JGsoft Newsfeed

Updated: EditPad Pro 7.1.1

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0700

EditPad Pro 7.1.1 is now available for download.

While EditPad Lite is only officially supported on Windows, it runs well enough on Linux using WINE. Version 7.1.0 failed to run under WINE, crashing at startup. Version 7.1.1 fixes this. Double-clicking files on the Files Panel no longer causes an access violation when running under WINE.

A few other bugs were also fixed. A significant one was that when searching though the files on disk took long enough for a progress meter to appear, EditPad failed to close the progress meter after searching through all the files, making further interaction with EditPad impossible.

If you already purchased EditPad Pro 7.x.x, you can download this minor upgrade for free.
If you have EditPad Pro 4, 5, or 6, you can upgrade to version 7 at a special price.
Buy EditPad Pro now.
EditPad Pro version history.

Updated: EditPad Lite 7.1.1

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:00:00 +0700

EditPad Lite 7.1.1 is now available for download.

While EditPad Lite is only officially supported on Windows, it runs well enough on Linux using WINE. Version 7.1.0 failed to run under WINE, crashing at startup. Version 7.1.1 fixes this.

See the EditPad Lite version history for a complete list of fixes and improvements.

EditPad Lite is free for personal use. Business and government users can purchase a license.

Download EditPad Lite.

Updated: DeployMaster 4.0.5

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0700

DeployMaster 4.0.5 is now available for download. This release fixes a few more issues we missed in DeployMaster 4.0.x.

On the Media page you can specify a code signing certificate that DeployMaster should use to sign your installer, along with an option to also sign all .exe files that you added to your installer. If any of those .exe files cannot be signed, DeployMaster now adds them to the installer unsigned. The Build tab will still display an error message, but the error is no longer treated as fatal Not signing .exe files to be installed by the setup does not affect the security warnings that occur during installation at all.

If you select a conversation or message in DeployMaster's built-in user forum and press Ctrl+C, an URL pointing to that conversation or message is copied to the clipboard. If you paste that link into a message on the forum, it will now be highlighted as a link. Double-clicking the link will activate the message. The discussion links at the bottom of each help file topic now also open DeployMaster's forum.

DeployMaster uses a .chm file to provide context-sensitive help. This is the standard help system for modern Windows applications. Due to a bug in Internet Explorer 9, if a 64-bit application requests context-sensitive help using a .chm file, and you click on a link in that help file, the calling application will crash. To work around this, we've disabled context-sensitive help in the 64-bit version of DeployMaster if you have Internet Explorer 9 installed on your PC. Pressing F1 will still open the help file, but it will show the first page in the help file, rather than the page that describes the part of DeployMaster you're using.

On the Update page you can configure your installer to require a previous version of your application to be installed. This is useful for building "patch" installers that do not include the entire application, but only files that have changed since a given previous version. If you used this option in previous DeployMaster 4.0.x releases, the generated installer would crash upon startup. Version 4.0.5 restores this feature.

If you turn on the option to allow portable installations and the user clicks the Create Portable Installation button in the installer, then your installer will show a list of removable drives and a field to type in the name of the installation folder. Installers built with previous versions of DeployMaster ignored any drive letters the user added to the installation folder, always using the drive selected in the list. Installers built with DeployMaster 4.0.5 will select the drive in the list when the user types in an installation folder with a drive letter.

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

Updated: AceText 3.0.1

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 18:00:00 +0700

AceText 3.0.1 is now available for download. This release fixes a few issues we missed in AceText 3.0.0, last month's major upgrade.

When you click the X button to close AceText, it doesn't shut down completely. It keeps running in the background so that text you copy to the clipboard can be captured into the ClipHistory, and the AcePaste and AceType hotkeys continue to work. Version 3.0.0 failed to hide the AceText taskbar button in certain situations when you clicked the X button.

The Find First, Find Next, and Find Previous buttons on the Clipboard tab now scroll the text as necessary when finding a search match. Previously the Clipboard tab would find all search matches, but failed to scroll the text, making it look as if nothing was found if the part of the text that the match was found in was scrolled out of view.

If you select a conversation or message in AceText's built-in user forum and press Ctrl+C, an URL pointing to that conversation or message is copied to the clipboard. If you paste that link into a message on the forum, it will now be highlighted as a link. Double-clicking the link will activate the message. The discussion links at the bottom of each help file topic now also open AceText's forum.

AceText uses a .chm file to provide context-sensitive help. This is the standard help system for modern Windows applications. Due to a bug in Internet Explorer 9, if a 64-bit application requests context-sensitive help using a .chm file, and you click on a link in that help file, the calling application will crash. To work around this, we've disabled context-sensitive help in the 64-bit version of AceText if you have Internet Explorer 9 installed on your PC. Pressing F1 will still open the help file, but it will show the first page in the help file, rather than the page that describes the part of AceText you're using.

