Cocoal.icio.us 1.0b17
If you use Cocoal.icio.us and haven’t looked at its changelog recently, you may be interested to know that I’ve actually released several updates I never quite got around to mentioning on my weblog. Here are some of the more interesting changes I put in between version 14 and 17 (which went up this afternoon):
- Added support for NetNewsWire 2’s External Weblog Editor Interface. This was a feature I probably wouldn’t have thought of myself, but I put it in at Fraser Speirs’ suggestion, and now that it’s in I find it really useful. I think Brent Simmons has really done the whole Mac RSS/weblog developer community a favor by establishing a standard for that sort of interchange.
- Added the ability to edit existing posts (something I found myself sorely missing in my day-to-day use of Cocoal.icio.us). With this addition, I think Cocoal.icio.us becomes significantly more usable as an alternative interface to del.icio.us.
- Added a preference and keyboard modifier to cause links to be opened in the default browser in the background. Now, if you hold down option while double clicking on a post table row, or pressing the right arrow key while the post table has focus, the post’s URL will be opened in the default browser but the browser will not become the active application. The opposite is true if you hold down option while the “Open links in browser in background” preference is enabled.
- Worked on making the app more usable from the keyboard (thanks to reader xTina for getting me to think in this direction). Changed the initially focused control of the main window to the search field. Changed the tab order so that the web preview pane is skipped (tabbing order is now: search field, tag list, post list, then back to search field). Also made the selection of the initially focused control in the posting interface smarter (the description field is now focused initially if a URL is found on the pasteboard).
- Changed the date display so that the date format as specified in the International preference pane is honored (thanks to Jonas Rabbe for feedback on this).
- Fixed lots of bugs, including a particularly embarassing one that prevented the last tag from being displayed in the tag list (thanks to reader Zach for pointing this out) and a bunch of problems with URL encoding (thanks to George Temple and Cliff Mees for help on those).
Admittedly, progress has slowed a bit lately, and will probably continue to be somewhat slow for awhile. If I haven’t addressed your favorite annoyance about Cocoal.icio.us yet, feel free to remind me in the comments (I use the same “hipster bug tracking system” Joshua mentions in the comments on 43 Folders’ “Hipster PDA” post). I still plan to tackle some of the larger plans I have for Cocoal.icio.us (full text search, etc.), but for now I’m probably going to have to content myself with doing opportunistic little fixes as time allows (my next priority, by popular demand, will be to add the ability to hide the preview pane).