How are you doing guys? :) Are you ready for some new stuff?

We are releasing the Snippets 0.8 update today. This version brings some exciting features that we are happy to introduce.


External Editing

Almost everybody of us have the code editor that we use on a daily basis. Why not to take their advantages to edit snippets? Great! Starting with 0.8, you may edit any snippet in your favourite text mate. Thanks to our Twitter followers, we have collected a solid list of text editors that are currently supported by the application:

TextMate, Coda, Espresso, BBEdit, TextWrangler, Xcode IDE, and some others…

They are all included in the menu under toolbar's Edit button.

Note: You may need to customise the toolbar, if the ‘Edit Externally’ button isn't in place.


Scripts + Snippets = Scrippets!

Scrippet is a special package—bundle—that handles snippet items in a pre-defined way. For example, you can share selected snippets on a public source code repository. We have included some Scrippets by default to demonstrate just this:

Scrippets Preference Pane

Note: Scrippet ‘Share via Snipt.org’ is not included by default. You can download it at here and install by simple double-clicking.


How Does It Work?

Scrippets are available via main application menu:

Scrippets in Main Menu


You just select library items to process and click the Scrippet menu item. That's it…

Running Scrippet

Every Scrippet includes Information file and set of Resources. These resources can be shell scripts, images, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files:


Running Scrippet


Information file describes a set of steps to be executed one by one, and every step is a Shell script or HTML page that can handle selected snippets: modify them, send over network, create the new ones etc.


How Good Is It?

Well… In the future, anyone can make a lot of scrippets with almost unlimited functionality. HTML-screens are WebKit-driven so they support full-featured HTML and JavaScript. Shell scripts can be written in Ruby, Python, Perl, or Bash. And it is wrapped in a simple and powerful Cocoa UI. This must be a very promising platform.


Where to Get?

Scrippets can do almost everything, can be made by everybody and shared with everyone. There are no limits at all. It's really cool :)

We will publish Guidelines and API in the Part 2 of this post soon so you can enjoy the Scrippet Development too. Also, we are going to add the catalogue of scrippets on this site but need some time for this. Please stay tuned…


What Is Next?

In short, you should give it a try :) As always, please don't hesitate to ask for any support or feature requests in our Discussion Group and Twitter. Also, we need you feedback very much. Let us know what scrippets would you like to have included in the application by default.


Dessert!

There is a way to assign custom keyboard shortcuts to your favourite scrippets:

— Open ‘Keyboard System Preferences’

— Select ‘Application Shortcuts’ item in the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ tab

— Click the ‘Plus’ button to add the shortcut

For instance, try to give the Menu Title: Share via Pastie.org… Keyboard Shortcut: ⌥⌘P.

Be careful: don't mix an ‘ellipsis’ symbol with 3 ‘dot’ symbols. Scrippet menu items end by ‘ellipsis’ (⌥+; on the mac keyboards).

Finally, look at the Scrippets menu: the item ‘Share via Pastie.org…’ should have the just assigned shortcut.


To be continued…