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

Updated: AceText 2.2.4

Mon, 5 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0700

AceText 2.2.4 is now available for download. This is the last release of AceText that is compatible with Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows NT4. It fixes 3 minor bugs:

Printouts were sometimes missing lines across page boundaries depending on whether you chose to print headers and/or footers.
Right-clicking on collection tabs did not show the context menu specific to the tab but instead showed AceText's main context menu (2.2.3 only).
Searching backwards did not always work correctly.

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

Updated: RegexBuddy 3.5.4

Fri, 4 Nov 2011 18:00:00 +0700

RegexBuddy 3.5.4 is now available for download.

The installer for the purchased version of RegexBuddy now allows you to create portable installations even when you don't have administrator rights on the PC you're running the installer on. You can create a portable install in any folder that you can write to, even if that folder is on a hard drive.

The regex \\n (literal backslash and literal n) is now converted properly when coping C-style or Java strings and when generating C or Java code snippets.

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: RegexMagic 1.2.4

Fri, 4 Nov 2011 18:00:00 +0700

RegexMagic 1.2.4 is now available for download.

The installer for the purchased version of RegexMagic now allows you to create portable installations even when you don't have administrator rights on the PC you're running the installer on. You can create a portable install in any folder that you can write to, even if that folder is on a hard drive.

Several fixes and improvements were made to the RegexMagic patterns that you use to build up regular expressions in RegexMagic:

Integer: Repeating a field that uses the Integer pattern without limiting the pattern to certain ranges and selecting a single integer format that does not use a format specifier resulted in invalid regular expressions.
National ID: US social security numbers now allow the full ranges 7xx and 8xx as the first 3 digits.
Text matched by other field: The drop-down list to select the other field did not list pattern fields that were nested inside the same alternation or sequence field as the field using the "text matched by other field" pattern.
URL: Unnecessary opening parentheses were generated, causing the regex to be broken, when setting "file names" to "specific file names only" or to "specific extensions only".

Major Upgrade: DeployMaster 4.0.0

Tue, 1 Nov 2011 18:00:00 +0700

DeployMaster 4.0.0 is now available for download. This is a major upgrade with significant changes and new features.

The big new feature in this major upgrade is full support for installing 64-bit applications. On the new Platform page, you can indicate whether your application is 32-bit, 64-bit, or both. On the Files and 3rd Party pages, you can specify for each file whether it is 32-bit, 64-bit, or both (neutral). This allows you to build a single installer that can deploy both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of your software. It also allows you to use a single DeployMaster script to create separate 32-bit-only and 64-bit-only installers for your application.

The new Platform page also allows you to specify which versions of Windows you want to allow your installer to run on. If your application does not support certain versions of Windows, you can make your installer show a message explaining that and prevent installation. Installers built with DeployMaster 4 can support Windows 98 and later. DeployMaster itself now requires Windows 2000 or later.

The Project and Files pages support a new app-specific folder %USERDATA% that defaults to %APPDATAROOT%\AppName for installing data files that the user is likely to modify after installation. On the Files page you can set your installer to grant write access to all users to the %USERDATA% folder or to any other app-specific folder. The new %FONTS% folder on the Files page allows you to install fonts that DeployMaster will automatically register to make them available to all applications.

Setups built with DeployMaster no longer show the black screen security prompt on Windows Vista and 7 when you first run them. This prompt now appears when the user clicks one of the buttons in the installer that starts the installation. This allows people without administrative rights to view the readme file and to create portable installations. The application to be run after installation as specified on the Finished page is now also run without administrator privileges. This option is intended to run the actual application after installation is complete. If you used the Finished page to run an executable or batch file that performed installation tasks, you will need to change your installer to use the new facility on the Files page to run executables. Those are run with administrator privileges (unless a portable install is created). Because the security prompt is now shown at a later stage, it is no longer sufficient to sign the final setup.exe. The actual installer embedded in the final setup.exe needs to be signed as well. DeployMaster can now automatically sign your installer and all executables in it using the Authenticode certificate that you specify on the Media page.

DeployMaster can now generate installers that are larger than 4 GB. Individual files that you add to the installer can also be larger than 4 GB. The new (theoretical) limit is 9 billion GB (2^63 bytes).

When including DeployMaster in an automated build, you can use the /q parameter in combination with /b to stop DeployMaster's GUI from appearing during the build. If your build tool collects tool output via standard I/O, you can use the new DeployMasterCmd.exe console application to invoke DeployMaster and have the build log output to the console or standard output.

If you have any comments or questions about all these new features, select Forum in the Help menu in DeployMaster to connect to the new user forum.

