Released a new version of Retrospect-GDS earlier today. What’s new you ask?

• Polish language translation by Michal Rudolf
  The addition of the Polish language translation required me to rewrite parts of the language handling functions because they weren’t working well with the UTF-8 or 8859-2 character sets needed for Polish. I also uncovered a problem with gettext when its compiled against certain versions of libiconv. This has caused me some headaches on my development box. Oh yeah, and PHP’s built in htmlentities function doesn’t like some of the 8859-2 or UTF-8 character codes, so I had to stop using it. This means that some pages may not validate as strict XHTML 1.0, but there is no easy workaround for this.
• More CSS cleanup
  
The CSS has been simplified a little bit more. This is an area that is undergoing constant tweaking as I get time.
• Added error handling for unwritable directories
  
There are several directories that need to be writable for Retrospect-GDS to work correctly. Two of them are critical, so if they are not writable you will get a blank page when trying to run the program. I’ve added some code to make sure these directories are writable. If they aren’t, then Retrospect-GDS will die with an error message instead of just choking and giving no output.

The last of the Kauai photos has been added to the Kauai photo gallery tonight. I also burned a CD with all the photos for our Kauai decompression party tomorrow night. While I was at it I created a cool slideshow in iPhoto with a cool Iz song playing in the background. iPhoto lets you export to iDVD, so I tried that out and now I have a DVD which I can take to the party. No need to bring the Powerbook. Slick.

I upgraded my Powerbook to Tiger last night. I did the upgrade option rather than archive and install as most people recommend because I didn’t want to hassle with re-configuring everything. The whole process took less than 30 minutes and all of my applications seem to be working perfectly. The only issue I’ve seen so far is that my hosts file was overwritten during the upgrade.

Backpack is the new application from the very talented people at 37signals. Backpack launched today, and I’ve spent some time creating a couple of shared pages to test it out. Based on my 1st days playing, here are my initial impressions and suggestions for improvement:

• I would like to be able to use the lists as outlines, so that I can group things logically. 3 levels would be sufficient for me. Lacking that, allow me to create multiple lists.
• Show people how to create links on the formatting help page. Not being familiar with textile or markdown (or whatever it is), I had to spend a few minutes trying to find this. I finally found how to do it by editing one of the notes on the examples page.
• Load a user css file after the main file(s) so that the users can override the default styles. But, maybe this would cause to many support issues…
• I like the use of ajax for the in place editing.
• The edit / delete links that show up when rolling over the titles are a little annoying. I think its because they dont always seem to show up as quickly as they should. Sometimes they aren’t showing up at all and I have to re-roll over the titles.

Retrospect-GDS now has experimental support for external photo gallery software. Coppermine is the first photo gallery software supported. Some quick and dirty instructions on how to use the new plugin are available the Infused Solutions forums.