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Today here is a sneak peak of the new user interface in SQLEditor 3 which is in development and will be released later in the year.

The improvements visible here are mostly evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Single Window Interface

The biggest change is the single window interface. This seems to be the preferred design for apps these days, the floating palette approach seems to have fallen out of favour. This offers a major improvement on small screen devices and when in full screen mode. The palettes tended to get in the way a lot. There is a tradeoff on larger screens. Work is continuing on how to get the balance right.

The sidebars can be collapsed and you can hide the overview and palette sections entirely if you want:

Left Sidebar

The new left sidebar includes the overview at the top and the main sections below.
Both the labels panel and the status window have now been moved to the left sidebar.

Only status events relevant to the this document appear in its status panel.

The labels panel works as before:

Tree View

The tree view can now show tables grouped by schema as well as the previous flat view:

Right Sidebar

On the right side, the inspector takes the main space. Each window now keeps its inspector separately, so it is possible to  have several on screen at once. This makes things like copying text from one comment to another easier, because both text views will be visible at the same time.
The palette appears at the bottom and works as before.

Next Time

SQLEditor 3 has more exciting new features and improvements, which I’ll be writing more about as we get closer to the release date.

SQLEditor 3 is due later this year, pricing to be announced. 

Upgrades will be at a discount or free for recent purchases of SQLEditor

A new version of SQLEditor is released. Version 2.8.2 [56MB zip file]

Things of note in SQLEditor 2.8

The SQL parser has had quite a bit of work done on it for this release, which should mean fewer parsing oddities, particularly with keywords. This was originally reported as a bug involving the word ‘source’ as an identifier. You can now use ‘source’ as an identifier without problem. 🙂

There are several improvements to table renaming, and objects are better at preventing duplicated names.

Another significant improvement is the rewrite of the document state code. This handles things like when the document needs to be saved and when it is marked edited. Previously documents appeared as ‘edited’ immediately upon opening, but now they only appear as edited when they actually have been edited.

As part of the state change rewrite, undo for object properties should be more solid and label color editing should be more reliable.

There are also various other improvements and bug fixes.

Hopefully this should be a good release.

What happened to 2.8 and 2.8.1?

2.8 reached beta, but several bugs were identified, particularly in object naming and auto increment. These were fixed and 2.8.1 was released.

2.8.1 was a full release version, but a build issue caused two help files to be omitted from the build. This generated an exception when attempting to view them.

I’m happy to announce SQLEditor 2.7.1 (zip file, about 55MB). If you have automatic updates turned on, this update should appear the next time SQLEditor checks for updates.

As well as various bug fixes, this release also has a nice new feature where you can drag an entire SQLEditor document into another SQLEditor document and the contents will import everything in the first document into the second document.

You can also do this with SQL files and SQLite database files. In this second video I’ve got a SQLite database file and I drag it into the SQLEditor window. (Then I moved the second table a bit)

SQLEditor 2.7.1 (zip file) is available to download immediately.
It’s a free upgrade for all SQLEditor 2.x customers.

SQLEditor 1.x users can upgrade from 1.x at a good discount.

If you’ve been using SQLEditor recently, one thing you may have noticed is that the application download size increased in 2.2 from about 5MB or so, to nearly 60MB. This is because SQLEditor now bundles a complete Java VM in the application bundle, following current recommendations.

The main advantage of bundling a Java VM inside the app is that SQLEditor no longer needs Java installed on the system. (Assuming you’re running OS X 10.7.3 or later). This means no worries about installing and keeping java up-to-date. The bundled java obviously needs to be kept updated, but (a) that’s our problem now and (b) since we’re only using it in very limited ways, there shouldn’t be too much exposure.

You do still need to use a JDBC driver for the relevant database, and install this in the standard /Library/Java/Extensions directory.

SQLEditor 2.0.6 has just been posted onto the beta update channel, so if you have the “Check for beta Versions” option set you should get offered it the next time the app checks for updates. It will get pushed to the main site and the release channel in a day or so.

Or download SQLEditor 2.0.6 (5.7 MB zip file)

This version got a bit delayed, originally it was going to be 2.0.3, except that a whole collection of new bugs got reported, so it became 2.0.4. Then of course, a couple of the fixes failed during pre-release testing, so the number got bumped again (twice!). It is finally ready, though, and hopefully should fix a number of problems that were identified in 2.0.2.

