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]
SQLEditor 1.5 is making good progress. The latest thing that I’m currently working on is to extract SQL Views from a database. In theory this should be just like extracting tables, but it’s looking much harder to work out than I ever expected.
The new SQL parser is mostly finished. It’s been completely rewritten using ANTLR3. This offers a number of really good improvements, the most important one being that it’s not running in Java anymore. The parser is now completely native code.
Also pretty much finished is the new document model code, the new document export code and the new JDBC handling code. I’m hopeful that it will now be possible to run JDBC drivers that use AWT (which I’m informed the IBM DB2 driver may do).
SQLEditor 1.4 is just about finished too. There is one change that needs to get beta tested and then the 1.4 final release should be available.
Watch out for a new 1.5 download soon and of course the final candidate for 1.4
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.
OneMonthApp is using SQLEditor!
OneMonthApp is a project where they are building a complete web application in a month. It’s going to be a simple and easy to use cash flow application, apparently. And they’re going to make it free, which is great too.
I’ve signed up to be notified when it’s done, which the counter is promising for sometime in the next couple of days. (They started in September, so less than a month)
Stephen over at OneMonthApp very kindly included SQLEditor in a list of 20 tools for web application development that they’re using for the project.
Maybe I need an “I use SQLEditor” badge icon or something?
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.
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.
I just made the latest version of SQLEditor (1.3b9) available on the website for download [2.8MB dmg].
The new version has a collection of improvements. Particularly in stability. Chris submitted a test case which broke the parser and the save file functionality in really interesting ways, which are now fixed; SQLite support is a bit better, with a new user interface in the JDBC panel and there is better handling of the display preferences (including a new preference pane so you can set defaults).
I also fixed some user interface bugs, like a really stupid one involving import and progress bars. The progress bar would display if you used file->import, but not if you dragged an sql file directly to the application icon. The reason was that there were two different paths depending on which action you took. This got refactored, which means that they both now show progress bars.
I also have started to look at the file loading performance. Too much time is being taken up loading files. I’ve been working on some ideas for optimization and I’m hopeful for the next release.
Unfortunately this isn’t the final candidate that I was hoping to release. But I think the improvements are definitely worth delaying the final build.
Hopefully if there aren’t any reported bugs then the release version will be out within the next few weeks.
About the new MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog.
The new weblog will contain posts about SQLEditor and other products.
If you already reading Angus Thinks you probably don’t need to read the MalcolmHardie weblog as well because all the posts on the MalcolmHardie Solutions weblog will appear on Angus Thinks.
This mirroring is done using the xmlrpc api and code from the blogger api plugin for wordpress
This post on the xcode-users list explains a neat trick on how to get xcode to link a static library instead of a dynamic library.
Imagine the circumstance: you want to use a particular non-standard version of a native library which is already part of the system; perhaps you want to use an old version with better compatibility, or a newer version with more features. The obvious thing to do is to take a static build of the library and add it your xcode project.
However this typically won’t work. The linker will choose the system version instead because by default it looks in all possible locations for a dynamic library first before looking through the same list of locations for a static library. If there is a dynamic library in any of the search locations it will always get chosen. There are some good reasons for this, but what if you really want to include your own statically linked version?
The answer is to add the -Wl,-search_paths_first flag to the other link flags option (under linking in target settings).
When this is set each possible location for a library is inspected first for a dynamic library and then for a static library. This means that the static library will get linked correctly.
It’s not exactly something that will be needed frequently though.
Edit: Apple have a technical Q&A article (1393) on this very subject which appeared a couple of days back and which I somehow missed.
It offers this exact method. [Link]
Unfortunately I didn’t manage to make a single post to this site during January. Then suddenly I made several posts today.
Why?
The main reason is that I’ve been hard at work producing a Universal Binary version of SQLEditor. Which offers not only performance improvements but is actually required to use SQLEditor on intel mac hardware at all. (This is because SQLEditor uses both Java and compiled Objective C).
The good news is that it’s pretty much ready so after the next round of beta testing version 1.2 should be released. Hopefully before the end of February, but possibly at the beginning of March.
Recently I’ve been trying to set up a box to run Oracle again. There are enough SQLEditor users that Oracle support is important.
Fortunately Oracle have several downloads that can be used, there is a developer license for 10g and various chargeable options. However the option that is most interesting is Oracle Express. This is a cut down version of Oracle that has some limitations in maximum performance, but otherwise works the same as the regular version. For my purposes it’s perfect, since I’m not actually doing any data processing at all, maximum performance is irrelevant.
So the next step was to download and install a copy.
First I had to select windows or linux. Obviously a difficult choice, so I avoided it and downloaded both just in case.
Next I looked around for a suitable machine to run this database on. Oracle 10g does run on macs, but no word of Intel mac support, so my Imac is out (directly at least).
My next thought was a virtual machine on my Intel Imac ‘aslund’. Qemu runs windows really quite well and it runs linux perfectly well too. Unfortunately despite several hours playing around with settings I couldn’t get anything that would run fast enough and I couldn’t seem to get Oracle to run properly at all. I suspect that either I didn’t get one of the settings right, or there is some other problem somewhere.
Next I thought about ‘cetaganda’, which is my windows box. This meets the minimum requirements of 256MB ram, and has both windows and linux. No worries there.
Unfortunately it was debian linux and this requires Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After some thought I realized that Centos is a clone of Red Hat and so should work just as well. Which is probably would, if only my machine had enough memory. Unfortunately this machine was built to a (small) budget and has integrated graphics. The integrated graphics use memory from the main system for graphics, which reduces it from a nominal 256MB to only about 218 MB. 218MB isn’t enough for Oracle apparently and it complained.
