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Balthisar Tidy 1.5 sports awesome new look

Balthisar Tidy 1.5 is released and available now from balthisar.com, and should be available in just a few short days from the Mac App Store.

The new version has a couple of usability enhancements (described below), but the first thing you’ll probably notice is its new look. Your current workflow won’t be impacted, as there’s nothing Earth-shattering done to its overall layout, but the new, modern look is definitely more pleasing to work with. Gone is the old Mac OS X 10.2 embedded table for displaying Tidy’s options; instead Tidy looks and works much like the other Mac OS X applications you know and love, such as iTunes and Mail.

As part of this change I’ve (cautiously) added alternating row colors to the options list, and I’ve also hidden all of the interface gadgets such as the popup lists and (new!) stepper controls, which contribute greatly to readability. And if you don’t like to work this way, each of these new options can be disabled in Preferences.

In the way of usability, the ability to hide and show the descriptions of the Tidy options is now more obvious; it works just like the mail activity panel in Mail.

There’s also a new action menu at the bottom of the Tidy options panel, and it has a couple of features that make your life easier.

The first is the ability to show friendly option names instead of the Unix option names. Right now there’s not a lot of difference between the Unix names and friendly names, but this is likely to change in the future. It will also be important when I start localizing Tidy in other languages because the embedded library doesn’t natively support localization.

The action menu also has a couple of Tidy options related actions. In a document window, you can revert all of the current Tidy options back to the options you’ve set in preferences, or you can set the Preferences based on the current document. This is useful when you’re trying to figure out which Tidy options you want to use.

In the Preferences window, this action menu has an item that will allow you to revert back to the Tidy, original, factory default values.

There are more great plans for Tidy coming up. Stay tuned!

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