As already announced, Balthisar Tidy version 2.0 is available. So, what’s so new that we jumped from a version 1.5 all the way to a major version 2.0?
Major Rewrite
Although the new Balthisar Tidy will be familiar to long time users, it’s actually the result of a fairly major rewrite of the user interface portions. Balthisar Tidy has been around since late 2002, and a lot has changed in Mac OS X’s Cocoa API. It was finally time to dismantle the old, monolithic controllers and break thinks up into a better MVC organization.
If you’re a user and I’ve done my job right, the only changes you should notice are in the user interface.
Private TidyLib
For twelve years I’ve insisted that Balthisar Tidy link directly to the publicly available TidyLib. While Balthisar Tidy can still do so (with a couple of changes to the source code which are well commented), I’ve decided to abandon this early principle in order to ensure that you, dear user, have access to the best, most up-to-date Tidy processor that is available.
Starting with version 2.0, I will use my own fork of TidyLib based on the HTML5 Experimental version maintained by the W3C. As WC3 is having difficulty finding a maintainer, several useful pull requests are being ignored, meaning that useful Tidy features are simply not available unless I merge them into my own fork.
Additionally TidyLib is wretched for localization. Given that at some point I hope to release localized versions of Balthisar Tidy, some solution for localizing the TidyLib output using the Cocoa APIs was deemed important. My fork introduces a new error filter that allows applications to do just that.
Modern Appearance and Behaviors
Although version 1.5 did a lot to bring Balthisar Tidy’s appearance towards modern Mac OS X application standards, version 2.0 adds a lot of touches. The Tidy Options source list now has headers for option groups, for example. And the user has much more control over the amount of space that Balthisar Tidy occupies on the screen by enabling hiding of the Tidy Options panel and the Tidy Messages table, if desired.
Side-by-Side Source Code View
The optional side-by-side source code view makes it very easy to examine differences between the Source HTML and the Tidy HTML. Now you can spot the subtle changes that Tidy made with much less effort.
Toolbar
The new toolbar makes it easy to get help, hide and reveal document window panels, and more.
Much Improved Preferences
Balthisar Tidy now has a plethora of preferences! The defaults are reasonable, and if you are the type that can’t be bothered to figure out every single detail, then simply leave them alone. If you’re obsessive about your work environment though, you will be thrilled with the degree of control that the new Preferences gives you.
Balthisar Tidy for Work
I’m very happy to introduce the new Balthisar Tidy for Work. As a “pro” version of Balthisar Tidy, it does everything that Balthisar Tidy does, and then a little bit more. But we’ll save those exciting details for another post.