Unheard of, 2 updates from Martin on the Intype blog in a week! This time he's talking about paired characters, tab trigger and updates to the the conflict selector (the menu that comes up when more than one command matches the tab trigger), and the licensing library.

More information on the Intype blog

A new year, a new determination from the Intype team that they will provide more details and be more active within the community. I have my reservations, however one thing is for sure: development is still moving on. A new blog post from Martin Cohen describes the recent changes, and promises some interesting additions to the editor.

Spans allows us to split the document into an virtual fully automated tree. The feature allows us to unify all the required automation we’ve all wanted in a layered manner. With current model of stacked behaviors we were not able to layer the automation effectively (i.e. having paired character automation within a snippet).

This new functionality also affects the undo/redo which is now able to contain the information about serialization and restore it. So you can return back to snippets edited in past through undo. Source: Intype blog

Although some would (and have) suggested that Intype is suffering from feature creep, according to this blog post, they are "finally finishing last tasks for the first internal testing launch of 0.3.5" - news that should make the Intype community very happy!

Watch the Spans video, here:

One question that seems to come up more often than any other, whether on the Intype forums or in the Blog, is whether or not another release is ever going to arrive.

Whilst the list of Features planned for 0.3.5 is extensive, many Intype users are hankering for a release (any release) to be provided for the community to see some progress has been made since the last release.


Intype is being developed during the nights and mornings because of our daily jobs. This lack and irregularity of the time is taking its price, we all as users are paying. Our reason for need of daily jobs is to have income from different source, so we can keep Intype free of charge during its development process. Many users are comparing Intype’s development cycle to other products being on some regular basis. But we simply cannot compete on this level, therefore we have to find other areas where we can prove to have better product.Source: Intype Blog

We can see that Martin is clearly still determined to get the product out, without compromising on the quality of the software, it is still frustrating when long standing users of the forums are starting to lose faith that we'll ever have the software released before we're all forced to abandon the wait and look elsewhere. I still use Intype for daily work but more and more the things which are missing are driving me to using alternatives. In the same blog post that provided the quote above, the team again promised much and the result is simply more waiting. The 'cutting edge' releases haven't surfaced, the forums are quiet, and there hasn't been a blog post in 2 months.

Communication even just to say that nothing has changed is key to keeping your audience. I have no doubt that Intype will be a fantastic product when it's released. I'm just not sure that I'll still be around to see it.

One of the things that drew me to Intype is the ability to create simple, but effective code snippets.

Here's an example, as written for a user of the Intype forums recently, who wanted bundles for <h1> to <h5>.

{
	title : 'Heading 1'
	tab_trigger : 'h1'
	scope : 'text.html'
	key_equivalent : 'Ctrl+1'
	content : '<h1>${1:$SELECTED_TEXT}</h1>$0'
}  

If you're an Intype user, you can download the bundle (2Kb)

Tab triggers & Shortcuts

1. h1 - Heading 1
2. h2 - Heading 2
3. h3 - Heading 3
4. h4 - Heading 4
5. h5 - Heading 5

All of the above can also be triggered using <ctrl>+<N> for example <ctrl>+<1>

Output

Any selected text will be placed between the tags, e.g.;

<h1>selected text shown here</h1>