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.

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