Squinter 2.2 released

IDE & Tools
1

Now available via Check for Updates… in the Squinter menu (or download)

Squinter 2.2.126 (7 December 2018)

Important Squinter 2.2 requires macOS 10.12 or above (versions 2.0. and 2.1 required macOS 10.11 or above).

Improvements

  • The Inspector panel is now integrated into the main window for a more modern look.
  • Add logging information to the Inspector.
  • When a shared Product is selected, the Shared Products menu item is marked to aid visual navigation.
  • Make Inspector link button graphics work better with Mojave Dark Mode.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a crash experienced when downloading a shared product.
  • Fixed an issue in which devices were incorrectly added to the current device group.
  • Fixed an issue in which creating a new project failed to update the Device Groups menu.
  • Fixed the incorrect selection of a device after changing projects.
  • Ensure the Inspector Project view is cleared when the last open project is closed.
2

Thanks for your work on Squinter! I have a few questions.

  • When I compile and upload the code, I don’t see the update reflected in the browser view of the code. Should I?
  • I’m using Brackets for my editor, however, it doesn’t know about the Squirrel language, so I tell it to use C syntax coloring. Do you have a recommended editor?
  • How do I link from Squinter to my editor? There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell Squinter what editor I’m using when I click on “Edit File”.
3

Thanks for trying Squinter, and thanks for your questions.

  1. impCentral’s view is derived from the same database that Squinter talks to, so you should see the update reflected if, for example, you upload code from Squinter and the open the code in impCentral. If impCentral is already showing the code and then you upload the code from Squinter, you may not see the changes: it depends on whether impCentral is checking for new deployments to the target Device Group. By the sounds of it, impCentral doesn’t do this automatically.

  2. I’m currently using Code, but until recently I was using BBEdit. Code has a Squirrel language highlighting extension. For BBEdit, I think I just set it to use JavaScript highlighting.

  3. To keep things simple, Squinter opens .nut code files whichever app you have selected on your Mac as your default for those kind of files. Do Command-I on a .nut file and select Brackets (or whatever) under Open with:, then click Change All…. It’s done this way so that you can open .nut files with a double-click; you don’t need to use Squinter specifically.

4

I’ve reworked my development workflow, and am thoroughly impressed and delighted with the results. Here are a few comments.

  1. Having worked with the browser based Imp development environment for so long, it felt strange moving the code offline. I can’t see that the code updates online, but now that I’m comfortable with Squinter, it doesn’t matter.

  2. I downloaded and got Visual Studio Code running without any problems. It’s a nice intuitive IDE. Thanks for the recommendation.

  3. I am able to open .nut files with VS Code based on your comment, plus it works with the editor commands in Squinter. It’s rare that I need to associate file exentions, so It’s not immediately intuitive or obvious how to do it from Squinter. I would humbly recommend that you add the information into the Squinter docs.

  4. The ease with which this all ties into GitHub is a huge advantage.

Thanks again for your work on providing Imp developers with Sqinter!

5

I’m pleased to hear that’s working out for you.

Re. the opening of text files, that’s such an old mac OS trick, I assumed most people would do this anyway, so thanks for putting me right on that. I’ll certainly add it to the docs.

For me, the GitHub thing is handy, but the real reason I use Squinter — and why I wrote in the first place, long before the impCentral API was available to tie it into the impCloud — was the combination of multiple files. I have a lot of cross-application code that I can pull into any new application with a single #import statement.

PS. Please do let me know if you run into any bugs. You can report them here or via the Squinter Help menu’s Report a Problem… option.