to be a way to cut that
down and most importantly, make Cactus release unused memory.

When files are small enough, the most missed features are search/
replace and copy/paste.

Next on the list is the still unsatisfying edit mode. It has gotten
better but still is far away from the fluency of MORE, Frontier and
OmniOutliner.

While doing NSDocument stuff I had the urge to create a native
document type for Cactus, one that encompasses all attributes it can
handle. That is still open since I didn't come up with an intriguing
idea how such a file should look like; so for the future
interchangeability for the existing types should grow. Currently you
should stay in the file type that was loaded.