August 09, 2011
Hello everyone. Most of you have discovered by now that there is a slight problem with your keyboard when you upgrade to Lion!
Roy has posted a ‘fix’ for this. You will find it in the News section of this site. Please note that this is a fix for a British keyboard only, as that is the only one we have!
He is still pottering away at version 2.0. This will circumvent the need for X11 and therefore won’t exhibit some of the problems that many have had. However, it is just pottering at the moment. Unfortunately time is very short in more ways than one! Work, RBC and theocratic things are sapping the hours away. So please be patient with us!
May we also take this opportunity to apologise to everyone who has posted feedback that we just don’t have the time to answer. If any of you brothers or sisters out there can help out with answering some of the queries, we would be very grateful.
151 comments
February 22, 2011
Hi everyone. Sorry that Roy and I haven’t been around for the last few weeks. We are back!! We guess that some of you might be waiting for the new release of Watchtower Library for Mac. It is on it’s way. I’m afraid it has had to go on the back burner for a while due to other responsibilities. Our apologies for the delay.
This is Roy’s plan, although I don’t fully understand it – maybe you will.
Version 2.0 will have the following features:
- embedded X11 (techno babble for that you won’t need anything else, it will run independently);
- assistance for non-Roman input i.e. Chinese, Kanji, Japanese, Greek etc;
- better printer integration; tracker speed problems;
- various bug features that have been reported i.e. grey screen; double pasting.
If there are any other features that come to mind, please file them as a Feature issue at the developer site or post a comment below. However Roy’s… [more]
162 comments
December 05, 2010
If you have the new 2010 edition of the library, you will have problems launching it. Although it installs successfully, it crashes on launch.
No doubt this issue will get resolved in due course. In the meantime, you can update your library by following the instructions here.
192 comments
May 16, 2010
When installing a Watchtower library edition, the installer prompts for a place to install the library. Please do not change this location.
The reason is that drive C is just a virtual location, not a real one. Even if you have other software with their ‘own’ drive C’s, such as Parallels or VMware, this drive C is separate. These programs also create their own virtual drive C’s. There will be no confusion.
When you specify C:\Program Files\Watchtower, the C just refers to a folder within your home directory, specifically HOME/Library/Application Support/Watchtower Library/drive_c (where HOME stands for your own home folder).
128 comments
May 14, 2010
Some users have reported seeing a grey screen. This is an issue with X11.
X11 should be running in what it calls ‘rootless’ mode. This just means that X11 does not display its ‘root’ window, i.e. the grey background. Trouble is, this setting sometimes becomes disabled and X11 starts showing you its root window: the weird grey background. Hit Command+Q to quit the app until you get rid of it.
In the next version, I’ll disable this feature. That way, any accidental override to switch off rootless will not be acted upon. In the meantime, the solution is relatively straightforward. Just open a Terminal window and reenable the necessary setting by entering the command below. Please make sure you close down Watchtower Library for Mac before entering:
defaults write uk.me.royratcliffe.Watchtower_Library rootless -bool yes
Then relaunch the app. Grey screen gone!
19 comments
May 14, 2010
Big apologies for my lack of promptness lately. The website reorganisation is now complete. Everything lives on the cloud. There are three Watchtower Library for Mac related sites.
I think only the first will be of general interest. Project development is only interesting for those who want to file an issue or otherwise dig a litter deeper. My blog has lots of historical information, not too useful.
To help simplify the answers to questions posted in this section, I’ll post answers as posts rather than comments to previous posts. Otherwise the comment lists will grow very large.
79 comments
May 13, 2010
You have a Chinese Simplified or Traditional, Japanese or Korean Watchtower Library and want to run it on your Mac. Watchtower Library for Mac lets you install and run the library. Good. But it does not let you enter Asian text in the search box. Not good!
This is an issue I have been working on for some time. I’m imagining that there are many such users. After all, there are far more Mandarin speakers say compared to English speakers; though perhaps not of those in the truth. I remember Harry Cotton’s accelerated language learning classes: only about 300 million English speakers, compared to billions of Mandarin speakers. English is a minority language, even if you count those speaking English as a second language.
So Asian input has been at the top of my to-do list for quite a while. Sorry for lack of progress. But I am getting somewhere, although I have not had a lot of time for developing it.
16 comments
December 16, 2009
Sorry about my lack of response on your feedback thus far. The web site temporarily discarded your feedback as spam. I had not set up my Akismet key. Hence everything was considered as junk. Fixed now.
142 comments
October 22, 2009
This is a new section of the royratcliffe.me.uk site dedicated to brief and to-the-point help for installing and running Watchtower Library on your Mac computer.
We surely have not answered every question, or anticipated every problem. So please post a comment, or ask a question.
215 comments