Most of the problems were exceptions that were raised in odd circumstances, although it also fixes the parser to accept # as a single line comment prefix, and it makes some useful code improvements to the way that the document options window is managed. It also fixes the keyboard toggling of labels, which uses the CMD+{number} commands to hide or show labeled objects.

Hope you like it, and please do continue to report problems. It’s really appreciated!

Due to the effective end-of-life for Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) we will not be supporting it in new major versions of software.
SQLEditor 2.0 will require a minimum of OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard), with 10.8 strongly recommended.

Note that 10.5 will continue to be supported for SQLEditor 1.7.x, however 1.7.x will reach end-of-life when 2.0 is released.

I am personally sad to see this because this is also the end of the PowerPC support (10.6 is Intel only). Unfortunately it is becoming increasingly difficult to support old versions of OS X and the problem is, if anything, accelerating. The future is coming, and faster than ever.

In particular the difficulty of supporting new features in the latest operating system (currently Mountain Lion), while still supporting old operating systems, is very great. A lot of work went in to getting SQLEditor 1.7.18 correctly signed for gatekeeper on 10.8, because the default Apple signing tools generate signatures that are, in effect, broken on earlier systems. It was almost getting to the point where two versions would have been made available, one for 10.7 and below, the other for 10.8. Fortunately that didn’t happen, but it was pretty close.

In addition the declining proportion of users who use old systems mean that the work increases as the number of customers who benefit declines. And of course, as soon as a user replaces their machine with a new one, they have upgraded and the number of customers benefiting declines again.

Regrettably this makes the correct decision quite clear.

Goodbye Leopard, you served us all well.

Angus

If you have any questions about this or anything else please get in touch at support@malcolmhardie.com

SQLEditor 1.7.14 just got pushed to the site this evening and if you read the version history you’ll see an entry marked “Fix for 10.4 compatibility”. Due to an oversight some earlier releases of 1.7.x (starting at 1.7.11b1) don’t work correctly on 10.4 and it wasn’t caught during testing. (Sorry)

10.4 compatibility is a difficulty in many ways, because it doesn’t run easily in vmware, nor do current macs support running it. To test SQLEditor on 10.4, I have a old iBook G4 machine which runs 10.4 and by testing SQLEditor on this machine, it is possible to confirm that the program works correctly. However there was an incompatible change made in a bug release version and the testing didn’t happen. I’m personally annoyed about this and I’m sorry to anyone affected.

However it did raise a crucial point. Very few people appear to have been affected. The opt-in statistic gathering system which sends us details of your system configuration reckons that fewer than 0.1% of users are running 10.4 (and reporting statistics).

Unfortunately the result is clear. 10.4 will not be a supported operating system in SQLEditor 2.0. This hopefully won’t be too much of a surprise, because we’ve been saying this for a while in the read me file.

We’re also looking at Mac OS X 10.5 support. Currently fewer than 0.5% of SQLEditor users are running 10.5.

For me personally, removing 10.5 support is more difficult, because removing it also removes all PPC users and I’ve always been a fan of the PPC platform and of course SQLEditor started as a PPC application. (Running partly in Java for people who remember)

The current plan is to support 10.5 in the initial release of SQLEditor 2 and then look again at how much this is actually being used. It seems unlikely that 10.5 support can continue much beyond the end of 2012 and it is likely that we’ll stop before then.

I’m sad about this, but such is progress.

So if you’re using SQLEditor and running it on 10.5, please enable the statistics gathering option. Alternatively, email us and tell us your plans. We’d love to hear from you.

The MalcolmHardie company is very pleased to announce that HTMLValidator is part of the new Web Development Toolkit bundle. The bundle is available immediately for $39.99 and includes 10 great apps for Mac OS X.

The bundle includes:

• Get Backup Pro
• skEdit
• Better Link Tester
• Simon (Bronze – 15 active tests)
• Logo Design Studio Pro
• Stor
• Interarchy
• Whoosh
• MacFreelance
• HTMLValidator

The bundle deal finishes on December 28th.

This weblog has just been upgraded.