NuPagePacker
PagePacker is an impressive little Cocoa application that Aaron Hillegass wrote to assemble PDFs and other documents into small printable booklets. Last month Aaron released the Objective-C source code to PagePacker, and today I’m releasing an equivalent implementation of PagePacker in Nu.
Nu-0.2.4
See the downloads page for another small release. It was built on OS 10.4 and tested on OS 10.4 and 10.5. It contains two fairly significant additions and a couple of other minor enhancements.
What’s Nu?
Nu is an interpreted object-oriented language. Its syntax comes from Lisp, but Nu is semantically closer to Ruby than Lisp. Nu is written in Objective-C and is designed to take full advantange of the Objective-C runtime and the many mature class libraries written in Objective-C. Nu code can fully interoperate with code written in Objective-C; messages can be sent to and from objects with no concern for whether those messages are implemented in Objective-C or Nu.
Although you can compile Objective-C on lots of platforms, right now Nu is only available for Apple systems running Mac OS 10.4 or later.
Nu-0.2.3
I keep saying “this is the last 10.4 release”, but this set of changes wasn’t quite big enough to call 0.3.0, and I wanted to get it out so that I could share a few more things that I’ll post soon. Nu-0.2.3 is available on the downloads page. It is a universal binary that was built on 10.4(Intel) and tested on 10.4(Intel) and 10.5(Intel).
For details, see the commit log.
NuHTTP
Git users can now download NuHTTP from code.neontology.com. Built as a Cocoa framework, NuHTTP includes a web server and a simple HTTP client class.
Nu-0.2.2
There’s a new release on the downloads page. This one is a relatively small update: it contains some enhancements to the TextMate bundle (thanks to Jason Sallis!), some early support for CoreData applications (see the git logs and class reference documentation for details), and some changes that allow NuAnywhere to be used on OS 10.5. It was built and tested on OS 10.4 and 10.5.
Beginning with Nu-0.3.0, I am planning to build and test Nu for Mac OS 10.5 only.
A Delicious Nu Screencast
Here is a screencast that shows some of the fun opportunities we have with Nu. In it, I use NuAnywhere (based on Jonathan Rentzsch’s mach_inject) to inject a Nu console into Wil Shipley’s Delicious Library. Then, after poking around a bit, we load a small script that demonstrates NuHTTP, an embeddable web server component that I’ve been writing and testing.
Nu-0.2.1
Today I posted links for Nu-0.2.1. This release contains an assortment of changes and fixes for issues found in the last few weeks of Nu usage. Here’s a summary of the changes.
Closures in Nu
Nu closures now close on variable bindings rather than values.
New Literal Forms in Nu
Nu-0.2.0 contains support for two new literal types: regular expressions and characters.
Escape Sequences in Nu Strings
With Nu-0.2.0, Nu now supports character escape sequences in strings.
Nu-0.2.0
Today I posted download links for Nu-0.2.0, a small but significant set of upgrades to Nu. The release contains two changes that can break existing programs (they broke some of mine!), hence the new minor version number.
I’ll describe each change in more detail in subsequent posts (see the git commit logs if you don’t want to wait), and I’ll also be updating the documentation to cover the new topics.
Here’s a brief list of the changes:
Screen Savers and Plugins
There’s a small new release on the downloads page. Nu-0.1.4 includes a new nuke macro called bundle-tasks. With this, we can easily build Cocoa bundles with nuke, and those bundles can contain Nu source code.
To demonstrate this, the release also contains a new example, a simple screen saver.
Markdown in Nu
Kudos to Grayson Hansard for his release today of a port of John Gruber’s Markdown to Nu!
For more, see Grayson’s blog and our discussion on Programming Nu.
Thanks, Grayson!
Functional Aspects of Nu
Two topics appeared on the mailing list that drew out some of the functional aspects of Nu. I think they’re worth discussing here.
New Example: Nib Files
A question arose on the mailing list about loading nib files with Nu. Since none of the Nu sample programs used nib files, it wasn’t clear how to write Nu code to use them. To help with that, I added a new example, another version of the RandomApp program from Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.