Modern scrollbars

Cappuccino now features new scrollbars which fade away automatically when not in use, giving more space for the content of your scroll views. If the user’s browser does not support or use overlay scrollbars, Cappuccino automatically detects it and falls back to old style scrollbars.

Documentation Overhaul

The Cappuccino documentation has not only been extended but also visually refreshed. Many more classes and methods are now in the documentation and it’s an easier read.

Popover Widget

A popover control is a small window that appears to ‘come out’ of a part of your user interface, and which remains attached to it until the user dismisses it. It’s an easy way to ask for extra information when that ‘create’ button is clicked, or to show a list of individually selectable downloads when the ‘downloads’ button is clicked.

CPPopover originating from a button.

Level Indicator Widget

A level indicator shows a discrete graduation from ‘empty’ to ‘full’, useful for certain gauges like space usage. Level indicators can also be editable and can be placed inline in table cells.

Level indicators, some in a ‘warning’ state.

Predicate Editor

Predicates are powerful tools for encoding ‘search patterns’, and combined with the power of Cappuccino’s Array Controller class they make it incredibly easy to create user searchable tables or other views. The new predicate editor allows users to create their own saved searches with almost no work for the developer.

Tooltips

A much requested feature has been tooltips. We didn’t want to release something that wasn’t as powerful and flexible as everything else in Cappuccino and we don’t think we will disappoint. Cappuccino tooltips can be attached to any control, position themselves intelligently and support multiline tips.

Stronger Interface Builder Integration

If you want to easily create and edit your user interfaces using a visual editor, you have the best tool in the market available for use with Cappuccino: Interface Builder. Every aspect of the nib2cib experience has improved, with better support for fonts, smarter realignment of widgets to match Cappuccino sizes and support for more controls than ever before. Best of all, the new XcodeCapp application automatically creates an Xcode project out of your Cappuccino project and lets you place UI components with ease.

New Installer

The new bootstrap installer is much simpler to use and installs all the packages you will need by default.

You know you want to.

Notable Improvements

There are too many improvements to list them all here but here are some highlights:

• CPNumberFormatter with CPNumberFormatterDecimalStyle.
• More powerful objjc CLI.
• CPButton continuous mode.
• Keyboard navigation, improved submenu handling and auto validation in CPMenus.
• Support for pattern fills when drawing using CG.
• Many new bindings features and optimisations, including CPNullPlaceholderBindingOption, CPContinuouslyUpdatesValueBindingOption and better object controllers.
• CPUserDefaultsController which can be used to easily bind controls to user default keys in Interface Builder or elsewhere.
• CPColorWithImages convenience function to quickly create a `CPColor` from single, 3-part or 9-part images.
• Support for autosaving and collapsing views towards the right in CPSplitViews.

For the full list of changes, see the Cappuccino 0.9.5 change log.

The Team

We’re also happy to announce we’ve added Klaas Pieter Annema, Aparajita Fishman and Antoine Mercadal to the core team. Their contributions to Cappuccino have been invaluable.

- The Cappuccino Core Developer Team

Download Cappuccino

Bindings

One of the most exciting features of this release is full Key Value Bindings support. Team members Klaas Pieter, Alexander, Ross, and of course many members of the community have put a tremendous amount of work into getting bindings ready for this release. With support for most major components, CPObjectController, CPArrayController, and undo/redo, bindings are already a killer feature. But we’ve gone one step beyond that and included support for bindings in nib2cib! So not only can you build your Cappuccino interface in Interface Builder, but you can now configure interface bindings in it as well.

CPTableView and CPOutlineView

We were incredibly excited to introduce table views—one of the most important and versatile components in any widget set—in our 0.8 release. In 0.9, we’ve matured the table view to production quality and added its supplemental component, the outline view. CPOutlineView lets you build tables that provide hierarchical data and it inherits from CPTableView, so it already benefits from all the additional work that has gone into the table view.

CPOutlineView

Table views now support bindings, group rows, inline editing, column reordering and resizing, and a whole slew of other features. Perhaps the most requested feature that is now supported: variable row heights.

One of the most important aspects of our table view is performance; we have been very careful not to sacrifice speed for any of these new features. CPTableView will still scroll like butter, even with hundreds of thousands of rows.

New Components

This release also introduces several new features to Cappuccino. You’ll find more controls from Cocoa and some new additions specific to Cappuccino. While there are too many to mention them all here, here are some notable additions:

• CPAlert: Totally rewritten for ease of use and featuring a new UI  designed by Sofa.
• CPBrowser: We’re shipping a great implementation of CPBrowser with this release of Cappuccino. CPBrowser provides columnar layout for displaying hierarchical data. This is very similar to the column view in Mac OS X’s Finder.
• CPCursor: A simple API for changing the user’s cursor. The class supports a number of cursors from the start or allows you to load your own images.
• CPPredicate: The CPPredicate school of classes gives you a very powerful way to filter through your data. A future release may include robust controls for users to visually edit predicates.
• CPStepper: A control that allows users to incrementally step through values.
• CPTokenField: A powerful text field subclass with support for autocomplete, CPTokenField allows you to build unique token managers, like the address fields in Mac OS X’s Mail.app.
• NativeHost: We announced NativeHost a few months ago, but this is the first time we’ve included it with a release of Cappuccino. NativeHost lets you build your Cappuccino application for desktop platforms and distribute it like any other desktop app. Support for Mac OS X is currently included, with Windows and Linux support coming soon.

The Future

We’re extremely proud of this release and all the time and work that has gone into it. We couldn’t have made it to this point this without all our contributors (67 and counting!), and a huge thank you goes out to everyone involved. The core team has grown considerably as well, now composed of 7 team members. We also want to thank everyone who has battle hardened this release through rigorous testing and feedback.

