Things are really busy for me right now. I’ve just started two separate customer projects, sales of Killink CSV and SMTP Diagnostics are climbing, and I’ve been doing a lot of travel. But one thing has me really excited. I ordered a MacBook Pro and it’s expected to arrive in a couple of days.
The Association of Shareware Professionals is celebrating it’s 20th anniversary. During its 20 year history ASP has brought together many of the best software vendors in the business.
As part of the 20th Anniversary Celebration, ASP has negotiated great deals on some quality software title including my favorite .csv editor and my favorite automated build tool.
Visit the ASP’s 20th Anniversary page for the complete list of software titles and discounts.
The last 4 weeks have been crazy, which is why I have not blogged much over the last month. For starters, I put in a lot of time on Killink CSV, the new csv editor from White Peak Software, over the last 4 to 5 weeks. Last month I rushed out release 1.3 to address some capability problems with Windows Vista but it turned out to cause more problems. That will teach me to rush out a release without proper testing. Good news is a lot of additional enhancements have been made to Killink CSV and today version 1.4 is finally ready for download.
Now that version 1.4 has been released I should be able to focus time on new features such as search and replace. Another new feature I’m looking forward to is file extension association with Killink CSV. This has always been a trivial task under Windows but Windows Vista makes it a bit more difficult, hence the delay. Still, I’m looking forward to this new feature.
It hasn’t been all work for me over the last 4 weeks. I did take time off for NASCAR weekend in Loudon NH. I knew I would have fun but I didn’t know I would have as much fun as I did. It was a blast. Everyone should spend at least one weekend camping in an RV and watching NASCAR races, even if you are not a NASCAR fan.
The server hosting thecave.com and whitepeaksoftware.com is moving to a new data center on Saturday, July 7. Because of this move thecave.com and whitepeaksoftware.com will be down for approximately 3 to 4 hours starting at 11:00 p.m. MST (GMT -7).
Today I discovered a new problem in Killink CSV, the .csv editor I have been working on. Killink CSV has 2 general options, “Remember column widths” and “First row is read-only”. “Remember column widths” has a problem with hidden columns when the “First row is read-only” is turned on. Killink CSV will ignore the hidden columns when populating the first row causing column headers to appear under the wrong columns.
The second problem is more serious. The option “First row is read-only” causes the program to report an unhandled error under certain circumstances when more than one file is open at a time.
Fixes for these problems will be available in a few days. Meantime if you are editing .csv files with Killink CSV I suggest you turn off these options until version 1.4 is released.
The Support Forums at White Peak Software are down due to some
I’m happy to annouce the release of Killink CSV v1.2, the spreadsheet application dedicated to delimited text files. Version 1.2 is a FREE upgrade for all licensed users.
Download Killink CSV at:
http://www.whitepeaksoftware.com/killink-csv-download.aspx
What’s New
* Adds support for history, undo and redo actions
* Insert new rows
* Insert new columns
* Selected row column header highlighting
* Unsaved changes indiciator
* Select entire row by clicking row header
* Select entire column by clicking the column header
* Delete entire rows
* Delete entire columns
* Insert / delete cells
* Added popup cell editor (click the ellipses button at end of cell text or press Ctrl+Enter when a cell is highlighted)
* Right mouse click cell for fast access to common actions
* Fixed auto check for update
* Minor bug fixes and enhancements
* Fixed minor memory leak
I posted the following in the Killink CSV support forum but decided it might be helpful if posted here to:
Starting with Killink CSV v1.2 add cell values are formatted as text. This is a change from previous versions which used a general format similar to the one found in Excel.
The problem with the general format is that certain values are displayed in a format different then the format used in the actual file. For example, using the general format the value 01970 is displayed as 1970. Notice the leading zero is removed. With a text format the value 01970 is displayed as 01970. Changing to the text format means you will see the value as it is found in the file, which in my opinion is a good thing.
This leads me to the question, do you want the ability to change the format of cells?
I see some advantages to this. For example, by allowing formatting you could easily convert dates from a Month Day Year format to Year Month Day. Is this something Killink CSV users would find useful?
Earlier this week CodeGear released Update 1 for Delphi 2007. I run Delphi 2007 on my laptop in a VMware virtual machine with XP as the guest OS. Update 1 installed without a problem. It took longer than expected, about 45 minutes, but the wait was worth the update.
There are many fixes and improvements in Update 1 but the one I noticed right away was the improvements to the online help. In March I complained that many Delphi routines were not indexed in the online help. Update 1 fixes this problem which means I no longer need to refer back to BDS 2006 help.
Other Delphi news this week…CodeGear as published the Delphi Roadmap. Highlander is still scheduled for release later this year. Highlander will combine Delphi.NET, Delphi Win32, and C++ Builder into the 2007 RAD Studio, and .NET 2.0 support be provided.
Most interesting to me, however, is the release of Tiburon, which is planned for release during the first half of 2008. This release will provide Unicode support throughout. This is huge for me since I need to provide Unicode support in my native Windows based application.
The latest beta release of Killink CSV v1.2 has been posted. Feel free to test the release and post your comments. If all goes well the final v1.2 release will be posted next week.