Bruji

Though I am not too bad at HTML/CSS coding, cocoa/c++/object/xcode programming is obviously a bit beyond me. I downloaded your Sample Plugin and the Apple xcode app from the App store hoping I could hack into an existing book plugin. Well I could understand some of the principles in the Sample Plugin but that was about it. I could not even fully open up, say, the iafdplugin or AbeBooks.plugin, especially the MAC OS unix file which I believe is where the main game is.

Anyway the idea of trying to write my own Book site search plugin was because there are none for Australia. Being an avid Sci-Fi & Fantasy reader I buy most of my books from the Galaxy Bookshop, the premier Sci-Fi & Fantasy bookshop in Australia (OK debatable) which is owned by Abbey's Bookshop which are a very good all round bookshop, therefore both these sites are very similar and I was hoping to write a plugin for each site.

Well that was a bit of a fantasy in itself so my Future Request is; can we have a Book search plugin each for these two sites just to keep the Southern Hemisphere covered. A lot of times overseas books tend to be printed and published here Downunder with a different cover and even a different ISBN sometimes plus we do write, print and publish, (though the printing is tending to be done more and more in China), a lot of our own titles from world famous authors. Australia does have a population of close to 23 million and New Zealand is over 4.4 million.

By the way if any other Australian/New Zealand forum members can come up with better Downunder book sites, mention them. Outlets such as Borders are gone. Dymocks and Angus & Robertson are down sizing their bricks & mortar outlets yearly.

OK Cheers

Galaxy is a great bookstore, we visited the one behind the Victoria Galleries and spent a long time there. The staff was incredibly helpful as well in helping us choose some new titles.

The MAC OS unix file that ships with the program are the plugins already compiled and ready to be used by Bookpedia and not the actual source code that you would need to build å new one in Xcode. I would be happy to provide the source code to those plugins you mentioned, but I took the time (reason it took me a while to respond) to start you off on the right foot, here is the source code to a started Galaxy Plugin. Open the Galaxy.xcodeproj file in Xcode and you should be able to right away to use the Program->Build (command-B) command. Then on the left side "Navigation pane" find the folder named "Products" and inside there is Galaxy.plugin. Control click this item and say "Show in Finder", this is the actual final plugin that get created. Copy that plugin into ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia/Plug-ins (creating the "Plug-ins" folder if necessary) and you should be able to try out the bare bones plugin by relaunching Bookpedia. I built the searching part that is more complex and for the details did only author, summary, publisher and the cover image. I leave the rest of the details up to you, copy paste the three lines of code from publisher already there to add more details. There is also more information on this forum about working with plugins if you decide to dive deep into it and want to automate some of the step, such as copying the plugin into Bookpedia and debugging in Xcode.

WOW - Thanks Conor for all of that instruction and Galaxy Plugin. As I am working all this week including Easter, it will have to wait till next week for me to delve into it all and see if I can avoid drowning. This will be all new for me.

If there are other forum members who have written Plugin's and would not mind being asked beginners questions, can they let me know as I would prefer not to disturb the Bruji team to much at this time so near to the release of the Pocketpedia's.

Cheers

Well, with a huge amount of help from Conor there are two new search plugins available to download and install for us Australian & New Zealand users of Bookpedia. These search the Australian Book Shops; Galaxy Bookshop for all your Sci-Fi & Fantasy requirements and Abbey's Bookshop which is a good all round general bookshop.

They are available on the Extras page or you can download them straight from here: [url]bookpedia://www.bruji.com/download?extras/abbeysGalaxy.zip[/url]

Again I wish to thank Conor for his enormous help with this project. Us Downunder users of Bookpedia have been lacking in search sites relevant to our area and I hope these two plugins will go along way to rectify this. If any Aussie's or Kiwi's can come up with better search sites please post. Of course any improvement suggestions for these plugins are also welcome.

Thank you so much for building those plug-ins for the Australians out there. It's such a good plug-in that will be including it in the next release of Bookpedia as well, out in a few days. We will only include the Abbey's version as that allows access to the Sci-Fi & Fantasy catalog as well as the regular catalog. For those looking for a more targeted search the Galaxy version will be available from the link provided above by FineWine.