Nick Bradbury

TopStyle 3.5: What to call the new "Preview Spy" feature?

The big addition in the upcoming TopStyle 3.5 is a "preview spy" feature which exposes an HTML tag's margins, padding and content box as you mouse over it in the preview. 

 Watch a Flash movie of this feature

Trouble is, I don't know what to call this feature.  "Preview spy" isn't exactly exciting - it's bland, whereas I think this feature is pretty cool.  CSSEdit for the Mac has a somewhat similar feature called "X-Ray," but I'm not wild about stealing the name from someone else's software.

Can anyone recommend a better name?

Update: OK, I've settled on the name "Box Spy" for this feature. Many thanks for all the great suggestions!

The Delphi Hour

I'll be the guest geek on today's "Delphi Hour" show.  If you're a Delphi developer (or even if you're not) and you'd like to tune in, Nick Hodges has the details.

What annoys you about TopStyle?

Now that I'm working on TopStyle again, I'm wondering what I can do to make it less annoying.

Every piece of software has annoyances - seemingly minor things that over time really get on your nerves, like:

• Constant dialog boxes asking you to confirm something you've confirmed 100 times before
• Settings that change behind your back
• Tasks which require too many keystrokes or mouse clicks
• Features which take a while to complete yet give no visual indicator telling you when they'll be done

So in addition to adding the usual bug fixes and new features to the next version of TopStyle, I'd also like to remove the things that annoy you. If there's something in TopStyle that makes you grind your teeth, please let me know by posting a comment here.

Extended Replace in TopStyle 3.5

One of the most popular features in HomeSite was "Extended Search and Replace," which enabled searching and replacing blocks of text across multiple files.  I remember hearing from countless customers who used HomeSite for this feature alone.

Pretty much every text editor had a similar feature, but HomeSite's was really easy to use, and it was extremely fast.  So it was no surprise when TopStyle customers who had switched from HomeSite requested the same feature in TopStyle.

I partially addressed this in TopStyle 3.10 by adding "Find in Files" (Shift+Ctrl+F), which improved upon HomeSite's "Extended Search" by adding regular expression matching. But as nice as this feature was, it only searched files.  The lack of similar replace feature has been a sore spot for some TopStyle users (including myself, to be honest).

So today I finally buckled down and added an "Extended Replace" feature to TopStyle 3.5 which makes HomeSite's look childish by comparison.  You can do things like:

• Replace only if the text occurs outside of an HTML tag
• Replace only in files that have been modified in a specific date range
• Replace only in files that have not been modified in a specific date range
• Include or exclude files based on their extension
• Save your search/replace operations so you can repeat them later

Here's a screenshot of how it looks so far:

I'm working on TopStyle (and you can be, too!)

I'm finally working on TopStyle again after waaayyy too much time away from it. 

I really am sorry that we've been so quiet about TopStyle.  As NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker explains in this forum post, we've spent quite a bit of time trying to find a new home for TopStyle, and we couldn't say much while conversations with potential buyers were going on.  Sill, I know we could've done a lot better communicating with TopStyle customers during this time, and I personally regret how we handled this situation.

Anyway, in the end we've decided to keep TopStyle as a NewsGator product, and our immediate goal is to release TopStyle 3.5 as soon as possible.  Version 3.5 will primarily be a bug fix and Vista-compatibility release, but I hope to sneak a few new features in, too :)

Once TopStyle 3.5 goes out, we'd like to begin work on TopStyle 4.0.  And this is where you come in: given all the activity around FeedDemon, it's unlikely that I'd have enough time to create a major release of TopStyle, so we're actively searching for a skilled Delphi developer to eventually take it over.  If you're interested, or you know someone who might be interested, please check out the job description for details on the position.

Perpetual Hosting

Dave Winer writes about "perpetual hosting" in this BBC article:

"I'd...like to be able to pay a web company, such as Amazon or Google, a one-time flat fee to host my content in perpetuity."

This is something I've thought a lot about, too.  I'd like this blog to outlive me so that when my kids have grown up, they'll be able to read my old posts to find out more about me.  Maybe they'd enjoy some of my goofy stories.  Or perhaps they'd appreciate forward-looking technical posts like this one.  And I'm sure they'd like to read about themselves. 

Right now, though, I have no guarantee that this can happen.  How can I be sure that what I write today can still be read by my children many years from now?

iPhone Disappointment

For quite some time, I've been wondering which platform I should take my development skills to next. Don't get me wrong - Windows development is still fun - but the world is moving under my feet, and it's past time I at least experimented with other platforms.

The most obvious choice would be to enter the world of web application development, but the idea of dealing with web server maintenance, etc., makes that choice far less appealing to me. Truth is, what I've really been wanting to do is try out mobile application development. It would be a unique challenge to create apps for a platform that enables access to a wealth of information whenever - and wherever - you need it.

But the existing mobile platforms and devices haven't impressed me. Mobile devices are still far too geeky for mainstream customers, but I've long assumed we'd eventually see one designed for non-geeks.

So when I first heard of the Apple iPhone, I was excited. Here was a user-friendly, stylish mobile device designed with people in mind. As my colleagues at NewsGator can attest, as soon as I saw the iPhone, I wanted to develop for it.

Then I read Apple's announcement at their developer conference that third-party iPhone development would be limited to apps designed to work inside the Safari browser. Apple can't promise that the iPhone will be secure and reliable unless they limit third-party apps to running inside the browser? What a cop-out.

No SDK. No access to local storage. How disappointing.

There are scores of developers looking for a new platform, and the iPhone could've been it - but at this stage, the iPhone doesn't offer me enough to invest time developing for it.

FeedDemon 2.5 Podcast

The week before FeedDemon 2.5 was announced, NewsGator's Leland Rucker interviewed me about its new features. If you'd like to listen in on the discussion, you can download the podcast here.

PS: Subscribe to the NewsGator Podcasts feed for more interviews with NewsGator developers.

FeedDemon 2.5: What else is there?

Over the past few days, I've highlighted some of the big additions to FeedDemon 2.5.  But as you can see from the release notes, there are a ton of other new features.  I can't possibly describe them all here, but there are a few I'd like to mention:

• "Dinosaur" report (lists feeds that haven't updated recently) [screenshot]
• "History of Auto-Discovered Feeds" (similar in concept to your web browser's history - shows feeds that have been auto-discovered while browsing inside FeedDemon) [screenshot]
• Ability to choose which feeds to show in the desktop alert (you'll love this if you rely on FeedDemon's popup desktop alert to tell you about new posts)
• Support for slash:comments (see the number of comments a post has)
• Synchronization of flagged items
• Dozens of performance improvements throughout

All in all, FeedDemon 2.5 is a significant release (it really should've been named FeedDemon 3.0), and I think it's a big improvement over previous versions.  But don't just take my word for it - check out what others are saying:

• CyberNet News
• Brad Feld
• Neville Hobson
• Glenn Slaven 
• Andrew Connell
• Graham Tucker
• Todd Mitchell

FeedDemon 2.5: Show me the video!

Online video has been taking off like crazy, but previous versions of FeedDemon have been stuck in the past because they prevented embedded videos from displaying in your subscriptions.  Luckily, FeedDemon 2.5 corrects this.  Now you can subscribe to video-enabled feeds and have their videos securely displayed within FeedDemon's newspaper view.

Which means that if you're viewing this in a FeedDemon 2.5 newspaper, you get to watch this completely irrelevant video of a guy failing to jump his car across the St. Lawrence river.