JGsoft Newsfeed

Updated: DeployMaster 3.2.0

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:00:00 +0700

DeployMaster 3.2.0 is now available for download. This release brings a few minor fixes and improvements.

Two new named folders are now supported. %COMMONDOCUMENTS% can be used to install document and data files that are shared between all users on a PC. It translates to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents on Windows XP and to C:\Users\Public\Public Documents on Vista. %LOCALAPPDATAROOT% can be used to install user-specific data files and settings that should not become part of the user's roaming profile. It translates to C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data on Windows XP and to C:\Users\username\AppData\Local on Vista.

Handling of 3rd party setups was improved. If a 3rd party setup does not specify a download URL, installation detection file, or installation detection registry key, and the 3rd Party setup is not included in the installation package created by DeployMaster, then the installation package no longer prompts that the 3rd party setup needs to be installed. Confirming the installation by checking a registry value now works correctly. Previously, only checking a registry key without checking a value worked correctly. Installers that specify 3rd party setups now work correctly when using the /silent command line parameter. Previously, such installers would fail to install anything when the /silent parameter was used.

If you have already purchased DeployMaster, you can download this free update for free.
Buy DeployMaster now.
Complete Version History.

New: Regular Expressions Cookbook

Wed, 27 May 2009 18:00:00 +0700

Regular Expressions Cookbook, written by myself and Steven Levithan, is now shipping. The book covers the regular the regular expression flavors .NET, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PCRE, Python, and Ruby, and the programming languages C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET. After a quick introduction, the book starts with a detailed regular expression tutorial which equally covers all 7 regex flavors. That chapter is followed by a detailed guide how to implement regular expressions in your source code, again covering the 8 programming languages equally. These chapters too are presented in cookbook format. You can easily pick out the task you want to accomplish when creating a regular expression of your own, and when you want to do something with a regex in your source code. While there's some repetition, particularly in the programming guide, because of our goal of equal coverage, the benefit is that you can easily skip the parts on programming languages you're not interested in, in true cookbook style.

The remaining chapters, over half of the book, present real-world problems, and how to solve them with regular expressions. These problems range from very simple problems and everyday regex tasks, to some complex problems that stretch the limits of what you can do with regular expressions, but show how a regex-based solution is often much quicker than doing the same in procedural code, particularly if you only need to do the job once. All the real-world problems also have solutions for all regex flavors. A few solutions add procedural code to make up for missing regex features, such as JavaScript lacking lookbehind. The book does not cover regex flavors with limited features such as the venerable POSIX standard. We didn't want to put those flavors on the cover and then disappoint readers by saying "can't be done with this limited flavor" for half of the recipes in the book.

If you use regular expressions with the latest versions of PowerGREP, EditPad Pro or AceText, you can use pretty much any of the regular expressions presented in the book. These products use a custom regex flavor that is a fusion of the features found in the flavors covered in Regular Expression Cookbook. RegexBuddy 3 emulates all the flavors in the book. Older versions of these products are based on PCRE 4, without Unicode support.

Regular Expression Cookbook targets people with regular expression skills ranging from zero to upper intermediate, who want to learn about regular expressions for the first time, or sharpen their skills to become experts. Except for the chapter on programming languages, most of the recipes in the book don't require programming skills to implement the solutions in EditPad Pro, PowerGREP, or any other text editor or search tool that uses one of the book's regular expression flavors. The programming chapter assumes you're familiar with all the basic features and syntax of your programming language, but it doesn't assume you've ever used regular expressions in your source code.

Order Regular Expressions Cookbook from Amazon.com. Free shipping to the USA.

Order Regular Expressions Cookbook from Amazon.co.uk. Free shipping to the UK.

Order Regular Expressions Cookbook from Amazon.fr. Free shipping to France and Belgium.

Order Regular Expressions Cookbook from Amazon.de. Free shipping to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.

Updated: HelpScribble 7.7.6

Thu, 14 May 2009 18:00:00 +0700

HelpScribble 7.7.6 is now available for download.

This version brings a number of minor fixes and improvements in compiling into HTML Help format. Broken links indicated at the bottom of the help compiler error log now mention the topic the broken link was found in. Compiling a help file with a button that specifies a non-existent topic ID no longer aborts the compilation with a "no such topic" error. Instead, the broken button is indicated at the bottom of the help compiler's error log. If a topic has its context string set to "prn", "con", or "aux", HelpScribble will no longer fail to compile into HTML Help format with an error that the file could not be created. (Yes, the ghost of DOS lives on, even in Vista.)

