Following up Tuesday’s build, I’ve added a few more features and fixes to this release. I will be out of town for the next week, so it will be two weeks before a4. The changes are:

• Cut, Copy, Paste, Select All, and Clear are all automatically enabled and handled. Currently only plain text is copied and pasted, but styled text will most likely be implemented in a4 or a5.
• When clicking at the end of a line that ends with a line ending, the insertion point no longer is after the line ending, but rather directly after the last character on that line.
• Clicking beyond the last line in the field now properly moves the insertion point to the end. Note that dragging from beyond the last line currently does not work.
• When the insertion point is at the very end of the field, pressing a carriage return will insert a new line instead of adding a blank space to the last line.
• The examples folder has been rearranged to help new people to the project understand the different components. A new example is in the works (the obvious one: a text editor).

To download the new version, visit the product page.

As always, we look forward to your feedback!

We’ve made alpha 2 of TextKit available which includes several features and fixes that you’ve requested.

• TKTextRenderer does not recalculate line heights when setting an attribute. This bug would cause any assignment to font or text size to cause the lines to overwrap and draw offset (if aligned).
• Style of inserted text is now based on the previous character. This bug is hard to describe, but essentially what was seen before is on Mac OS X, the style of the inserted text would be applied correctly, but as soon as you selected some text, the inserted text would flip back to the style of the text after the insertion point. On Windows, there was no flipping: it just took the style from the next character, rather than the previous character. Now, styles are properly applied using the previous character.
• Added some field measurement methods. We’ve added three new methods: ObjectAtXY, LineAtY, and LineTop. Read the documentation for more information about these methods.

We’re excited to see how much interest there is in this product. Please let us know if there’s anything you would love to see this field do by either commenting here or filing a new ticket.

Visit the product page to download and learn more about TextKit.

Thanks everyone!

If you remember back to our teasers, we previewed a new product code-named ESTO. We’ve since named the product TextKit, and we’re pleased to announce that we are previewing it in a public beta.

TextKit is a REALbasic plugin that provides a rendering engine for styled text as well as a corresponding EditField-like control that works on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Unlike most other engines, this engine is written specifically for REALbasic and is extremely extendable.

TextKit provides two classes to help with displaying and editing text: TKTextRenderer and TKTextField. Unlike REALbasic’s built-in classes, TKTextRenderer can be used to manipulate and draw text offscreen. TKTextField provides an easy way to edit and display text and objects on a window.

During this public beta, we are extending our customers a special offer: If you buy TextKit today, we’ll extend your license by twelve months from the day that we release TextKit 1.0. It’s our way of showing our gratitude for helping us improve the product.

More information about TextKit can be found at http://alacatialabs.com/products/textkit/. We look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback.

It’s hard to write a teaser about this upcoming project, code named ESTO, so I’ll do more showing than telling. Let’s start with a vanilla REALbasic window, and add a multiline field to it:

Now, add about ten lines of code and hit Run:

If you’re interested in guessing how we did it, you can download the data source for the above rendering. And lastly, I would like to point out that this compiles and runs on Windows also.

Update: After some more sleep…

We’ve realized how lame our joke with the “data source” being empty was. We originally thought it would add to the mystique showing we didn’t have a data source by showing an empty zip file. Unfortunately, the joke’s on us because it just made it look like we messed up.

For the record, all of the fields contents were created in code.