See Formatted Text Control Has a New Home and is Open Sourced | BKeeney Briefs
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Does anybody know the current status of FTC? I followed the link in @bkeeney 's article but there is no link to the plugin or source. I’d even be interested in purchasing it still. However, I can’t find any way to get it. Is there any comparable plugin that’s still available? I just need text highlighting. Thank you!
The group that purchased it from Bob basically owns it, all rights etc
You’d have to contact them about availability of sources
Sorry I cant be of more help
Thank you, @npalardy. I’ll reach out to them.
any feedback would be much appreciated !
I sent an email to the contact address on the linked site and Brian Gaines responded. He sent me the last release of FTC along with a bit of history on the control and how he uses it in his products. He was very helpful!
Did he say when it would be posted publicly? I may have a usage in mind, but not for several months, and I can’t believe he wants people to keep emailing him individually about it! I would rather not bother him like that!
-Karen
Hi Karen,
I’ve just emailed him to ask if he would be OK if I copy it to Github. He did say that Github would be a good place to coordinate work on the control. So I believe you will be able to get it from a place like that in the near future.
It has been re-licensed as MIT open source, however, I’m aware that this is something that he paid for. So, it’s a bit of an awkward situation, and I thought I should ask permission before I just quickly upload it publicly. I’ve never bought sole rights to a control like this before, but it seems like it would be expensive.
I’ll update here when I hear back.
is it API1 or 2 ?
I’d guess API 1 as moving it to API 2 had no real benefit for a HUGE pile of work
Brian gave his blessing to put it on Github and is looking forward to that being a place where people can submit fixes, enhancements, etc. to keep FTC alive and thriving!
You can find it here: GitHub - atomiccity/FormattedTextControl: The Formatted Text Control for Xojo. The repo currently is exactly what he gave me to download.
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I haven’t seen any API 2, but there could be some code I missed when I was looking through it.
as it is API1, do you think we should tell xojo forum of this fantastic news ?
Nope. If you see someone in need, privately message them, but it’s against their rules to post about inn on their forum. We’re not here to cause trouble.
Seems the latest Xojo might have borked the FTC …
@bkeeney Any ideas?
P.S. It still boggles the mind that Xojo did not integrate ActiveRecord and the FTC into Xojo … classical “Not Invented Here” syndrome …
I doubt they would have gotten them for free to include
Oh I know how to fix that one but … myeh
Someone has been dicking around with the compiler and instead of it realizing that in a structure that is an INTEGER it probably has to be made explicit
Not fun as that conversion could be automatic and apparently used to be
I haven’t touched FTC in over five years and don’t have the latest Xojo to dink with and don’t have much desire to mess with it. Honestly, the person to talk to is Martin Trippensee. He’s used it a lot and has some additional helper modules for it too. He’s also one of the MVP’s so he could be a good source to get things fixed on the Xojo side.
I’m glad FTC is still around and Brian was gracious enough to open source it. Making it API 2 compatible probably means forking the branch and doing too much busy work.
Looking at the repo it looks like someone has already done the work and put up a PR for it. 2 years ago. So it’s not actively managed.
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OpenSource works only if somebody maintains at least the repository and manages PR’s and so on. If this is gone: rest in peace repository. That’s often so. We worked with deloitte on a project which was open source and after the sponsoring was ended nobody took care of the project anymore. So many projects are ending up. Starting with a good reason and ending cause there is nobody anymore. This does not work without the people working by self on a project. And if there is no structure of working people which are taking care a single person could have problems to do the stuff alone.
And the other side: if the person left Xojo development there is also nop interest anymore to provider this work. Sad, no question, especially for the one which wrote the pr.