(๐งต 6/7) #Macstodon, REALBasic, and Proxies
I've been planning - since last April - to start work on Macstodon 2.0. This is going to be a rewrite using REALBasic instead of MacPython, in the hopes of getting around many of MacPython's limitations - poor performance and memory leaks, primarily.
But I discovered pretty quickly that REALBasic has its own set of problems - lack of support for custom LDEFs being a big one, unless you use a plugin. Fortunately there is such a plugin - Einhugur Software's CustomGrid, which incorporates the features I want. It has a big problem though, it corrupts the menu bar and window title font when running on 68k machines...and other plugins that provide comparable features don't work on 68k at all.
I have a hard requirement that Macstodon needs to run with System 7.1 on a 68020 system. Sure, things would be a lot easier if I wrote something that was for PowerPC only, or required Mac OS 8 - but I'm stubborn like that!
Anyway, after about 8 months (seriously) of trying different things, I've managed to find a solution that doesn't corrupt the menu and window title when rendering a custom grid with REALBasic. So now I can actually proceed with the project... until the next roadblock, that is ๐
Meanwhile, there's another problem with Macstodon, which is that it doesn't work correctly with
Mastodon 4.3. Well...technically it's not Macstodon that's at fault here, the problem is that Mastodon 4.3 changed how the login page works, making it incompatible with vintage web browsers. So Macstodon can't do the initial login/authentication, unless you manually copy the authorization URL to a modern computer, log in there, and then copy the authorization code back into Macstodon. Yuck!
To resolve that problem, I've been looking into MacProxy Plus (https://github.com/hunterirving/macproxy_plus/) as a replacement for WebOne on the backend, via its' extension mechanism. In addition to SSL-stripping, this should let me "massage" the login form into a format that works with vintage web browsers. And not only that, but it'll also let me do things like transform the JSON that gets sent from the Mastodon API before it reaches the client, as some things are much easier to do with modern Python than in a vintage app.
I've already made a bunch of contributions to the MacProxy Plus codebase already over the last few weeks, including support for SVG rendering and a number of bug fixes.
So, between the MacProxy Plus work and the REALBasic work, things are finally starting to come together for Macstodon 2.0. I'm sorry it's taken so long - and it's going to continue to be in development for a while - I'm taking things slow so I don't burn out, but work is picking up.
Oh, and one more thing - I'm looking into Bluesky support for Macstodon 2.0 as well. No promises yet, but I'd like to do it ๐
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread | More toots from smallsco@oldbytes.space
=> View macstodon tag This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini