People often say, no news is good news. It is true. Development on PPL 2.0 is going full speed these days. We have a new real time profiler and memory analyser that giving you tons of information about your running program including Charts and Graphs about memory consumption, leaks, time spent on each line executed and procedures/functions. Very nice addition. I will post a screenshot most probably tomorrow. We just have to include Sprites, Surfaces, API Windows and Objects into the memory analyser to really make it much more useful.

The events list has been moved to its own panel so you can move the events without the properties list.

The search by tag features has been implemented and is really amazing. You can look for almost anything by typing phrases ex:

“move a sprite”

The tag search engine will suggest something like:

MoveSprite
SetSpriteX
SetSpriteY

Multi project support is working well, you can load as many projects as you want into the IDE.

We have worked on polishing the Hint engine, it now displays a little Icon on the left of the hint window to let you know that more help is available, you can just click on the icon to reveal the complete help page.

Here are a few more things we would like to include next week:

A welcome screen that loads an HTML page with the latest news, updates and links to the blog, the forums and support.

A crash reporter that will automatically send via email a complete report about the crash that just happened, including a screenshot and a lot of details. This way it will help us improve the program tremendously.

I am more and more decided on the fast that PPL 2.0 will have a Trial, Pro and Enterprise version. The Enterprise version will focus more on database and profiling.

We have a ton of PCL objects that we would love to include into the official launch of PPL 2.0 but unfortunately that won’t be possible unless we delay the release by half a year. So what we will do is offer them via a component store for a reduced price. This will help ArianeSoft stay viable economically and offer the opportunity for components developers to sell them.

Even though life is trying hard to put me down, I won’t let it work its nasty tricks on me.

I have worked on the Tag search engine today and man does it look and work great. The Help Engine is also getting revamped a little bit to give it some boost. From the code completion you can get the full help page as a hint window, very very handy.

I have also worked on the Help Engine, Search feature which searches through all the help pages in HTML for user defined strings.

The code completion window has also been revamped to display using the syntax highlighting that the code editor uses (looks very nice now).

Here is the Help Engine Index:

Finding by tag with help engine hint window activated:

The Code Completion with help engine hint window activated:

Finding text in all help engine pages:

In PPL 2.0 there will be a new technology called tag programming. What does this mean exactly you ask? To put it simple, it allows you to search for functions, classes, properties, events and methods using tags related to the nature of the selection.

For example, how often do you search for a function name in particular but don’t remember its name? Very often you say, me too… You know what this function is to do right? By searching by tags you can easily find it!

Lets say you want to show a message on screen. What if you don’t remember the function to do this is called ShowMessage() ? Well you could search for the following tags: “show,display,message”, they will come up with ShowMessage and a few other items.

We are trying to implement this technology right in the roots of PPL 2.0 so that third party developers can set tags for their classes, properties,methods and events easily. This will provide consistency through all libraries.

We want to integrate the help feature right from the functions, classes, properties, methods and events as well. It will be a property just like the others. We will have, description, parameters and example properties for all objects so that all help dialog does show exactly the same without having to merge help files together or other odd help file formats.

We want to make library creations very easy and powerful this time. PPL 2.0 will have tons of information on screen to simplify your programming experience.