BlueGriffon.org

JSCSSP #2

BlueGriffon — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:49:00 +0100

Starts looking ok...

JSCSSP

BlueGriffon — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:14:00 +0100

Nvu had a strong limitation, because of Gecko. It could only edit CSS styles understandable by the embedded version of Gecko. This is something I don't want for BlueGriffon because I think it does not make sense to make a content editor for the Web that is restricted to Gecko-based browsers. I want users to be able to manipulate a UI that will create -moz-transform but also -webkit-transform. And I also want users to be able to edit stylesheets that include both properties while the -webkit-* are never present in Gecko's CSS OM (and that's normal). I don't need to cascade, I want to preserve all rules and all declarations even multiple declarations of the same property, I want to preserve comments as much as possible (ie between rules and between declarations), I want to preserve CSS parsing errors. The only extra thing I need is a resolver for shorthands.

So I just started my own CSS parser. It'll parse a string containing a stylesheet and will return CSSOM-like objects with the necessary extensions. It'll live inside the CSS Inspector sidebar of BlueGriffon but I will probably make it MPL.

CSS 'font-weight' and UI

BlueGriffon — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:35:00 +0100

CSS is so cool. So cool. But not in terms of UI for a CSS editor...

let's suppose you can have your text 'bold' or 'normal'; one checkbox or checkboxButton is enough, and you can have this button live with other buttons like italic, underline and others
let's suppose now you can have your text 'bold', 'normal or unspecified ; a few options here:
1. one checkbox to say the boldness is specified or not and a checkbox/checkboxButton for bold
2. two checkboxes/checkboxButtons for 'bold' and 'normal'; property is unspecified when both are unchecked
3. a menulist with three choices
let's suppose now, and that's the CSS real case that matters to me, boldness can take the values 'bold', 'normal', 'bolder', 'lighter', 'inherit', 'initial', 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900 or can be unspecified... The two reasonable choices here are:
1. one checkbox to say the boldness is specified or not and a menulist
2. a menulist where 'unspecified' is one of the options

In other terms, offering the full power of the 'font-weight' CSS property to a CSS editor will necessarily suck in terms of UI (yeah, forcing a menulist when most users will only use the 'bold' choice just sucks)... I am even tempted to have two modes in the CSS editor, basic and advanced. Pffff....

Ideas, suggestions?

Editor weirdnesses

BlueGriffon — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:25:00 +0100

I think I just found a weirdness in the editingSession and the docshell. If I try to edit a document having a chrome://* URL, scripts and plugins are not correctly disabled. I needed that to store "blank" transitional and strict html and xhtml documents into my jars. Even if I call disableJSAndPlugins() on the editingSession, scripts and plugins are not disabled or disabled only until major changes of the edited document. Not sure it's a bug though, there could be a good reason for this behavior. Anyway, workarounds are easy to implement.

Script Inspector

BlueGriffon — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:16:00 +0100

It's done. v1.0 as an add-on to the core editor. Precisely one day and a half of work.

Script manager

BlueGriffon — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:38:00 +0100

BlueGriffon has a new sidebar to handle all scripts declared inside the <head> element (scripts inside the <body> element will be visible inline and clickable to edit). The editor for embedded scripts is of course Bespin.

Fullscreen

BlueGriffon — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:30:00 +0100

Fullscreen implemented with hideable toolbars and a 5 pixels box at the top to show the toolbars in fullscreen mode. On Mac OS X too

Rulers

BlueGriffon — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:41:00 +0100

I have almost entirely revamped the rulers in BlueGriffon. The original code came from Nvu and used a few big hacks. That original code is totally gone and the rulers are now based on SVG. So if you have enhancement proposals with nice UI ideas for these rulers, please leave a comment, thanks.

Bespin in BlueGriffon #2

BlueGriffon — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:31:00 +0100

If you except minor issues that are more related to the preview of Bespin than Bluegriffon itself, the integration of Bespin as the default source editor is almost done. I am currently working on something new in the world of Mozilla Composer/Nvu/Kompozer/Bluegriffon: users will be able to edit the doctype and change that way the model of the edited document...

Bespin in BlueGriffon

BlueGriffon — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:14:00 +0100

Warning, it's in a very very early state so don't get too excited too soon. And there are a few big issues with Bespin at this time, but hey that's normal it's only a 0.5.

resizing the editor makes the line numbers disappear ; a CR in the editor make them come back
syntax highlight is now a plugin and gone for the time being
you can't embed direct Bespin in XUL because it uses innerHTML and that one fails inside a XUL document
so you need an iframe and that's painful wrt editor/chrome communication
it has issues with rtl text
but hey, it's already usable as is so mucho congrats to the Bespin team !

Update: yes, I know, I wrote somewhere a langer nun instead of a nun ; my bad.

Resurrection

BlueGriffon — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:50:00 +0100

After many months busy on other projects for third-parties, I am resurrecting BlueGriffon. In the last hours, I have added charset and text direction choices to the New Document wizard and fixed the toolbar customization that broke with recent xulrunner nightly builds due to ancient code. Stay tuned.

Templates Manager #5

BlueGriffon — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:17:00 +0100

I'm almost done with the templates manager. It now correctly saves locally (or pushes to the remote server) the unzipped version of a template package. I have one bug to fix in the main window and a progressmeter to add for remote storage. And done. Woof. The result is really beautiful, and impressively simple to use. I sincerely hope a lot of template repositories are going to jump on that.

Templates Manager #4

BlueGriffon — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 18:03:00 +0100

Starts looking ok...

Builds for windows and linux

LaurentJ — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 10:34:00 +0100

You will find latest binaries of BlueGriffon (nightlies) for windows and linux here:

I built the linux version on Ubuntu 8.04. I hope it works on other distro.

In the future, we will try to provide binaries for all plateforms at the same time.

Remember that this builds are for test only. We are still far from having a full featured BlueGriffon.

Fresh Meat 20090112

BlueGriffon — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:21:00 +0100

A Mac OS X build today. The templates manager and the table layout manager are not in as they are extensions to the "basic" editor and I'm still working on the former.

Templates Manager #3

BlueGriffon — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:24:00 +0100

Templates Manager #2

BlueGriffon — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:28:00 +0100

I'm making fast progress on the Templates Manager. See by yourself....

Templates Manager

BlueGriffon — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:06:00 +0100

mockup
format (draft, please do NOT consider as final)

Happy New Year

BlueGriffon — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 10:14:00 +0100

The BlueGriffon Team wishes you a very happy new year 2009!

Speaking of wishes, BlueGriffon will not only be able to apply themes to a page, but also get themes from online repositories. We're working on a themes' manifest all web sites distributing themes could serve. Giving the URL of that file to BlueGriffon would be the only thing needed to use a theme coming from that web site inside BlueGriffon. Stay tuned.

Project manager #2

BlueGriffon — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 17:58:00 +0100

Nvu's Site Manager was clearly not enough. BlueGriffon's Project Manager starts really being cool and it will be much more powerful than its ancestor. Link checking, sync with remote site and so on. Stay tuned.