TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – For the past several years, I’ve switched from one software development platform to another. I’ve written code in PHP, Visual Basic .Net, Objective-C and Swift. Switching from one development platform to another can be quite confusing, at least, to me. Maybe, I’m too old for that. It’s very important for me to store code snippets under different categories so that I can find and then retrieve them quickly whenever I need them. That’s why I’ve developed CodeBlue.

It’s been more than four years since I introduced the first version of CodeBlue. The first major overhaul was made about sixteen months. Yet, it still requires a major overhaul because it can act strangely under macOS 10.12 Sierra. More specifically, IKImageBrowser does not appear to work properly when one tries to create a code group. Well, finally… It was a long road because I dealt with a memory leak for a week. I submitted the second major overhaul to Mac App Store several minutes ago. The application name is of course CodeBlue 3.  

Tom Bluewater

Tom Bluewater

What’s new?

1. The application uses Regular Expression to identify group tags to highlight.
2. The application uses NSToken objects for group tags.
3. The user can import a text file with comma-separated strings to create a list of tags to highlight.
4. The user can now run a search with a key phrase across all groups.
5. The application is 100% compatible with macOS 10.12 Sierra.
6. Additional three dozen group icons are available.
7. Old data files from CodeBlue 2 are supported.

Features

1. Record programming code snippets under different groups.
2. Attach one or more URLs to each code snippet as references.
3. Create a list of tags to syntax-highlight for a given group.
4. Choose one of nearly 200 icons to characterize a group.
5. Highlight the names of important code snippet titles.
6. Local search: Narrow the list of code snippets with a key phrase under the selected group.
7. Global search: List code snippets across all groups containing a key phrase.
8. Locate a specific key phrase within the selected code snippet.
9. Save a code snippet as a data file so that you can recover the same code snippet with a remote computer.
10. Save the entire dataset as a backup data file to your disk. Recover data from a backup data file.
11. Create backup data files internally. Recover data from an internal backup data file.
12. Save data for the selected group as an XML-formatted text file to your disk.
13. Replace a group of key phrases (up to 10) for the selected code snippet with another.
14. Select a window color from a list of more than five dozen colors.
15. Select a family font name and text size for showing code.
16. Sort the titles of code snippets by date or by name (ascending or descending).
17. Select a syntax-highlighting color, title-highlight color, search-matching color from a list of more than five dozen colors.
18. Reorder groups.
19. The fullScreen mode is supported.
20. The application supports the retina screen. (tested with 2014 2.6 GHz 13″ MacBook Pro)
21. Languages: English only.
22. Application file size: 43.9 MB.
23. The application comes with a built-in 24-page user guide. Click on the Quick tour toolbar button or choose Show Quick Tour under CodeBlue 3 whenever you need to see it.

System requirements

1. 10.11 (tested with 10.11.6), 10.12 (tested with 10.12.2 and 10.12.5)
2. 64-bit system

Limitations

Nothing so far…






Version history

Version 3.1.0 (Released on September 4th, 2018)

1. Fixed is an issue where the application failed to save user’s preferences under the general settings tab.

Version 3.0.9 (Released on March 3rd, 2018)

1. Fixed is an issue where the application crashed after the user chose different groups with a drop-down menu a dozen times.

Version 3.0.8 (Released on February 17th, 2018)

1. Fixed is an Xcode 9 issue where a warning message says “Unknown Window class (null) in Interface Builder file, creating generic Window instead.”
2. Fix: When the user turned on Edit, additional lines of code were shown in Rich Text apart from other lines of plain text.
3. Fix: When the user chose Find Globally under Snippet without selecting a group and then clicked on Show after running a search, the application disabled the segment control at the bottom-left corner of the window.
4. Code is compliant to Swift 4.

Version 3.0.4 (Released on August 17th, 2017)

1. When the user register a new code snippet, if a code title was previously selected, the last title will be selected after addition.
2. When the user slided the split divider all the way to the right and slide back, the user interface could partially break involving the URL drop-down menu.

Version 3.0.2 (Released on August 11th, 2017)

1. When the user clicked on the highlight (or unhighlight) toolbar button, the application did not maintain the scroll position of the current code snippet title in the list. Similarly, the scroll position changed when the user clicked on Save or Unedit after revising code.
2. When the user clicked on the Edit tab button to revise code, provided that the first character of the code assumed the syntax color, all the lines of code could assume the syntax color under the edit mode.
3. Other minor changes are made.

Trial/Demo version

Click here to download a trial version. This trial version will remain fully functional for 7 days, starting from the very moment you first launch it. If you are running this trial version under macOS 10.12 Sierra, you need to quit the application right after the first launch to evade a Sierra bug.






Video tutorial

There is no video tutorial at this time.






CodeBlue 3 is a product of Tom Bluewater.
Apple and the Apple logo are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Mac App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.