In case you missed it version 1.4 of SQLEditor was released back on July 8th.
If you’re using 1.3.9 you might like to consider upgrading.
The 1.3.9 upgrade system will be set soon to recommend this upgrade
(though 1.3.9 doesn’t use sparkle, so it can’t actually do the upgrade for you)
SQLEditor 1.4
(3.6 MB DMG File)
Lots of great new features and various bug fixes and improvements to the existing ones.
SQLEditor 1.4b26 is now available for download.
It fixes only one problem which is related to auto increment and SQLite.
This should hopefully be the final beta version for 1.4
The next version should be the 1.4 final release which will probably happen later this week or early next week (assuming no more problems are reported)
SQLEditor 1.4b26 Download [3.6MB DMG]
Handy new tool I came across today which allows you to test regular expressions and see what they select.
A cool new online presentation tool:
The slide show application is really nice in that it feels very much like a desktop application when in use, even down the way buttons and key presses behave. The object rotation is particularly clever.
Another thing that makes this one clever though is the underlying framework, which is said to compile cocoa like code into dynamic web pages. It will apparently even be opensourced at some stage!
The build system for SQLEditor has lots of steps, from building each of the component frameworks, compiling the application, assembling the bundle, creating a disk image and then uploading everything to the server. (Plus things like version histories and read me files).To reduce errors I have several aggregate targets and a collection of scripts, but I was puzzled how to produce those little note entries that OCUnit generates when it’s running unit tests. There were several notes I wanted to make but I couldn’t figure it out.
However it occurred to me one day to inspect the souce of RunTargetTests and the answer was of course right there in the source.
<filename>:<line>: note: <message>
gives you a note.
<filename>:<line>: <message>
gives you a warning.
where
<filename>
is the name of the file you want the message to appear from
<line>
is the line number in that file
<message>
is the message you want to display
In the note form the word ‘note’ is a constant. Don’t replace it with anything.
As an alternative you put in use an empty filename and 0 for the line if you’re not interested in these details.
@echo ":0: note: disk image creation complete"
Will display the message “disk image creation complete” as a note in the build window.
Found an odd problem with Flash CS3 today. I was working away and I realised that I wasn’t getting anything in the output window from calls to trace().
Just a completely empty output panel.
The answer is simple, make sure Filter Level is set to verbose in the menu on the output panel. If you have it set to None then you won’t get any output.
I’m not quite sure if this is something that I changed or if it is the default, but it isn’t exactly obvious.
Johan Basberg (who designed the beautiful SQLEditor icon) has a handy list of recommended mac applications at
http://dittverk.no/mac/files/tag-editor.php
And SQLEditor is on this list
At the moment I believe that both SQLEditor and HTMLValidator are compatible with Mac OS X 10.5 and should work without functional difficulty.
A minor issue that I found is that the toolbar icons don’t look very good against the 10.5 window style. These have already been redrawn and the new icons will appear in the 1.4 release.
This assumes that there weren’t any major changes between the version that I used to test and the release version of 10.5 which will be released on October 26th.
Overall it looks good though.
This made me laugh when I saw it:
http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/retro-mac-os-wordpress-theme
Definitely memories of simpler times 
HTMLValidator 1.0 is finally released.
As I write this, it’s been out since Friday, so I guess I’m a bit late in writing this. HTMLValidator 1.0 is identical to HTMLValidator 1.0b8, except of course that it 1) doesn’t expire and 2) asks for registration.
The first non-beta release seems to have gone reasonably well. People are downloading it, trying it and some are starting to buy it. (If you’re reading this, then thank you!).
Oddly enough the most difficult thing about the whole thing was making sure that the order processing system could correctly deal with more than one product. We have a system that interfaces with our payment provider and it handles logging orders and generating serial codes. When it was originally written, HTMLValidator didn’t exist, we sold only one product and there wasn’t really a plan to develop others; So there were several areas that assumed that was only one product. The lesson here is to assume that you’re going to expand and plan accordingly.
Work has already started on the next release of HTMLValidator. The main areas for improvement are speed and memory usage. Plus there are some improvements to validation that the W3C released in their version 0.80 code release that would be nice to have in HTMLValidator. (Which is of course based on the W3C validator).
If you want to try HTMLValidator then we have a page that tells you all about it.