Posted on the 05/08/2007 at 05:11 AM
Yes, I'm finally moving servers. Hopefully you won't notice a thing as I move stuff over. If you do notice any problems then please email us at support@mcubedsw.com and we'll try and fix them asap. It does seem a lot of work moving all this over just to release a new site a few days later... oops, didn't mean to say that.
Posted on the 03/08/2007 at 04:17 AM
Ok, so I'm not very good with dates I put on the blog. I said I'd switch web hosts a few weeks ago and I haven't got round to it yet. I also said I'd make this blog post last week and I didn't. At least I had a very good reason. Code Collector Pro is currently in private beta (beta 3 at the moment) and is likely to need a few more beta versions before it gets released. Though I think it's ready enough for me to tell you all about it.
Code Collector was meant to be a small side project to Minim. I needed to refresh my memory about a few programming things and I was getting annoyed at having to look through several files for code snippets that I wanted, so I wrote Code Collector. Then Code Collector became very popular. I was torn between wanting to make money, and therefore wanting to work on shareware, and wanting to improve Code Collector for all those asking for features. So the only real choice was to make a shareware version. This way I can justify investing time into Code Collector and give users the features they wanted. As I improve Code Collector Pro the free version will benefit, so everyone wins.
So what is Code Collector Pro then? Well it's Code Collector 1.1, which has a new UI, improved syntax highlighting and groups (yay!) plus a whole lot more. As our advertising will say when we release it, it is snippets++. First thing we've added is Smart Groups, which are pretty self explanatory. We've also added the ability to tag snippets. The two real difference in CCP are the export options and the amount of customisability. You can export snippets or groups of snippets into a single file which you can share with anyone else who has Code Collector (either Pro or Standard) as well as exporting your entire library as a text file.
CCP also allows you to customise the syntax highlighting and the font of the editor, as well as adding line numbers to the editor. On top of this you can customise the licences in there (Code Collector only allows for BSD, MIT, GPL, LGPL, Apache and Other). But one of the best bits is the support for TextMate bundles. Adding TextMate bundles to CCP allows you to increase the available languages and in turn the syntax highlighting. This means you can have virtually any language compared to 8 languages that ship with Code Collector.
So what does this look like? Well without further ado I present to you the Code Collector Pro 1.0 UI:
Hopefully you'll be able to try this next week, assuming that we don't hit any major snags.
Posted on the 26/07/2007 at 03:23 AM
I think it's time to give you a small taste of what is coming over the next few weeks from us. First lets start with the boring stuff:
Minim 1.1.3: Just a quick bugfix that is coming in a mid-augustish time period.
New website: No I haven't moved servers yet but yet my brain does keep nagging me to get round to it. It's not a huge change but enough to make a difference. This will hopefully be out in around 2 weeks time
M3Extensions 1.1 (non-programmers can skip this): with some cool new methods and clean ups of old ones, due soon after Minim 1.2.3. One cool feature I've added to it is a delegate method that will be called when Core Data has loaded everything from the database. Not a huge thing but it's been driving me round the bend. I'll also be updating the Rule Editor I released a while ago with some bug fixes
And now for the big announcement:
Code Collector 1.1: Code Collector has been far more popular that I could've imagined when I wrote it as a simple project almost 11 months ago. In that time I've got a lot of feedback about what people want to see and the general consensus has been: groups. So I'm pleased to announce that Code Collector 1.1 does in fact support groups. On top of that it supports the ability to choose the licence and language that the snippet is in, along with improved syntax colouring. I'm hoping to have this out in about 2 weeks time and as with 1.0 it will still be freeware...
However, there is one more thing. I realised that if I was to spend time on Code Collector, I'd need some sort of incentive. While it's nice seeing lots of people using it, I'm aiming to make money in this business and as such should focus most of my time on apps that make money, such as Minim. So there was only one obvious conclusion to this:
Code Collector Pro 1.0: Code Collector Pro will take Code Collector beyond what it could ever have been just being a freeware side project. It will be shareware and cost €20, and as it shares the same code base as Code Collector the freeware version will benefit from many of the core improvements I put in. "But..", I hear you ask, "what will Pro have to warrant my giving you €20 of my hard earned money". The simple answer is: more. The slightly less simple answer: smart groups, tags, textmate bundle support, customisable code licence support, customisable syntax colouring and better export options. I'll have more (and screenshots!) for you later in the week.
Posted on the 10/07/2007 at 10:40 PM
You may have noticed a small advert at the bottom of the sidebar on this blog recently. This is part of the IndyMac community ad server which is coded and hosted by Jan Lehnardt. The project came out of an idea by Daniel Jalkut aboutco-operative advertising between Mac developers. Jan’s system is now ready for public consumption so if you want to join simply make you way over to the administration centre (prettified by yours truly) and register. The network operates on a similar principle to the Dock advertising network (small 120x90px image, 75 characters of text allowed) but it completely free.
In other news, I’ve finally decided on a new host. You may have seen a post a while ago on my personal blog where I compared various web hosts. One host I overlooked was TextDrive. I was put off by the relatively small amount of storage space and bandwidth (5GB and 15GB/month respectively) but I realised that for the time being that’s all I really need, and for $99 for the full year it’s hard to go wrong. I’ll be moving the site over to TextDrive sometime this weekend so you may see some minor downtime as I move things over. This is all in preparation for our new application which should be out at the end of July and which I’ll be talking more about later this week.
