Bean Sheet / News: Recent posts

With version 1.0.4, Bean Sheet (bsheet) is now being released under LGPL license. Aside from the license change, minor bug fixes and an addition of toolbar module in its first iteration is included.

With Bean Sheet 1.0.3, two features have been added: keyboard shortcuts and paste fill.

Keyboard shortcuts work pretty much as expected and can be learned from the drop-down menus. There is one known issue with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V and Ctrl-X, which aren't working as expected. They appear to be getting consumed by other widgets. Look for a fix shortly. All other shortcuts are fine.

Paste fill is a brand new feature. It enables a region to be selected and pasted into. If the contents of the clipboard are not enough to fill up the entire region, the region is filled by repetion of the contents. If the contents is too large for the selected region, only the region receives the clipboard contents and the rest of it is "cropped". This feature is particularly useful for filling large regions of cells with formulas that contain relative references, such as [-1-0]. As of mod_help 0.3.5, it is undocumented. Additional documentation will be provided as a separate mod_help release.

The latest release of bsheet module (main download) was compiled under JDK 1.5. It has come to my attention that it requires JVM 1.5 or higher to run. bsheet 1.1 source code is fully compatible with JDK 1.4 and can therefore be built under that environment. I will make a JVM 1.4 binary available for bsheet 1.1 shortly under bsheet-1.1_1.4.zip.

Alexey Zinger
Bean Sheet author

At long last, Bean Sheet 1.0 is released. Mainly, this release fixes some bugs and adds print module (mod_print), which is, like mod_help, bundled with the main application. It also requires bsheet 1.0 or higher as it leverages a few tweaks made to module mechanism in kernel code. There is a known issue with mod_print, which manifests itself by page format settings not respecting changes made in page format dialog window. Look for mod_print releases that fix this problem soon.

Within the next month, I'm planning on fixing some remaining bugs and other issues. Currently the print module (mod_print) is in the final pre-release stages of debugging. mod_print will be bundled in the main Bean Sheet releases starting with 1.0. I've decided to release Bean Sheet under LGPL starting with this version. Other changes will also include some module mechanism tweaks such as version support and a module manager. I am also considering integrating JChart as a mod_chart module, but it will not come with 1.0 and most likely will go under its own license. Stay tuned!

The long-standing manageWindow command bug has now been fixed in the new release (0.0.1) of mod_commands package. Seeing as I am planning on doing more releases shortly dealing with more major changes in the application, I've decided to keep this one as a module-only release (no bsheet package release). Those who wish to obtain this bug fix before new bsheet releases come out, they'll need to download release 0.0.1 of mod_commands and unzip it in their Bean Sheet module directory.

Just a quick heads-up regarding a change in the file set of bsheet package. Starting with release 0.9.3, the jar file (bsheet-<release>.jar) will no longer be distributed as a download. In my opinion, it added to the complexity of getting Bean Sheet installed correctly by necessitating presence of Bean Shell. It seems to me that those wishing to not download the bundled release are best served by downloading the source and generating their own bsheet.jar file using "jar" Ant task in the build file. Documentation will be updated shortly to reflect this change.

Well, it's been a little while. Lots of personal changes. I now reside in upstate NY, slowly getting settled in the new place. So far so good.

I'm trying to prioritize development for the next few months, given my limited time. Before doing a 1.0 release, there will be several 0.9. releases, usually each containing relatively minor feature updates. When I sufficiently exhaust my own feature and bug list for the near future, the latest release will go out as a 1.0. I would really like to have 1.0 bug free. Expect 0.9. releases to go out every couple of weeks or so. I will try to have new features being worked on in the feature list. Also expect some additional documentation released both on the project doc page as well as additions to the help module. There may be a few module API tweaks, but nothing should get deprecated. Expect only additions.

Bean Sheet 0.8 has been released. There were some problems with the distribution of older versions due to conflicting file names. I didn't realize the sf.net file download mirrors don't handle conflicting file names from separate releases gracefully. I'm considering taking some older releases off-line anyway, as they're irrelevant at this point. One can always build an earlier version from CVS by checking out appropriate tag.