But what’s next? We have a ton of updates in the pipeline, and the master branch is already far ahead of 0.9. Cappuccino has been open source for over 2 years now, and it has been an amazing ride. The framework has vastly matured and a lot of people would have already slapped the 1.0 sticker on it. However, we’ve had a concrete goal of quality and completion in mind from the beginning, and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we discuss our final roadmap toward Cappuccino 1.0!

-Randy

You can find a full list of changes here.

0.7 By The Numbers

As of version 0.6, Cappuccino had 9 total contributors. Version 0.7 more than triples that number with 29 total contributors. And thanks to the inspiration and hard work of Xavier Noria and José Espinal, we’ve got a slick new website that keeps up to date tallies on all of the contributors to the project. Check it out here. If you find a mistake, be sure to let us know in the comments.

This release includes over 100 bug fixes, thanks in part to all the new contributors, and to the hard work of users taking the time to file quality bug reports. If you hadn’t noticed already, we’ve moved to github’s new issue tracking for bug reports, so check out the new system, and vote on issues that are important to you.

New Look

The biggest new feature of Cappuccino is our new new theme: Aristo. Aristo is the new look and feel for Cappuccino applications. Created by the talented designers at Sofa, Aristo is designed specifically to look good in the browser, and in any browser, whether it’s Firefox, Safari, or even Internet Explorer, Mac and Windows. We’ve also open-sourced the PSD file used to create Aristo. All the controls have been updated to use the new style, and we’ve added a few new controls as well, like checkboxes, radio buttons, and segmented controls.

Theming

We didn’t just build one new look for Cappuccino, though. Instead, we built an entirely new theme engine which will let anyone create a theme for Cappuccino. All the properties of the standard controls are fully themeable in all the different “theme states” (like “pushed”, “disabled”, “normal”, etc.). In the coming months, we’ll be sharing new themes with the community, and building a site for users to post their own themes for others to download and use.

Interface Builder

Those of you who come from a Cocoa background are used to using Apple’s Interface Builder tool to layout your Cocoa applications. Thanks to a technology in 0.7 called nib2cib, you can use Interface Builder to layout Cappuccino applications too. All of the classes supported in Cappuccino 0.7 that have Cocoa analogues are included. So, you can drag checkboxes, sliders, text fields, buttons, and lots more. You can even instantiate custom top level objects, or custom view subclasses, which will be converted to the right class in Cappuccino by the nib2cib tool. Once you’re done laying out the UI of your application with Interace Builder, you can use it’s target-action and outlet technology to build up its logic as well.

nib2cib is a powerful tool that drastically reduces the amount of code you need to write to build an interface with Cappuccino. The starter package now includes both a nib/xib based application template, and a standard, code based template, so you can choose which is best for you. From the command line you can use the new capp tool to generate a nib/xib project by typing “capp gen -t NibApplication MyApp”.

The Rest

As if that wasn’t enough, there are a lot more changes. First off, improved support for debugging in Cappuccino and Objective-J, thanks to some contributions to WebKit. For more details, see Francisco’s post on the topic.

We now build on top of Rake instead of ant, which has helped us create a much better build system that can improve quickly. Objective-J has improved support for deploying code to multiple platforms, like server (e.g. rhino) and browser. And we’re including the new Narwhal JavaScript standard library in Cappuccino as an external dependency.

Narwhal is still in the early stages, but eventually it will be a set of standard JavaScript APIs that work consistently across many different JavaScript implementations, making it easy to work on any JavaScript interpreter you have available. We’ll write more about all these new features as time goes on, especially all the new tools and APIs in 0.7, so stay tuned. In the mean time, you can check out information we’ve posted to the wiki.

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed to Cappuccino for the 0.7 release, and to everyone using Cappuccino!

- Ross

Thomas Balthazar has also recapped a lot of the information in his latest installment of This Week in Cappuccino Edge. I encourage you to check it out and let us know how 0.7 beta is shaping up!

• New language addition to Objective-J: The @accessors keyword to eliminate the boiler plate code of writing setters and getters. Read more about it here.
• Support for more classes like CPTimer.
• Performance improvements all around, but especially in Objective-J thanks to a major rewrite of the parser.
• Improved debugging tools and a new debugging “mode”.

And much more! But despite all these additions, Cappuccino has actually gotten smaller with this release. That’s thanks to some pretty cool new compression technologies. We’d like to thank the guys over at DoJo for their outstanding work on shrinksafe, which along with a number of custom techniques on our end, have really helped this along.

You may have also heard that Coda and SubEthaEdit are now shipping with built in support for Objective-J and Cappuccino. This is really exciting, but make sure to get the latest and greatest bundles from our downloads page, available in the Frameworks and Tools package. The download also includes modules for TextMate and Vim so no need to worry if you use these editors.

However, the best part about 0.6 is that we’ve had the most contributors thus far. We’d like to thank everyone who filed bugs and helped out on the IRC channel. And of course a special thanks to everyone that submitted patches:

Rich Collins
Patrick Crosby
Jake MacMullin
Sam McDonald
Glenn Rempe
Nick Takayama

So download it, take it for a spin, and don’t forget to file bugs!

Even more exciting is the fact that this release includes our first user contributions. We’re glad these individuals were able to help out the project, and we hope more people continue to do so in the future. You can keep up with those contributing to Cappuccino on Github.

Version 0.5.5 includes over 60 fixes, and several key new features, including:

• New build tools, including press
• Key-Value-Observing
• CPSplitView, CPWebView, and CPDate
• Additional Editor Support
• Major performance gains

Full list of resolved bugs since 0.5.1.

Download the update directly: Starter, Tools.