Socialcalc

Previously Tony mentioned we’d release in “the next few weeks” under a new license. Writing a new license is hard work and the lawyers are still working on it. We’ve implemented a plan in the mean time to keep the project moving forward. For now, the application will be licensed using the same license as the main Socialtext wiki: the Socialtext Public License 2.0 (STPL 2.0). No-one is entirely happy with this, but it’s better than waiting for the CPAL process to complete first.

Although the application as a whole is under the STPL 2.0, we have, however, split the core spreadsheet functionality out and are making it available under version 2.0 of the Artistic License. This means that the underlying engine, responsible for editing and displaying spreadsheets, will be available under a license that enables people to use it in lots of interesting places and in ways we probably can’t yet imagine. It also means you’ll be able to send us patches for inclusion, and help us make it much better.

Stay tuned by subscribing to the blog feed.

Today we’ve implemented TAB’s counterpart, SHIFT+TAB, which acts as left arrow (←). We’ve brought in some extra talent to make this less painful, and we intend to exploit that talent further in the coming weeks. As the title suggests I’m talking about the MooTools JavaScript library. In particular we’re going to be using the Element.Event class to make life much easier.

We are confident that the amount of JavaScript currently in SocialCalc will decrease drastically with MooTools because of its cross-browser functionality and clear interfaces. Development should go faster, too, with the clear documentation available online.

More next week. Cheers!

Today SocialCalc received a minor feature. When a cell is selected, pressing the TAB key will select the cell to the right of the current cell. Presently this is a poor man’s implementation of TAB navigation in a spreadsheet, copying the functionality of pressing the right arrow key (→) verbatim.

That’s OK, though, because the next steps in the UI will be refactorial. We’re going to clean up the event handling enough to properly handle TAB – and SHIFT+TAB – with minimal effort. You can read more about this on the mailing list, or get involved in the discussion, too.

As usual you can download the very latest from SVN.

There iswas a small bug in SocialCalc that disallowed the input of colons, parentheses, and other valid characters with a keyCode less than 48 when typing directly into the cell. Today I’ve fixed that problem with a simple patch. It’s revision 66 in Subversion. The latest snapshot, ready for download, also has the fix.

Feel free to play around with it. Let us know how it goes on the mailing list.