Next step, the windows download (lucky I got them both before).
Windows XP sees the installer, unfortunately the same problem: not enough memory. (Although oddly the release notes mention this being a problem that has been fixed).
Next I may consider my iBook ‘Komarr’, however that will be annoying, because when I tried it before, it was slow.
The best plan may be to add more memory to cetaganda and run it that way.
Today I released SQLEditor 1.1b3. I think this could very well be the last beta version before 1.1 final release.
My first minor point release application!! (x.1)
Originally I hadn’t intended to update all of the websites today, but they discovered it automatically so I uploaded the details onto the others so that everything was consistent.
However one thing really stood out today: Softpedia. The people at Softpedia not only grabbed all of the details, they also created some screen shots and gave me a nice “No Spyware, adware or viruses certified” logo. And it wasn’t just a quick screen shot either, they must have spent some time using the application as can be seen on the screenshot page.
I was amazed
Obviously I should have some screenshots of my own to distribute and they should arrive with the new manual, but still, I was really suprised by this.
And very grateful.
SQLEditor 1.1 is now approaching release. It seems to have taken much longer than expected, however it does have a number of interesting improvements.
The most interesting improvement is that it can export directly to a database. This is still slightly experimental but pretty much works.
There is also a new structure for connector lines, the layout algorithms for each type of line have been moved into separate classes, so new types could be added in the future.
There is a new toolbar which allows for faster object creation.
There are also lots and lots of bug fixes (including one in the SAX XML parsing code which was causing occasional but serious problems in load and save).
I’ve also been working on the documentation, using docbook to make everything nice and multi-purpose.
I’m really hoping that version 1.1 can be out by the middle of next week.
Following the suggestions in this article, I’ve been considering forum software recently to offer customers (and others) somewhere to discuss SQLEditor.
Currently I’m considering PunBB, because it seems to be simple, fast and well received by reviewers and users.
PhpBB seems a popular choice but is probably a bit more than I actually need for this project.
SQLEditor has now been built for Mac OS X/Intel as well as Mac OS X/ppc. I was able to download the Xcode 2.1 release last night and worked on the port this morning. SQLEditor at the moment still has bits of Java as well as Objective C so I wasn’t entirely confident of success, but I converted the build target to the xcode native type and moved the java code into a separate target. Then I ran the build process and after a bit of fiddling I was able to produce what appears to be a working fat binary:
file SQLEditor
SQLEditor: Mach-O fat file with 2 architectures
SQLEditor (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
SQLEditor (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
The new version of the application seems to run as well as the old on PPC, although it is currently set up to use the 10.4 sdk as opposed to the 10.2.8 sdk of release SQLEditor versions. (Although SQLEditor is not officially supported on less than 10.3)
If I had a Mac On Intel machine to test it on I would be very curious to find out what happens.
But as far as I can see, and with the assumption that the ported version will not have unexpected bugs, the process is simple.
But will that assumption will hold? I have absolutely no idea.
Oracle connectivity has been one of the main things I’ve been working on this week with SQLEditor. This involved installing Oracle on my iBook. Oracle 10g is a remarkably complicated bit of software. It arrives in a 500MB+ download which takes forever to download and then a significant amount of time to install.
My machine is also noticably short of memory for oracle because it has only 256MB of ram, rather than the 512MB recommended.
The good news is that simple databases are now accessible using oracle, although larger ones are still a bit too big. I’m still working on trying to fix this. The idea of schemas in Oracle is also quite different in that you pretty much use one database and then sub-divide it up.
I’ve added a nice about box to the application that now includes a two column credits section and details of the username and serial number for the application.
After a rather over-extended development cycle SQLEditor version 1.0 has now been released. Which is a great relief to me. I’ve been working on it for so long now that I can’t quite remember not working on it, which is weird. Admittedly that’s only really about 12 months, but still, it’s a significant portion of my life. It’s also the first major product I’ve released.
In a moment of commercialism I would encourage you to buy a copy because it makes a wonderful christmas gift, or at least it might if the recipient really loved databases or if it was some other kind of program altogether. As it is, it probably wouldn’t make much of a Christmas gift. Socks or bottles of wine would be a better choice for almost anyone.
Releasing SQLEditor isn’t the end of the situation though. Version 1.1 is already being planned and I’ve various other projects that I’m working on as well, but SQLEditor is first and will always be the first piece of software that I released for sale.
Releasing software is complicated. In addition to the actual program, there is the distribution package, online help, the website, notifications to trackers like MacUpdate and Versiontracker, plus checking the online store is working correctly. Bad news with this release for anyone hoping for the pre-release discount. With the release of version 1.0 the offer expired.
People keep talking about MacPAD but nothing seems to be happening at the moment, only MacShareware.net seems to be supporting it (which is logical, since the two are quite closely tied together). I’ve got a MacPAD file up now, but nothing much else. I haven’t integrated it with the release managment stuff I’ve written (a motley collection of php and make files with a bit of XML for good measure).
If there was any market in it there is an interesting opportunity for a release management system (written perhaps in java?) that could generate everything automatically. Perhaps if I get really bored at some point I might do that.
The next step is to write a press release and send it out today. Joy
So, in conclusion, if you haven’t already tried SQLEditor, then version 1.0 will improve your life so much that you won’t know how you got by without it. Or at least might save some time when designing SQL databases.