Changelog Summary

• improved detection of haXe compiler messages
• improved conversion of the Textmate themes included in Pacu
• newly supported language: Cucumber
• new keyboard sugar: allow moving tabs by keyboard shortcuts
• new feature: allow to open files by default application form the context menu of the file browser
• fixed: haXe code browsing was killing Pacu
• fixed: mouse cursor difficult to see on dark background

OS X Specific Changes

• new feature: better integration with launch services
• fixed: make sub-dialogs in the preference dialog show correctly
• fixed: showing keyboard shortcuts correctly in the menus

Textmate Theme Converter

If you have Textmate themes you would like to use, take a look at our theme converter. Simply paste the tmTheme file into the form and save the resulting mytheme.js in /Where/Is/Pacu/shared/charcoal/themes (Linux) or /Applications/Pacu.app/Contents/Resources/charcoal/themes (Mac). Restart Pacu and enjoy!

Future Outlook: Pacu 1.3

The next version of Pacu will focus on productivity features: snippets, auto-completion and code insight. Before that there is a version 1.2.3 planned adding highlighting and code browsing for more languages.

Curious: Pacu is Green

My electrical utility provider informed me, that I saved CO2 emissions equivalent to the CO2 absorption of 52 trees. Thereby I can claim Pacu is build in an environmentally sustained way. Incidentally I know, that it also killed some birds. Beware the magnificent 100m wind turbines. They develop killing speeds at the edges of their rotor blades! So if you like trees, or hate birdies, buy Pacu!-)

Is it only about Flash? No, of course not. And yes, there are alternative implementations of the Flash APIs. For instance look at neash or lightspark.

Ok, here it comes: My first baby steps in Flash coding. The first demo taught me how to use the flash.display.Graphics API and the basics of display lists (n-ary trees actually). Can you get a L-System tree generator in 23 lines of code?

The build options for the haxe compiler (compile.hxml) are as follows:

-swf9 ltree.swf
-main TreeSprite
-swf-header 300:400:10:FFFFFF

class TreeSprite extends flash.display.Sprite {
    static function main() {
        var stage = flash.Lib.current.stage;
        flash.Lib.current.addChild(new TreeSprite(stage.stageWidth, stage.stageHeight));
    }
    public function new(w: Int, h: Int) {
        super();
        graphics.lineStyle(2, 0x008000);
        treeGen(w/2, h, 100, -Math.PI/2, 5, 3);
    }
    private function treeGen(ux: Float, uy: Float, l: Float, phi: Float, n1: Int, n2: Int) {
        var vx = ux + l * Math.cos(phi);
        var vy = uy + l * Math.sin(phi);
        graphics.moveTo(ux, uy);
        graphics.lineTo(vx, vy);
        if (n1 != 1)
            treeGen(vx, vy, 0.8 * l, phi - Math.PI / 45, n1 - 1, n2);
        if (n2 != 1) {
            treeGen(vx, vy, 0.4 * l, phi - Math.PI / 4, 5, n2 - 1);
            treeGen(vx, vy, 0.4 * l, phi + Math.PI / 4, 5, n2 - 1);
        }
    }
}

On the platform support side, Pacu now ships with a "fat" version of the latest Qt 4.7-beta/Cocoa for Mac. It took me a whopping one-and-a-half weeks to port Pacu to this new version of Qt and thereby enable Cocoa, 64bit and PPC support. On the other hand I must think: How long would it haven taken to port such an application from Objective-C/Cocoa to Linux? (Ahh, right, you weren't supposed to leave the walled garden.) Qt still rocks, even if I miss the visionary drive it once had. And yes you read right, PowerPC support, although I don't own one myself. If you are a PowerPC user, let me know how it works out for you.

Linker flags for your qmake *.pro file:

unix:INCLUDEPATH += /usr/include/glib-2.0 /usr/lib/glib-2.0/include /usr/include/cairo /usr/include/pango-1.0
unix:LIBS += -L/usr/lib -lcairomm-1.0 -lcairo -lpangocairo-1.0

Qt/C++ code to obtaining a Cairo surface to draw onto:

buf_ = QPixmap(width(), height());
buf_.fill(Qt::white);

const QX11Info& info = buf_.x11Info();
Display* display = info.display();
Drawable drawable = buf_.handle();
Screen* screen = XScreenOfDisplay(display, info.screen());
Visual* visual = reinterpret_cast<visual>(info.visual());
XRenderPictFormat *format = XRenderFindVisualFormat(display, visual);

surface_ = cairo_xlib_surface_create_with_xrender_format(display, drawable, screen, format, width(), height());
cr_ = cairo_create(surface_);

Where surface_ is of type cairo_surface_t* and cr_ of type cairo_t*.

To short of an explanation? Check out the entire example project from here. Run the usual "qmake && make" on it to get it compile. It simply renders the contents of the file provided as first command line argument onto a Cairo surface.