As you can see, this release brings significant changes. That's why it's numbered as a major upgrade. But the number of new features is closer to what you'd expect of a free minor upgrade from Just Great Software. That's why DeployMaster 4 is a free upgrade for all DeployMaster 3 users. Simply download and install it as you would any free minor upgrade.

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

What's Cooking: 64-bit Versions

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:32:10 +0700

For many years people have been asking us for 64-bit versions of our software. The answer was always that we were waiting for a 64-bit version of the Delphi compiler that we use, and that aside for a few minor issues, our 32-bit applications work just fine on all 64-bit versions of Windows.

Last month Embarcadero finally delivered the 64-bit Delphi compiler. I've been running it through its paces for the past two months. Everything is looking good so far. The plan for 64-bit versions of the Just Great Software products is as follows:

DeployMaster: Since 64-bit software requires a 64-bit installer, and we use DeployMaster to package all our software, we'll need a 64-bit version of DeployMaster before we can release 64-bit versions of any other products. This new version of DeployMaster is almost ready. It will be able to package the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of an application into a single installer, as well as 32-bit-only and 64-bit-only installers.
AceText: Because 64-bit Windows segregates 32-bit and 64-bit applications, the present 32-bit-only AceText is not capable of identifying 64-bit applications when run on 64-bit Windows. This means that you cannot configure application-specific settings in AceText for 64-bit applications. A 64-bit version of AceText will resolve this.
PowerGREP: Because 64-bit Windows segregates 32-bit and 64-bit applications, 32-bit applications can only load 32-bit DLLs, and 64-bit applications can only load 64-bit DLLs. PowerGREP's ability to use IFilter to search through files in proprietary formats is hampered by this. 64-bit Windows uses 64-bit IFilter DLLs which cannot be loaded by the 32-bit PowerGREP. A 64-bit version of PowerGREP will resolve this. Many PowerGREP uses also work with very large result sets. A 64-bit PowerGREP will be able to display more match results by being able to use all of your computer's RAM. The 32-bit version is limited to 3 GB per PowerGREP instance.
EditPad Pro: The 32-bit version of EditPad Pro is fully functional on 64-bit Windows. Because the 32-bit version can only address 3 GB of memory, working with huge files would be more comfortable with a 64-bit version that can use all of your computer's RAM. This will allow a larger "huge files threshold" in Options|Preferences|Files and larger undo buffers in Options|Preferences|System. It will also make it possible to make large numbers of changes in huge files, which EditPad Pro keeps in memory until you save the file.
RegexBuddy, RegexMagic, and HelpScribble: The 32-bit versions of these products are fully functional on 64-bit Windows. They generally need only a fraction of the RAM available to 32-bit applications. Because there are no significant benefits to having 64-bit versions of these products, these will remain 32-bit only for the time being.

The 64-bit DeployMaster will likely be released next month. We don't have a release schedule for the 64-bit versions of AceText, PowerGREP, and EditPad Pro yet. We're still waiting for 64-bit versions of 3rd party components used in PowerGREP and EditPad Pro. Hopefully we'll have more news on that next month.

Updated: PowerGREP 4.2.4

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:00:00 +0700

PowerGREP 4.2.4 is now available for download.

This release fixes a serious bug that under certain circumstances caused PowerGREP to lock up while updating the display of a large set of search results.

The XLS decoder was also improved, allowing PowerGREP to search through Excel files that it previously failed to read.

If you have already purchased PowerGREP 4, you can download this update for free.
Upgrade from PowerGREP 2.x or 3.x to 4.x.
Buy PowerGREP now.
Complete Version History.

Updated: HelpScribble 7.8.1

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:00:00 +0700

HelpScribble 7.8.1 is now available for download.

HelpScribble's HelpContext property editor now supports Delphi XE2 and C++Builder XE2. HelpScribble's installer will automatically install it if it detects that you have Delphi XE2 or C++Builder XE2 installed. HelpScribble's HelpContext property editor can assign HelpContext properties to controls in Win32 VCL applications, Win64 VCL applications, and FireMonkey applications (all platforms).

Delphi XE2 and C++Builder XE2 include a new framework called FireMonkey. This is an alternative to the VCL. Its main benefit is that it supports both Windows and OS X. FireMonkey controls have HelpContext properties just like VCL controls, and you can assign them using HelpScribble's HelpContext property editor. Unfortunately, the FireMonkey framework does not actually have a context-sensitive help system. FireMonkey itself does not use those HelpContext properties at all. If you want context-sensitive help in your FireMonkey application, you'll need to respond to F1 key presses in your own code. If you want to show a .chm file, call the HtmlHelp() function declared in the WinApi.Windows unit.

HelpScribble's Contents Editor now allows topics to be indented under another topic when compiling into HTML Help format. In the HTML Help file, topics that have topics under them will appear as headers that also show their topic when clicked on.

One bug was also fixed. Buttons are now correctly exported to web help.

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