Trouble with my keyboard (random uppercase, yikes) has been deviling me for the past week, and this morning as I started finally to get the Sapphire release together I realized I’d not included an automatic update system. So, the Sapphire release will be a couple days yet (keyboard willing).

The new Macs are looking very good to me right now — I’m just hoping that I can hold out until they ship with Leopard.

My birthday is tomorrow (Wednesday); the software will be coming next week; current Diamond users will see the update notice when they check for updates at launch or from the application menu. The new feature for Diamond 2.5 is a built in command to launch Sapphire, the lightweight document/project management app to be released next week in Beta. Sapphire will be available as a separate download for diamond users through the first few releases but will also be bundled with the 2.5 release package (also upgraded next week). Sapphire, like Diamond, is and will always be freeware.

The biggest news that will unfold in the coming month is that I’m splitting my site (on the back end) into two websites (integrated in design and somewhat integrated in function when necessary) divided between software (Diamond and the other gems) on the current site and my writing, music, and design on the new site, both accessed from the geoffreyalexander.com portal (which will actually be on the new site. Squarespace (my current web host) provides (for now) excellent tools for the discussion boards, RSS feeds in multiple flavors, multiple user management (coming soon to this site), FAQ (soon to be begun), site search, and so forth, so it will continue to play that role. For my personal journals and weblog, media publication site, and other purposes I will be engaging private server hosting, and building/managing my own server and databases. I feel this solution gives me, for now, the best of both worlds, and to the end user the schism should appear totally invisible.

Watch for the changes beginning (and the new software coming) in the next two weeks.

I’ve just finished a pre-Beta build of Sapphire, an application I’ve been working on to bring project, document, and workspace management to the Diamond environment. And it works with all applications’ documents, not just Diamond, so you can build you projects using a mix-and-match strategy. Component documents can be any documents you have, anywhere on your filesystem. Sapphire project files themselves can be components of other Sapphire project files, allowing you to build complex structures from Sapphire’s straight-forward database structure. Sapphire project files are Unicode format XML databases utilizing Apple’s Cocoa/Core Data technology, and can be easily parsed by any XML-aware application, allowing potentially infinite interoperability with other applications.

The pre-beta is now in the hands of my User #1 (Don Parr) who is doing a first review. Hopefully I can have the Beta in everyone’s hands for a better shake-out sometime in August.

Added the Icon for TeX documents, and noticed thereupon that I should revise the TEXT icon to match HIG standards that state the badge on doctype icons should state the file extension (rather than document type) and noticed further that all the icons for document types are showing some wear from the copy/paste operations used to create them so I’ll be redoing them all soon (I’m about ready to do Icons for Emerald and Sapphire and I do all these chores at once) but, anyway…

If you’ve been needing a TeX doc icon to go with your TeX documents, here it is.

(… I say minor feasture but if it’s what you’re looking for then no feature is minor :). In this case I added TeX Documents to the list of supported formats. .tex docs are really nothing more than plain text with a different extension, but this should save you some time renaming files if you use TeX.

I’ll have a Document Icon for it by the end of the week.

This release is about streamlining, simplifying, and reducing code-bloat; numerous improvements have been made in application size, memory footprint, speed, and responsiveness.

• Consolidated the saving of default window sizes with the saving of specific document window sizes. “Save Document Size” is now used for setting both the default size of new, “Untitled” windows (simply save one with this option after sizing it) and document windows on a per document basis. RTF, RTFD, MS Doc and Text documents created in other appplications and opened from disk, that have not had the option applied, can be quickly resized and tagged with the command; or, you can use the “Clone Contents” command which copies the contents in to a new “Untitled” window sized to the “Untitled” default. This also handles bugs introduced with the sizing code in the last release.

• “Retain Window Placement” is now the mandatory default and removed as an option. The alternative (Cascading Windows) could not be properly fixed to eliminate the bugs that were appearing with it, and is generally not useful anyway in most Diamond workspaces.

• Removed the “Properties” dialog. This is being moved and upgraded as part of the Document/Project Management module I’m working on now (which is where it belongs). If you have used this feature, the documents to which properties have been applied will still retain them, and this information will be valid in the Management module.