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Another day, another beta. (Kind of)

SQLEditor 1.4b2 is now available, which is pretty much bug fixing against 1.4b1.

There were several issues with 1.4b1 including an annoying bug that would sometimes delete foreign key connectors when you deleted an unrelated table.

There are some fixes for other bugs which turned up and some improvements to undo/redo, to make it more stable when you undo or redo lots of things, one after the other.

I’ve also moved SQLEditor to Sparkle. Sparkle replaces an update system that I wrote myself and it should offer better update support as well as a nice html based ‘what’s changed’ window.

SQLEditor also now tells people that it is a beta and exactly when it will expire. It probably should always have done this, but it does it now, which is probably good.

There are also some minor fixes to the live source view, so that it changes with the document sql dialect and appears correctly when reopening existing documents.

[Download] (3.4MB DMG File, changelog)

So, if you’ve visited the MalcolmHardie.com site today you’ll have seen the new site design.

It’s Blue.

But that’s not all. The layout structure of each page has been substantially changed (for the first time since 2004, I think)
. The new 2 column design is also wider (960px) and offers more flexibility than the old 3 column design. There are new graphics and section headings and a new about page (with a message from me!).
The MalcolmHardie logo has been used in a reversed white on blue form, which I think worked out quite well and the main body is black/dark gray 13px Lucida Grande on a white background. (With Verdana as the second choice)

The content management has also been improved. The whole site is now a sort of wiki. Although it is somewhat static as wikis go. Each web page is now a wiki page that is rendered when necessary to deliver the page. Page expiry dates match the wiki source document expiry and all of the meta-data is cached into a database so that things like recently changed lists can be generated. The next iteration of the system may also cache the text as well.

Apache is configured to serve the wiki pages only after any existing index pages, so the whole thing can be switched to static html without recoding (if necessary).

There were several things that I really wanted to do with the re-design.

The first, obviously, was to get the web2.0 thing going. The first step in the design process was therefore to identify the gradient that I wanted to use. The blue/blue gradient seemed to be a good choice here. Although I didn’t in the end go for reflection or glass effects, several prototypes had glass effects.

The second was to serve html pages as html pages with a .html extension. Which was achieved (mostly)

The third thing was to clean up the arrangement of the site, previously there had been a mix of systems used to generate content from an interesting (but probably obsolete) attempt at a php visual class library, through ordinary php to finally plain html. The new wiki style system is consistent across the site. (I’m hoping that this will last)

Software

The site is written in php and uses a mysql database (standard, boring even!)

I used the PEAR Text_Wiki classes to handle the wiki side of things.

The wiki dialect is Text_Wiki default with extra classes to do php includes and page meta data in the same document.

Things I hope to improve

At the moment there are some limitations to the wiki syntax. This means there are more blocks of raw php and html than I want. Eventually I hope to write some more wiki plugins to reduce this

Another area that could be improved is the concept of relative pages within the site. Currently the wiki links are hierarchical with the full link required each time.

I’m very interested to know if you like the new design. Feel free to send me email or add a comment below.

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.

[HTMLValidator]

A new version of HTMLValidator today. I moved the validation into a separate thread to improve responsiveness. This is also the way that HTMLValidator will be doing multiple page validation. In fact the new release even includes pretty much all of the code necessary to do this, but it doesn’t include the interface yet. The 1.0b3 release actually validates a list of urls, but the list contains only 1 element. The idea is to test that the basic code works as expected before bolting the interface on the top.

Also new is a little spinner that spins when the application is doing something, some improvements to error display and handling and a few other fixes here and there. The changelog gives a complete list.

Next feature is the multiple file validation interface and then probably a 1.0 release.

HtmlValidator beta 2 has just been released. The new version offers assorted fixes and a slightly improved interface (a green tick or red cross now appear in the validation window!)

There is also a new downloads page which currently offers an Applescript to validate the source of the front page in Safari.

Usefully it validates the actual source that the browser received, it doesn’t download the url itself.

HTMLValidator 1.0b1 has just been released.

It runs on PowerPC or Intel Macs with Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

The current version expires 28th February 2007.

HTMLValidator is a new desktop HTML validator that works on both web pages and files. It’s something I’ve been working on for a while now in between SQLEditor releases. The main motivation is that I often seem to use the W3C validator, but I can’t always do that with files I’m working on locally. I also tried installing the W3C validator on a local web server and although it works, it seems to require a lot of installation effort, with different dependencies. So the idea occurred to me: what if you could have a drag and drop installation. From there came a web version using drag and drop and finally the application bundle version that is being distributed from today.
The earlier application versions actually displayed the results in an html webview in a window, while the newer releases display the results in a table.

On the drawing board for future releases are more validation options, the capability to validate multiple pages and the ability to watch pages for changes and then validate. Also better printing and Applescript support (although both of these are present in the current version).

I’m really interested to know what you think of HTMLValidator so feel free to send in comments, either to me personally Angus [DOT] Hardie [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com or to the support [AT] malcolmhardie [DOT] com email address

SQLEditor 1.3.6 has now been available for about a week and so far it looks good. 1.3.6 was mainly released to fix bugs found in 1.3.x releases and to add in a few important features that had been widely requested.

MySQL auto increment was probably the main improvement, but there were also some more changes to fix the connection issues.

One slight change that probably won’t get noticed at all if it works is that the page that version updates are directed to has changed. The url is now a special page rather than simply the product page. This should make it easier to download updates. (I’ve been looking into sparkle and friends for use in some later version)

I guess the upgrade advice is that 1.3.6 is recommended for all users, but if your current version is satisfactory then no need to upgrade.

SQLEditor 1.3.4 got released on Tuesday, but unfortunately there is a bug in this version.

The problem is that in 1.3.4 the connection presets system in the database connection panel was modified. There were a couple of fixes made, but one of them releated to selecting presets when the window opened. Unfortunately that change caused users who hadn’t made any presets to experience an error. The problem was that the new code didn’t correctly account for the possibility that there might not be any presets, it was trying to access an array of presets that was empty, which is obviously an error.
This has now been fixed and corrected in 1.3.5. Which should work correctly with or without presets.

SQLEditor 1.3.2 received a very limited release to a few selected testers at the end of 2006. However there were some additional issues that needed a bit more work, so the current plan is for a 1.3.3 release before the end of January.

SQLEditor 1.3.1 got released on Friday afternoon, this was really just a bug fix release which fixed a handful of problems that were identified. I think the only major fix was that the new UID system was slightly broken in that if you copied an object, or duplicated it in some cases, then SQLEditor would not always recreate the unique ID numbers that represent each object. This had the effect that if you copied an object, SQLEditor couldn’t distinguish between the objects when reloading and so all connectors would be attached to the original object and not the new one. An unfortunate bug.

It has now been fixed, along with slight improvements to image saving and a fix for a menu shortcut not being correct. The latter was an odd problem in that a shortcut was set, but it actually conflicted with an existing shortcut and the cocoa menu system is smart enough not to display the same shortcut for more than one menu.

[Download] 2.8MB DMG

For some reason also I don’t think I posted about the 1.3 release. But the 1.3 release was posted on November 23rd and is the first non-beta release to be released since May 2006. It rolled all of the improvements that had been made during the beta testing phase into a new release and is definitely worth upgrading (especially since the upgrade is free). However the 1.3 release has been superceded by the 1.3.1 release, so download that instead.