If you didn’t guess from the title, this will be a somewhat extensive post. Over the past couple days, cool several Selenium-related things have happened, and I figured I’d take this opportunity to highlight them.

First amongst the goings on is the release of Selenium 3.3.1. While not a very exciting release, it does fix a fairly nasty bug that would lock things up if you tried to do anything involving project names with the reset web browser option enabled. It also fixed a longstanding issue where the font from one project could be carried over to another, improved the behavior of the reset browser option, and added periodic autosaving to reduce the chance of Bad Things™ happening. If you haven’t already, download the update here.

On a somewhat more exciting note (at least for me), the folks over at TUAW gave a nice shoutout to Selenium today in a review of research tools for the Mac. I was particularly impressed to note Brett Terpstra’s use of the citation styles in combination with Markdown for blogging - when conceiving the feature, I never considered using it in such a manner. It does go to show just how flexible it can be, though. 

Next up is a quick hint about a semi-hidden feature in Selenium. As you may know, in almost any Cocoa application, you can press Escape (or F5 evidently, though I have it bound to Quicksilver) to bring up a list of text completion suggestions when typing. While this can certainly be a useful feature, Selenium carries it a bit further. Rather than presenting only a list of completion suggestions, Selenium will also offer internal citations for every source in your bibliography at the end of the list. You can then quickly arrow down and press Return to insert an internal citation anywhere in your writing. Currently, you can choose between three preset styles in the Word Processor preferences, though I may expand this in the future. It may not working perfectly 100% of the time, but it’s pretty close, and can be incredibly handy for citing works by authors with difficult-to-spell (or remember) names.

To finish, I’ll present you with the following image, hinting at things to (hopefully) come in the relatively near future. Don’t get your hopes up too much if you think you know what it is, but don’t be surprised to hear a few more details about something cool either.

It’s been a while, but a new version of Selenium is once again available. Version 3.3 adds a few things, the coolest of which is that you can now use your iSight to scan book barcodes to add them to the bibliography. This was made possible by the folks at Bruji’s excellent barcode scanning code, which made it amazingly simple to get this feature up and running in Selenium. I’ve put up a quick screencast that shows how it works.

The latest version of Selenium also includes a new feature called Open Quickly. It’s essentially like an internal version of Quicksilver, in that it allows you to work with Selenium almost entirely from the keyboard. Feedback on this would be greatly appreciated; I tried to include a wide variety of commands and some fairly sensible defaults, but I’d love to hear about any ideas you may have to improve it. The commands can be viewed (and changed) in the preferences.

One other change in 3.3 centers on the text and image snippets. The system for using them in previous versions was somewhat convoluted; you had to create a new snippet, and then copy the text or image you wanted to the snippet. To get the contents of the snippet back, you had to do the same thing in reverse. Now, you can simply drag and drop text and images to and from the text and image snippet lists, making them significantly faster and easier to use.

The final change in the update I want to call attention to is the user interface. You may have noticed that the browser controls are no longer in the toolbar, but are instead located under it. This change was made because the browser controls were often irrelevant and confusing when working with other things, and especially when annotating PDFs. Instead, the mode switcher bar that used to be located at the bottom of the window is now in the toolbar. As mode switching is relevant no matter what you may be doing, it fits well, and hopefully makes the modes more obvious to new users.

All that being said, if you have any ideas for improving Selenium, let me know. If you’re already using Selenium, you should be able to just check for updates and download the new version. If you’re not yet using Selenium, give it a try. And, of course, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact support.

At some point, it’s going to be more difficult to keep them balanced than it would be to empty the bin. Until that time, more drinks and more coding.

At 10:00 this morning, the first Apple Store in South Carolina opened. Since Stuffed Iggy Software headquarters are just 20 minutes away, a trip downtown was pretty much required. There were about 50 people in line when I showed up at 8:00, which eventually grew to several hundred by opening time. Around 9:00, the employees started handing out water and getting the line to join in chanting and other assorted revelry. A few minutes before opening, the line was split into folks waiting for iPhones and everyone else, which seemed to help with expediting things for both groups. As I wasn’t picking up an iPhone, I got into the latter group, and we were let into the store right on time.

After high-fiving everybody in sight, and snagging a free shirt (woo!) I was able to get back to the Genius Bar to try to get a replacement power adaptor for my laptop. Unfortunately, as I didn’t have the serial number of the MacBook Pro, I had to go back home to get it. Though the store was slightly less packed when I returned, it was still crammed full of people. On the upside, I was able to get the replacement power adaptor without any problems in just a few minutes. All in all, it seemed quite well-planned, and it’s great to finally have an Apple Store nearby.

For pictures of the event and shirt unboxing, check out my web gallery.

Though I haven’t yet gotten around to putting a page for it up on the website, I’ve put a Subversion repository online with some code that other developers may find useful. At the moment, the repository includes a couple of classes and projects as follows:

ADProgressIndicator

A really simple class that allows you to create a circular progress indicator which presents a close button when moused over. The Finder uses something similar when it’s syncing iDisks or Time Machine backups; it’s also useful for toolbars where a dedicated close button would seem somewhat out of place.

ADEmbeddableToolbar

A clone of the toolbar-like view found in iPhoto and iWeb at the bottom of the window to work around NSToolbar’s refusal to be placed anywhere but at the top of the window. It supports both standard buttons and custom views, and will hide or show them as it is resized. This is actually used in the latest version of Selenium, and has some basic support for assigning keyboard shortcuts to items.

ADTablePrinter

ADTablePrinter is a class to allow you to print table views in a vaguely attractive fashion. While NSTableViews can be printed, they don’t make any efforts to get the data to fit, and tend to get cut off in a nasty fashion. ADTablePrinter works around this by taking the contents of the table as a couple of arrays and creating an HTML table with the data. This is then rendered by WebKit, which will happily wrap and resize the table to fit nicely when printed. Check the project for an example of how to use it.

ImageDiff

ImageDiff was originally written as an add-on to my iSight-based pizza guy cam, which I have mounted underneath my roof. This allows me to watch for pizza or other deliveries without having to go downstairs, allowing me to continue working on things. Unfortunately, it still required watching QuickTime, which gets annoying after a half hour or so. ImageDiff solves this by monitoring a video feed or comparing two images, and determining whether or not there’s motion between the two images or frames. I’ve got the sensitivity fairly low to avoid detecting trees moving in the wind, but it can be adjusted quite easily. Here’s a screenshot, to give you a basic idea:

That’s all for now - I’ll likely add stuff in the future, though. The code is all BSD licensed, so basically do with it as you please. Patches are gladly accepted - just send me an email. The repository itself is located at svn://www.stuffediggysoftware.com/gonfunko. Enjoy!

Selenium 3.2 is out today, bringing with it an assortment of tweaks, bugfixes and features. The main feature associated with this release, and one of the coolest yet, is that Selenium now allows you to upload and download documents to and from Google Docs. This is especially helpful if you need to conduct research with several other people, as you can use Google Docs to easily share the latest copy of your research with all involved. While you cannot yet replace or update a document on Google Docs, I plan to include support for doing so as soon as Google’s API allows it. Selenium 3.2 also adds a few enhancements to the PDF annotation mode. As far as bugfixes are concerned, this release fixes a couple of crashers and several other annoyance-level bugs as well.

If you’re already using Selenium, this version is a free upgrade and is highly recommended. If you haven’t yet tried Selenium, now would be a great time; just head on over to the download page and snag a copy. 

To close out this post, if you have any questions or ideas for future versions of Selenium, please let me know - it’s great to get feedback from users, and your wishes might just come true.