Personally I’ve been annoyed with products where I paid money and a new release appears two weeks later which requires a paid upgrade. On the other hand, SQLEditor 2.0 will be a considerable upgrade from SQLEditor 1.0 (the first paid version), so I do think some additional fee is justified to fund development efforts.

But obviously I don’t want people who haven’t bought yet to have doubts as to whether they will be required to pay for the upgrade.

The stated policy is that anyone who bought SQLEditor within 12 months of a paid upgrade being released gets a free upgrade.

However given that the release date for the new version hasn’t been decided yet, I’ve decided to improve the arrangements for version 2.0:

Customers who bought SQLEditor 1.x after August 1st 2010 will get a free upgrade to SQLEditor 2.0.

This means that if you buy SQLEditor today you get 1.7.8 and when 2.0 is released you would get an upgrade to it free of charge.

The change initially is significant, and there were new ways of doing things and certain other things that had to be rethought altogether. But now, I’m starting to choose to use Xcode 4 when I have the choice, so I think I’ve got used to it

I recently released some new project files for Tesseract OCR cocoa, and they are built with Xcode 4 now. The simplification in the build system and the linking of the frameworks is a vast improvement. Workspaces are a gift to this type of multi-project build.

The only issue I have is that it doesn’t support 10.5 or PPC, so SQLEditor is stuck on Xcode 3 for a while longer.

Why?

• Zip files are simpler to create
• It prevents the problem of the app being run from the dmg
• Safari handles zip downloads really nicely
• Disk images created in 10.6 tend to loose their background images in 10.5

That last problem is quite significant, because most of the friendliness of the dmg is the background image; if you loose that, you might as well have a zip file.

There are some benefits from dmg files:

• They have the background image and the drag to applications directory install
• DMG files can be smaller
• DMG files are handy to store

But then if you loose the first point anyway, it might not be worth bothering.

Now there are excellent tools like DMG Canvas for creating cross platform disk images that work fine and keep their background images, but I began to wonder if it was worth the effort for SQLEditor. Were the benefits of the background image sufficient to make up for the trouble?

Various notables including John Gruber, Panic and Sofa recommend or use zip files, so it’s becoming more popular. (The Mac App Store uses pkg but it’s a different story altogether)

The change isn’t actually as significant as it seems anyway, because SQLEditor has been available in both zip and dmg formats for some months now. The release process automatically builds both zip and dmg format archives and uploads them at the end of the build release process. The change is really just that the website links now point to the zip instead of the dmg. (And if you really want the dmg you can change zip to dmg in the download link and get a dmg)

Enjoy!

Or take absolutely no notice of it at all

The reality is that one particular Java runtime has been deprecated: the one that Apple write themselves. Java as a language will still be available, only it won’t be Apple that writes it and possibly it might be an optional download.

The confusion is because up until now there has really been only one Java runtime on the Mac, which Apple wrote themselves using code licensed from Sun. Now Apple has chosen to discontinue their own particular runtime, but this doesn’t mean that there won’t be any Java at all.

There are already alternatives, in particular the OpenJDK and SoyLatte variants; a little rough in places possibly, but they definitely work. Undoubtably in time they will improve and others will appear, including possibly an Oracle one.

Obviously it would have been nice to have the deprecation notice and an endorsement of another runtime made at the same time, but given how long it will be until the current runtime becomes unsupported, I’m not terribly concerned.

Also, whether such a future Java release has a native visual appearance is not of virtal importance. While the Apple Java team has made enormous efforts to get it to look and feel native, it takes quite a bit of work to create an application that looks seamless. The very first version of SQLEditor was a Java Swing application and although it looked fairly good, it was taking too much time making things match exactly. Switching it to a native cocoa application made my life much easier (but killed off any immediate hopes of a Windows version)

I think most people accept that Java Swing apps don’t look native and will accept that the visual appearance will differ.If you want a truly native feeling Java app in the future you should look at SWT or better Rococoa, not Swing.

What is important is that future Java runtimes don’t require X11 for Swing. But I’ve seen good progress by several projects towards this goal and I’m not worried about it either.

Ideally of course, Apple would release their Java Runtime as open source, but whether they are in a position to do that with respect to licensing is unclear.

Having seen the deprecation notice last week and been somewhat concerned, I’m now fairly confident about the future of Java on the Mac,

It appears that this is possibly influenced by the amazing success of the iPhone developer program, which is also $99.

Anything that makes it easier and cheaper for developers to develop applications is probably a good thing. Although obviously you only need this developer program if you need access to pre-releases of Mac OS X and the other benefits it provides. It isn’t now and never has been a required purchase.

They’re still upgrading the sites as I write this, so I haven’t seen all of the details yet, but definitely looking good.

[edited to correct information about the free online program]

• A rails migration is a ruby class which inherits from ActiveRecord::Migration and contains a method called up

The useful fact that I realized only after doing some ultimately unnecessary work today is that because the schema file contains a method call, it’s actually easier to extract the information from it than with a migration (which needs SQLEditor to figure out a class name and then call the up method)

Hopefully this new work will appear soon in SQLEditor

Unfortunately languages that aren’t C derived don’t offer #pragma, so I missed these little dividers

Then I noticed that a comment that contained FIXME had appeared in the list too, looking just as if it were a #pragma mark entry

Looking at the XCode documentation reveals that XCode will also search code comments for a range of keywords and use them to control entries in the function popup. And it will do this for Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby (as well as the C based C, Objective-C and C++).

This means I can write in other interesting languages and still get my function popup dividers.

Just prefix the comment line with one of the following:

• MARK:
• TODO:
• FIXME:
• !!!:
• ???

and the remainder of that line will appear in the list.

There is more in the Apple Xcode tools documentation

(It looks like there has been some discussion of this already (1,2,3)

Reggy

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.