TWC: Tiddlyfox - it happened again

[Shankar Swamy]

Inadvertently I said "Update" for my Firefox and now it is refusing to install Tiddlyfox.  Normally, I have the auto update turned off to ward off against this (and do not use Firefox for anything else other than my local TiddlyWiki).  I think I accidentally checked off "auto update" at some point.

Do I need to rollback my Firefox now? Or, will there be an update available to Tiddlyfox anytime soon?

My version is: 57.0b2 (64-bit) (Developer Edition).

Thanks!

Cheers; 'best,

shankar

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Shankar

Read this post ... it may help understand what is happening & what to do about it ...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/tiddlywiki/best$20bet/tiddlywiki/4yyMPH-0hXg/SjIOy7aeAgAJ

Best wishes
Josiah

[Shankar Swamy]

Thank you, Josiah.  I had not seen that posting - and apparently did not search properly before posting.

Right now I rolled back to a older version.  I am alright - although for this moment!

I tried Tiddlydesktop.  Unfortunately its rendering of my TW is not identical to FF's and I find the latter's rendering better.  This more less though sounds like a "ticking time-bomb"!

Thanks!

Cheers; 'best,
shankar

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Shankar,

TiddlyDesktop has an old rendering engine. Many types of pages will begin to look messy until its updated with a newer engine. Recently the author, @Jermolene (Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki), said he will update it. When I don't know.

My "ESR post" is the last resort to squeeze life out of Firefox for a few more months. (BTW if you on TWC just use the last working TiddlyFox if you go with it, rather than what I list).

Google Groups are awful to search. I am NOT surprised you did not find it. Most of the time I can't find anything myself.

Best wishes & good luck
Josiah

[TonyM]

Shankar,

If you can install apps on your computer (no restrictions such as on a work PC) one rapid route to getting up and running is to go to prtableapps.com and include FireFox ESR which is maintained but fixed at Version 52.3.0 for a while.

This allows you to keep your current browser and its updates but allows you to keep using existing TW's and TiddlyFox (Although you can not run both at once), Unitl you resolve which long term method you use to access Tiddlywiki from a latest version TiddlyFox you will have a reliable access to your current tiddlywikis.

The TiddlyWIki Community are working on multiple alternatives to deal with this "unpleasant" browser change, I have no doubt an easy to use solution will be developed/documented.

Regards
Tony

[Shankar Swamy]

Thanks Tony.

Good to know that Tiddly community is working on a solution.  I have been using TWC for over a decade now and I have so many plugins and customizations built in that 1. my productivity will be heavily crippled without those, 2. a large number of my scripts/customizations won't port to the modern TiddlyWiki.

I had tried multiple other solutions before I switched to TiddlyWiki.  I even asked a question on slashdot for suggestions and finally, accidentally stumbled on TiddlyWiki.  Though not a web programmer or a JavaScript programmer, thanks to Eric Shulman and others on this forum, I became a JavaScript programmer over the years!

When I started with TiddlyWiki, I completely missed that it depended on some obscure loophole that apparently Firefox had and has covered up now!  Not sure if I would have opted for this if I had paid attention to that aspect.

I use portable Firefox on my USB drive where I keep all my TW files.  But it would be often nice to be able to access them via Desktop Firefox as well - just a matter of convenience.

The latest Portable App version of Firefox is 55.0.3 (64-bit) and TWC works fine with it.  It even supports most of ES6 (with Promises and other good stuff) for those heavily customizing their TWC.

But I feel reassured from your note that eventually the community will be able to bail me out of the potential catastrophe - thank you!

[TonyM]

Shankar,

I can assure you I depend on TWC right now. I have however bitten the bullet and started teaching myself TW5 because it is clear it is ultimately superior. With TW5 there are many solutions for hosting on your own computer and online, each is more refined every day.

Now that my knowledge is increasing I expect to move from TWC in the next 12 months or so but the learning curve (as it was in TWC) is a little high at the moment. The Community is clearly working to improve documentation, examples, features and slowly but surely the equivalent functionality to TWC is coming online.

I recommend you start dabbling with TW5 some of its editions and plugins to start to get familiar.

The following features interestingly mean when I do move to TW5 I will most likely split my big TWC into multiple TW5 wikis;

• You can import tiddlers from TWC
  
• All Tiddlers can be dragged and dropped between wikis
• Tiddlers can be exported as single tiddlers, groups of tiddlers (Bundles and JSON files)
  
• Custom imports and exports can be created
• Building plugins or sets of tiddlers are now accessible to less expert users
• The Interface is more configurable than ever
  
• Features under NodeJS will permit very large TW's with shared tiddlers (as I understand it)
  

An example may be, I will create Dedicated Project wikis, an independent contacts database and Knowledge base with multiple tabs in one browser window.

TiddlyWiki is unstoppable.

Tony

[Shankar Swamy]

Does the Macro <SCRIPT> (I think Eric Shulman wrote it) work the same way in TW5?  If you don't use that macro in TWC, the macro runs the code between the <SCRIPT> ... </SCRIPT> markup as JavaScript.

I have a Python system that emits JSON from a Sqlite repository.  The JSON file is read by a JavaScript in TWC and processed and displayed in a very useful manner.   This is one of the many critical functions that I use TWC for.

Thanks!

[BJ]

It is possible to run javascript inline, however, tw5 have a different structure to twc so it is unlikely that javascript running under twc would work on tw5. If you show the javascript I can tell you what options would be available to reproduce the same in tw5

all the best

BJ