AppLaunch / News: Recent posts

After some time of "mental review" I came to the conclusion that AppLaunch completely fulfils my needs, it works as it ever should do. Additionaly I discontinued using an Apple Mac, so further development under a recent OS X is not possible. As result (and with an "old" Mac as backup) I hereby declare AppLaunch to be mature and from today on I will only add bugfixes to the software, but no more new features. If someone is interested in further enhancing AppLaunch, do not hesitate contacting me – or fork your own version of it, it is open source!

The release 3.2 includes only one minor change to AppLaunch: Instead of separate text files for help and further information we now use the Apple Help Manager. The so-called help books are based on HTML which allows more ways to style and design the help. As a side-effect AppLaunch's code size is decreased by removing the now unneeded help text bo.

AppLaunch is again submitted to heise Software-Verzeichnis, a large freeware and opensource software directory hosted by german IT publisher heise. You can find and rate AppLaunch at http://www.heise.de/software/download/applaunch/18896

Today the minor release AppLaunch 3.1 became public. It fixes some little bugs in the UI and acknowledges changes in SourceForge.net's wiki system. As a major advance there is now also support for X11.app from x.org resp. Xquartz. This should improve the programs functionality on Mac OS (Snow) Leopard.

I'm very proud to announce the new AppLaunch 3.0 release. Three years and a Mac later all your wishes for improvements come true:

• tab completion
• privileged operations
• better X11 integration
• manipulating environment variables

This major release also covers some bugfixes so updating is generally recommended. Since Apple introduced MacIntel during the development, AppLaunch is now a universal binary. For users of Mac OS X Panther there is also a legacy release.... read more

The upcoming AppLaunch 3.0 release will contain some very nice features: Building the application from the CVS sources you get an AppLaunch which does tab-completion, lets you alter environment variables and supports executing commands with super-user rights.

Although there is still functionality missing (if you have a look at the feature requests), you are very welcome to help testing the next great release of AppLaunch.

I'm currently working on AppLaunch 3.0 that should be released in the next two months. This version will contain only the features requested so far <https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=111567&atid=659708> and reported bugs <https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=111567&atid=659705>. If you want a specific feature or found a bug that should be fixed as soon as possible, please do not hesitate to fill a report for the tracker so that I can respect them for the new release.

Today I was informed that the (still) current AppLaunch 2.1 is planned be put on the next magazine CD of the German computer magazine c't. There will be a Mac special in April 2008 with dozens of Mac applications that could be found at the c't software directory <http://www.heise.de/software/>.

Today I re-organized the AppLaunch CVS repository: There is now the AppLaunch module containing the sources and file histories for all releases from version 1.0 on. This module replaces the sources one which only covered 2.1. From now on use only the AppLaunch for the latest source code, because this is the new working repository.

http://applaunch.cvs.sourceforge.net/applaunch/AppLaunch/

The information about the AppLaunch sources, titled "Hacking AppLaunch", http://applaunch.sourceforge.net/dev/, has been updated due to SourceForge's CVS-server reorganization.

As reported a few weeks ago, there are some incorrect sentences in the English AppLaunch readme. I fixed the English readme in the CVS tree (package sources) and I also provided an update for your English AppLaunch localization as download.

Due to the fact that the AppLaunch CVS tree currently only contains the version 3.0 development branch as "src", I checked in the current 2.1 release sources as new package named "sources". I will use this one rather than the "old" src package to have a straight codebase for future AppLaunch releases.

Due to major changes in the SorceForge.net project services, I had to rewrite some parts of the AppLaunch support area under http://applaunch.sf.net/support/, e.g. the form mailer. Now, this changes are applied, everything is working again.

The contributed Cocoa Web Design package, providing a Cocoa-like design for your website, has been updated due to some bugs in the CSS code (see https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1306778&group_id=111567&atid=659705 for details). I also changed the licensing terms, the HTML, CSS and JavaScript code is now distributed under the terms of the BSD License. If you want to have the package with valid CSS code, download Cocoa Web Design 1.1 from http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/applaunch/CocoaWebDesign-1.1.zip?download.

As released some time ago, there is still the announcement for receiving new AppLaunch localizations. So, if you translated the application into another language and want to share your experiece with other users, let me know. There is now a special "tracker for this, the "Localization Tracker", linked on the SF.net project page or accessible via https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=759615&group_id=111567&func=browse.

This is only a bug fix release. It contains the patch for the history bug (previous versions stored one item too much in the command history) and introduces a new character set for the help files: For a better editing I converted the README files from UTF-16 to UTF-8. Also, most localized messages and texts are now using Unicode special characters instead of "ASCII Art".

Good Evening!

While studying physics, I do not have so much time working on AppLaunch, so I decided to slow down the development process, so you have to wait a bit longer for the next major release. Plans for this version are the ability to save command output into log files and setting environment variables for the processes.

But the next release of AppLaunch will not be 3, it will be the fixed 2.0, named 2.1. It will be released this or next week. This bugfix version contains the history patch and maybe a Tiger patch, because a user mailed problems using AppLaunch under Mac OS X 10.4.

AppLaunch goes more and more Open Source. Today I established the section ``Hacking AppLaunch'' that could be found at http://applaunch.sourceforge.net/dev/. This page contains information about hacking the application, working with its sources or joining the AppLaunch developer team. If you like AppLaunch as tool and want to improve it, check this page out!

Today I checked all AppLaunch sources into the CVS tree for having a powerful revision control and making the AppLaunch sources more public. Now it is possible developing on AppLaunch or having always an up-to-date version of the program.

As posted some time ago, I found a bug in handling the number of items stored in the history (https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1092279&group_id=111567&atid=659705). First, I told this will be fixed with release 3.0 (coming soon!), but I since this may take some time, now there is patch for the problem available. You need the AppLaunch source code (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/applaunch/AppLaunch-2.0.src.tar.bz2?download) for applying the patch or wait for AppLaunch 3.0.

I started an open discussion at https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=1203055&forum_id=382169 about some new features AppLaunch 3 may include, e.g. using pipes rather than system(3) calls for invoking terminal applications, so that you can see the program output directly in an AppLaunch window instead of having to launch Console.app. Use this chance of deciding how AppLaunch will become.

SourceForge.net now offers to feature to add screenshots directly to a projects SF.net page (not its homepage, see https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=25493&group_id=1 for details). So I decided adding the AppLaunch main window, so that users can see if, the program is what they expected by searching for AppLaunch.

Testing with the W3C XHTML validator showed some bugs in the code used for the Feedback Form. I corrected these bugs, mainly in using the fieldset tag, so that common web browsers will show the form correctly. Additionally, I updated the interal HTTP library used in some scripts. If you discover any other bugs on the AppLaunch web site, please report them via the ways the Support navigation entry presents.

When updating my personal SF.net skills page something came to my mind: There are fields for classifying your personal skill in speaking/writing other languages than the native one. This let my think about the AppLaunch localization, which are currently only (?) English and German. So, if you wish to have an AppLaunch in your native language, just let me know via the Feature Request page at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=659708&group_id=111567&func=browse. Otherwise, if you have created an localized AppLaunch on your Computer at home, just upload the localization as Patch at https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=111567&atid=659707 and I will include it in the next minor release.

As you can see since today, AppLaunch 2 has now more downloads compared to the previous release. That shows me, the way of promoting is right, but because of the low number of downloads and the low "project activity", there could be more promotion for AppLaunch. But, there is already one "great partner" for it: Search Google for "Graphical command line MacOS X" and you will see.