Importing WinHelp projects no longer fails if the HPJ file specifies an invalid path to the RTF file. HelpScribble now looks for the RTF file in the same folder as the HPJ file rather than complaining the path to the RTF file is invalid.

If you have already purchased helpscribble, you can download this update for free.
Buy helpscribble now.
Complete version history.

More Generous Upgrade Policy

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:00:00 +0700

Previously, the upgrade policy for Just Great Software products was free minor upgrades for the version that you purchased (without a limit in time), and free major upgrades up to 3 months after your purchase. The 3-month period coincided with our 3-month money-back guarantee.

Now, the upgrade policy is still free minor upgrades for the version that you purchased (still without a time limit), but free major upgrades for up to 12 months after your purchase, instead of only 3 months. The 3-month money-back guarantee remains unchanged.

This change in policy is retroactive. If we were to release a major upgrade tomorrow 23 April 2009, anybody who purchased the product on or after 23 April 2008 would get the major upgrade for free.

What is also unchanged is that if you get a major upgrade for free, you also get all free minor updates that follow the major upgrade, just like people who purchase the major upgrade or buy the product for the first time do. And if we release a major upgrade less than 12 months after you buy a major upgrade, you also get the next major upgrade free, as people who buy the product for the first time do.

All in all, this makes the Just Great Software upgrade and money-back policies some of the most generous in the software industry, short of giving it all away for free.

Updated: RegexBuddy 3.3.0

Wed, 8 Apr 2009 18:00:00 +0700

RegexBuddy 3.3.0 is now available for download. This free update brings quite a number of fixes and improvements, and support for two new programming languages.

The two new programming languages are Delphi Prism and Groovy. Delphi Prism is CodeGear's new version of Delphi for the .NET framework. Delphi Prism supports multi-line double-quoted strings in addition to the traditional single-quoted Pascal strings. There are new "Delphi Prism string" items in the Copy and Paste menus that support these two string styles. The "Pascal-style string" item was renamed to "Delphi string". It still supports the single-quoted Pascal-style strings used by Delphi for Win32 and other versions of Pascal. Since Delphi Prism is based on .NET, it uses the .NET regex flavor. On the Use tab, you can select Delphi Prism to generate code snippets using System.Text.RegularExpressions using the Delphi Prism syntax. Though CodeGear is no longer shipping the Delphi for .NET compiler that was included with Delphi 8, 2005, 2006, and 2007, you can still select Delphi for .NET on the Use tab in RegexBuddy.

Groovy is a programming language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It's intent is to be largely compatible with Java, and at the same time make Java programming more agile. Groovy sports five different string styles. Strings can be delimited with one single or double quote, or with three single or double quotes. Backslashes and quotes must be escaped. Using three quotes allows the string to span multiple lines. The 5th string style uses forward slashes as the delimiters, and requires only forward slashes to be escaped. RegexBuddy has new "Groovy string" items in the Copy and Paste menus that support these 5 string styles. When copying a regular expression, RegexBuddy will use the string style that requires the least characters to be escaped, depending on your regular expression. Triple-quoted strings are used for multi-line regular expressions. On the Use tab, you can select Groovy to generate code snippets that use Groovy's special syntax for instantiating java.util.regex.Pattern and java.util.regex.Matcher objects. Unlike the Java code snippets, these don't include exception handlers. You can use these code snippets for quick code, and the Java code snippets (which also work with Groovy) for code that must be robust. Or, you can use the provided Groovy and Java templates to create your own source code templates to suit your own coding style. (You can create new templates for any language, as long as RegexBuddy supports its regex flavor and string style.)

You can now follow the RegexBuddy user forums in your favorite RSS reader. First, use RegexBuddy 3.3.0 to connect to the forums by clicking the Login button on the Forum tab. Then, click the Feed button. You can create a variety of feeds to follow the whole forum, or only the topics that you're interested in. The feed can include the full text of each message, or only the headings. Either way, the RSS feed will have special links that you can click to launch RegexBuddy and see the conversation inside RegexBuddy. You'll need to do this when you want to download attachments (as you have to open those in RegexBuddy anyway), and when you want to reply to a message.

