Another day, another beta…

Neu 1.2b2 fixes some issues with 1.2b1, and adds some additional features.

• Added “Keep Window Centered” option.
• Fixed keyboard shortcut preferences.
• Neu now spots if the templates directory is deleted whilst it is running - it will recreate the directory and fill it with the default templates.
• Improved window and grid appearance by adding some subtle gradients.
• Grid items now have tooltips with full name of the template.
• Added userName and userFullName to substitution variables. Added some more text filters to convert MixedCaps text - useful for coding templates.
• Added an example template for an objective-c header file, which illustrates how you can modify the name of the new file to format it to suit your coding conventions.

Known Issues

This version has a few issues that I know about.

Due to a bug in sandboxing, when overwriting an existing document you will be asked “Do you want to replace?” but if you say OK the creation will fail. The workaround for now is simply to give the new document a different name. Neu will always default to a unique name for the file, so this shouldn’t affect many people.

Another issue is that user guide doesn’t show properly at the moment. This is actually another Sandboxing issue, but it’s probably a good thing as the user guide hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes in Neu 1.2!

Hot off the presses is a early beta of Neu 1.2.

Warning! This is an early version, and there are some known problems, so please don’t use it unless you are prepared for a bumpy ride.

The major changes in this version revolve around some upcoming security changes that Apple are making.

From November onwards, applications in the Mac App store must use something called Sandboxing. This is a system which asks applications to deliberately limit what they can do - for example which areas of the disk they can write to - to the smallest set of things that they need to do. The idea behind this is that if something nasty manages to hijack an application, it will be able to do less damage since it won’t have complete access to the machine.

In theory this is a nice system, but in practise it imposes some limits on applications which can cause applications like Neu some difficulty. In particular, it means that in some cases Neu can’t write new files to a directory unless it shows you a “Save As” dialog.

For this reason the Neu user interface has changed a bit.

Using Drag & Drop

The biggest change is that you can now use drag & drop to drag items directly out of the templates window and onto the Finder.

For people who like using the mouse/trackpad, I’d suggest that this is probably now the best way to use Neu. The reason for this is that when you drag items directly into the Finder, there won’t be any Sandboxing issues. If you set the preferences accordingly, you won’t have to go via a “Save As” dialog.

You can also use drag & drop to drag things into the Neu templates window - when you do this it will take a copy of the dragged items and add them to its templates list.

Using Menus & Keyboard

The old ways of working with Neu via menus are still there. You can still set a keyboard shortcut to bring the template list up, and you should be able to use the keyboard to select a template and create a document.

The only change is that sometimes you don’t get the choice to skip the “Save As” dialog. If you look in the preferences you’ll see that the preference relating saving has been renamed to reflect this difference. It now says “Hide when possible” to reflect the fact that sometimes it isn’t possible!

Using Services

When you launch Neu via the services, the Sandboxing system doesn’t need to force you to use a “Save As” dialog, so again this way of working should remain unchanged.

Other Changes

Neu now requires the 64-bit version of Mac OS X 10.6. This shouldn’t affect many people, as most of the machines that are capable of running 10.6 are 64-bit already. However, there are a few rare machines that run 10.6 but only in 32-bit mode. I’m afraid that Neu 1.2 won’t work on these machines. Neu 1.1.1 will continue to work fine though.

The template list now refreshes itself automatically if you change the contents of the underlying templates folder, so I’ve removed the Re-scan menu item.

The templates window UI now allows switching between list and grid view directly from within the window. It remembers the way you left it last time, so I’ve removed the corresponding view preference. The template window also has a “Open after creation” checkbox on it now, which you can use to change whether or not you want to open the resulting document after it is created.

I’ve re-organised some of the other preferences - a couple of more technical ones are now on a panel called “Advanced”, and some of the other Appearance and Behaviour options have been merged back into a General panel.

The small status menu icon is now see through like other icons!

If you only want to use Neu with a single template, we simplify the menus, and we don’t bother showing the “choose template” dialog. This streamlines things.

Still To Come

Some more features that I’m hoping to get into 1.2:

• drag & drop to rearrange the order of template items
• individual per-template preferences and keyboard shortcuts
• more text substitutions
• auto-centring the templates window

Known Issues

This version has a few issues that I know about.

Due to a bug in sandboxing, when overwriting an existing document you will be asked “Do you want to replace?” but if you say OK the creation will fail. The workaround for now is simply to give the new document a different name. Neu will always default to a unique name for the file, so this shouldn’t affect many people.

Another issue is that user guide doesn’t show properly at the moment. This is actually another Sandboxing issue, but it’s probably a good thing as the user guide hasn’t been updated to reflect the changes in Neu 1.2!

I’ve been doing a fair amount of contracting recently, including this crazy project, so development of Elegant Chaos products has had to take a bit of a back seat.

Happily though, I’m now in the position to spend some time on it again, and now that Ambientweet has made it to 1.0, the next update on the agenda is Neu 1.2.

This update of Neu is going to be quite substantial, not least because Apple are about to change the rules on how an application in the App store is allowed to interact with the Finder and the file system. This is going to require me to change the user interface a bit. There is a slight danger that it’s going to get a bit more clumsy, and I may have to permanently enable some settings that have until now been optional, such as whether you get asked for the file name / location when making a new item.

I’m hoping to have a beta version ready for release in a few days, and I’m especially keen to get some feedback on this version.

If you’d like to test it, please either check the beta software page, or get in touch.

If you have purchased an App Store version of Neu (and have updated to version 1.1.1), you should now be able to download betas from this website and test them. Although they have come from this site and not the App store, they ought to recognise that you have had a paid version of Neu on your computer from the App store, and won’t annoy you with reminders.

As always, if you have any problems with this, or anything else to do with Neu, please get in touch and I’ll try to help. Likewise if you have any feedback or feature suggestions for version 1.2 or beyond.

One of the most common problems I find when switching between testing on the simulator and testing on the device is the fact that the device’s file system is case-sensitive, whereas the simulator uses the user’s default file system which generally isn’t.

This can throw up mysterious bugs where things appear to work fine on the simulator, and then fail unexpectedly on the device because one or more files are actually being referred to by the wrong names (or rather, the right names, in the wrong case).

It occurs to me that the simulator could instead create and mount a private DMG disk image to use as the simulated device’s disk. It would then be able to format this image using a case-sensitive file system, which might provide a more realistic simulation of an actual device’s behaviour.

For what it’s worth, I’ve filed an enhancement request.

Hurrah!

After a beta period even longer than Apple’s iOS 5 (well, maybe), I’m pleased to announce that Ambientweet 1.0 has been released, and can be downloaded from the Mac App store.

As this version still has relatively modest functionality, and as I’m mostly interested in getting some user feedback, I’ve decided that it will initially be available for free.

Eventually I plan to start charging, but of course if you grab it from the store now, you will be able to get any future updates to this version for free too.