Alpha testers wanted for TypeR 1.1.

Although it's only been a little more than a month since the release of TypeR 1.0, development is hard at work on the next version, 1.1.

This is how how it looks right now, at 6PM +2UTC, October 16.

From the release notes:

• Added clear text button
  • ESC key is a shortcut for this
    • This worked in 1.0 as well
• Added a copy all button
  • Uses zClip
• Redo and undo
• Prompt before leaving the page
• Reduced filesize by changing HTML onclick attributes to jQuery

 So what does this mean? I'll go over each new feature:

Clear text

This seems simple enough to understand. Whatever you had written disappears. I have a keyboard shortcut to do this as well: escape. This keyboard shortcut works even in 1.0, but at the time i was still considering how best to have a button. In the end i decided to put the buttons on the right of the header, as you can see.

Copy all

This button copies what you've written to your clipboard. I wanted to have a keyboard shortcut, ctrl+c (the traditional shortcut for copying), but couldn't do to technical difficulties. In Firefox, and perhaps other browsers, you cannot use browser keyboard shortcuts until after clicking somewhere, but in Chrome you can. I'm still looking for a fix.
Technical information: This uses the zClip jQuery plugin.

Undo/redo

I'm sure you've heard of these before; it's a must in every good program, such as TypeR. They also support the classic shortcuts, ctrl+z and ctrl+y. The undo button is disabled if there are no previous edits, and redo if there are no undone edits. I'm not sure exactly how i should save revisions. Should i save every single change? Group some changes together? I'll blog more about this soon, and then we can discuss it in the comments.

Prompt before leaving the page

I'm sure this has happened to everybody: You're working on something, when somehow your mouse floats over and clicks close, or else you press the wrong keyboard shortcut. Oh no! All your unsaved work just got closed without saving! Except that rarely happens in good programs, because of a dialog that appears before it closes: Are you sure you want to close without saving? Close Save Cancel. This has now come to TypeR as well! In every browser it will warn you before leaving the page (HTML event unbeforeunload), whether by closing, refreshing, or going to a different URL, and in some it will even give you a personal message: Are you sure you want to leave TypeR? You will permanently lose your text. Since TypeR isn't a program with save features, being unnecessary, it has this. I'm considering not showing if you copied out less than 10 seconds ago. What do you think?

Reduced filesize by changing HTML onclick attributes to jQuery

Technical information: In 1.0, i started using jQuery for a bunch of things. One thing i did not use it for was when a virtual key was clicked. Instead i used HTML onclick, which got very repetitive. By switching all the ordinary keys to a single jQuery method, i reduced the HTML file by 1172 bytes (1.14 KB). That's pretty nice!


After all this, i'm sure you're eager to start playing with these new features. Well, you can! I'm opening it for alpha testing now. You can find it here: http://www.typeint.com/typer/index.php?version=1.1

Please give me your feedback, whether by on a comment on this blog, or by emailing me.

Thanks!