In the help file, you'll see a link at the bottom of each topic that offers a way to discuss that topic on the forum. Clicking this link will display the ongoing conversation on that topic, or ask you if you want to start a conversation of that topic. If you do so, please restrict your message to the help topic you just read. If you want to discuss other things too, simply start more than one conversation.

The box for typing in your forum message now has a context menu with the usual cut, copy, and paste commands. The list of messages in a conversation now shows both the date the message was first posted, and the date it was last edited by its author. Previously, only the last edited date was shown. That made it sometimes confusing to follow the course of the conversation when people edited their messages after others had already chimed in. Messages posted or edited with older versions of RegexBuddy will also show both dates in RegexBuddy 3.3.0.

When you right-click on the replacement text, you'll see three new items in the Insert Token submenu. You can insert the non-printables Tab, CR, and LF. You can also select ASCII or Unicode characters from a grid. Depending on the replacement text flavor you're working with, RegexBuddy inserts a character escape such as \xFF, \uFFFF, or \x{FFFF}, or the character itself.

The Insert Token menu items to insert ASCII and Unicode characters into the regular expression are now always available, even if the flavor does not support ASCII or Unicode escapes. For those flavors, the character(s) you selected are inserted literally.

If you place the cursor at the end of the line in the debugger, and you scroll vertically using the scrollbar, RegexBuddy now automatically scrolls the view horizontally too, to keep the ends of as many lines as possible visible. This makes it much easier to track the progress of your regular expression through the file. The debugger now has stricter catastrophic backtracking detection than normally used by the regex engine in RegexBuddy and other Just Great Software products. This makes sure it doesn't run out of memory. Catastrophic backtracking causes excessive memory usage in the debugger, because the debugger has to keep track of all steps of the matching process. The normal regex engine uses very little memory, even in case of catastrophic backtracking, because it immediately discards backtracking positions that can no longer lead to a match.

The responsiveness of the Test when editing the test subject was improved significantly. Previously, there would be a noticeable delay with each keystroke while highlighting matches or automatically updating the results if the regular expression was complex. Now, the match attempt is aborted and restarted instantly with each keystroke, even if the regular expression exhibits catastrophic backtracking. Because of this improvement, the 2-second delay in updating highlighted regex matches when editing the regular expression is no longer necessary to maintain responsiveness. Now, the highlighted regex matches are updated right away. If the regular expression is complex, the highlighting may disappear for a moment, but it will never hold up your keystrokes.

When the test results are automatically updated (because you turned on that option under the List All or Replace buttons on the Test tab), RegexBuddy now keeps the same line visible instead of scrolling the results back to the top. The message "The regular expression does not match the test subject" in the test results is now followed by the notice "Because you set the test scope to line by line, RegexBuddy will not find any regex matches that span across lines" if the test scope is set to "line by line", and the regular expression includes tokens that can match line breaks.

RegexBuddy 3.2.1 had a regression that caused it to lose its settings on the GREP tab when you closed RegexBuddy. Version 3.3.0 will preserve them once again, if you left that option turned on in the preferences. PHP preg strings using paired regex delimiters (), {}, [], and <> and Perl operators that have flags other than /ismx are now pasted correctly. On the Use tab, escaped spaces and hash symbols in free-spacing regular expressions no longer lose their backslashes. Regular expressions using Unicode properties are now properly converted when Java is regex flavor used by the programming language selected on the Use tab.

A series of other minor improvements and fixes were made as well. You can find the complete version history on RegexBuddy's web site.

If you have already purchased or upgraded to RegexBuddy 3, you can download this free update for free.
If you own RegexBuddy 2, you can upgrade to version 3 at a special price.
Buy RegexBuddy now.
Complete version history.

Updated: JGCSCSE 3.1.3

Mon, 6 Apr 2009 18:00:00 +0700

If you own EditPad Pro 6, PowerGREP 3, or RegexBuddy 3, you can now download version 3.1.3 of the JGsoft Custom Syntax Coloring Scheme Editor. With this tool you can adapt the syntax coloring in these applications, and even create new schemes for previously unsupported programming languages and file formats.

This release fixes two bugs. When deleting a subscheme, references to the subscheme immediately before it were removed, instead of references to the deleted subscheme. Editing a regex via RegexBuddy did not enable the Save button.

