PackRat 1.6.2
I just released PackRat 1.6.2. It contains some bug fixes for attachments and images. When Backpack was updated it changed the URLs for attachments and images. The Backpack API doesn’t support images or attachments, so we have to reverse engineer this. The changes broke our code.
One of the fixes restores the ability to click on an attachment or image and get the original. This only works when you are online and this has always been the case.
The other problem was displaying image thumbnails. Before PackRat would simply access the thumbnail images when you were online and they would be saved in its cache and the images in the cache would be used when you were offline. This no longer works because images and attachments are now secured. You have to be online and logged in to access them. Again the API has no way of retrieving them. Because of this Packrat no longer displays the image thumbnails. It just displays links for the original images. I apologize for the loss of this feature but its beyond my control.
I plan to add support for displaying the images in Packrat 2.0. 37signals has also said they will add image download support to the API but it will be awhile. I don’t expect anything within 6 months, probably longer. I don’t plan to wait for 37signals unless I have to but I don’t expect to.
You can get Packrat 1.6.2 here.
July 18th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Lookin’ good! I’ve been holding out expecting 2.0 would be here sooner… In the meanwhile, I’m interested in hearing about an iPhone App version of Backpack. I’ve hacked my own CSS, used VioletPixel’s iBackpack and still it always feels slow and still does not offer offline viewing of my pages like an iPhone app could. Thoughts?
July 20th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Yes, 2.0 is taking awhile. It’s quite a bit of work rewriting a UI.
As for a iPhone version, I plan to do it. I’m just waiting for Apple to approve my application to the iPhone Developer Program.
July 21st, 2008 at 7:17 am
[...] I got a little behind again last week and let a couple updates go by, but here they are: Code Collector Pro, the tag-based snippets manager, has been updated to 1.2.4, a minor update of mainly bug fixes (see the blog announcement or change log for more). Together was updated to 2.1.5, bringing some changes to Shelf behavior along with several minor bug fixes and small improvements (see the release notes for full details). PackRat, the desktop front-end for 37signals’ Backpack, was updated to version 1.6.2 which brings some fixes to images and attachments (see the blog announcement for info). [...]