Updated: JGFNSE 1.1.3

Mon, 6 Apr 2009 18:00:00 +0700

If you own EditPad Pro 6, you can now download version 1.1.3 of the JGsoft File Navigation Scheme Editor. This is the tool that you can use to create your own file navigation schemes. You can select them in Options, Configure File Types, Syntax & Navigation. A file navigation scheme is needed to bring the File Navigator in the View menu to life.

This release fixes two bugs. Deleting the first node of an element caused the scheme editor to get stuck on access violation errors if that node had a sibling node (which becomes the first node after the first node is deleted). If an element had its Layout Mode set to "detail the match with a layout", and the layout to use was set to the same layout as the one containing the element, the file navigation scheme would cause the scheme editor or EditPad to keep running the scheme until it runs out of memory. Now, the scheme editor will show an error explaining that this can't be done.

Updated: AceText 2.1.6

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +0700

AceText 2.1.6 is now available for download.

This release fixes one bug introduced in version 2.1.5. The Find First, Find Previous, and Find Next buttons triggered an access violation error when not using regular expressions. The error did not cause AceText to crash or malfunction, but did get annoying very quickly.

If you have already purchased AceText, you can download this free update for free.
Buy AceText now.
Complete Version History.

Updated: EditPad Lite and Pro in Italian

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:52:13 +0700

Thanks to the hard work of Marco Carai, the latest versions of EditPad Lite and Pro are once again available in the Italian language. If you have previously purchased EditPad Pro 6, you can download the Italian version (or any other language version) with the user ID you already have.

If you're still using EditPad Pro 5 because you were waiting for version 6 to become available in Italian, you can still upgrade to version 6 at the discounted price. The purchase process will be in English, and the download link on the confirmation page will give you the English version. To get the Italian version, go to the Italian download page after buying the upgrade.

As a small company, we do not have the resources to translate our software into many languages. We therefore rely on volunteers to make the translations for us. If you would like to translate EditPad into your language, please send a note to the EditPad technical support address.

Tips & Tricks: Make Sure Your Web Site Is Always Displayed With The Right Characters

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +0700

EditPad 6.4.5 has a new feature that can automatically fix HTML meta tags that indicate the wrong text encoding. Previous versions of EditPad would complain about incorrect meta tags, but not offer to fix them.

Placing the right meta tag in your HTML files makes sure your web site is displayed with the proper character set or script on any computer. You can read a detailed article on HTML file encodings, with instructions for EditPad Lite and Pro, on the Micro-ISV.asia blog.

Updated: PowerGREP 3.5.2

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +0700

PowerGREP 3.5.2 is now available for download.

This release fixes an issue that we missed in January's release. PowerGREP 3.5.1 would hang trying to convert certain .doc files that previous versions handled just fine. In PowerGREP 3.5.2, we've reverted the decoder for MS Word files to the one used in PowerGREP 3.5.0.

One additional improvement was made. In the File Selector, toggling the "search archives" button now immediately updates the tick marks that indicate which files and folders are included in the search in the files and folders tree.

If you have already purchased PowerGREP, you can download this free update for free.
Upgrade from PowerGREP 2.x to 3.x.
Buy PowerGREP now.
Complete Version History.

Updated: EditPad Lite and Pro 6.4.5

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:00:00 +0700

EditPad Lite and Pro version 6.4.5 are now available for download. This release fixes a few issues that we missed in last week's release.

The main reason for this quick update is that EditPad 6.4.4 introduced a new bug that made it impossible to save empty files. An access violation error appeared if you tried. The error didn't have any side effects other than making it impossible to save empty files. Saving a blank file right after opening a new tab in EditPad can be useful because it gives the new tab a name. That way you don't end up with lots of Untitled tabs.

While we were at it, a few other issues were fixed too. Incremental search is now more reliable. Going back through the search by backspacing the search term now properly scrolls the editor to show the search result you're going back to. If you have the "all files" checkbox turned on, and you have some files in text mode and others in hex mode, the incremental search will no longer try to move from a text file into a hexadecimal file or vice versa. Doing so caused access violation errors in previous versions of EditPad.

The Fold All command in the Fold menu will no longer reduce the entire file to a single line when there is a folding range that spans the entire file. The file navigation schemes that add automatic folding ranges will no longer add a range that spans the entire file either.

If you already purchased EditPad Pro 6.x.x, you can download this minor upgrade for free.
If you have EditPad Pro 4 or 5, you can upgrade to version 6 at a special price.
Buy EditPad Pro now.
Download EditPad Lite.
Complete version history.