Sunday 12 July 2009

This is an update to inform wondering users about the vitality of the project. A major and (hopefully better) rewrite of bless is currently taking place. My free time is quite limited but I try my best to make steady (although slow) progress.

The new version of bless is being developed as separate semi-independent core components/libraries that are written in C so that they can be easily used by other developers. This also makes development cleaner and easier for me.

The GUI code of bless will also be rewritten, probably in C#/Mono again, but we have some time until then so I may change my mind.

To get a feel of what has been done so far, see http://libbls.hellug.gr and http://launchpad.net/libbless-ui.

Sunday 25 January 2009

A bug in Mono 2.2 (#469213) is causing bless to crash. The bug has been fixed in recent Mono SVN revisions.

To temporarily work around this bug, set the environment variable MONO_GENERIC_SHARING=corlib.

Thursday 14 August 2008

It has been almost a year since the last Bless update. During this year I managed to get my Computer Science M.Sc. degree and in a couple of months I am going to finish my military service. Meanwhile, I have been quietly developing Bless and at last I am ready to present Bless 0.6.0! Main changes from 0.5.2 include: 

* Read/Write support for block devices.
* Saving speed improvements.
* Rendering speed improvements.
* Various bug fixes (gna.org #9660, #10378, #11397, #10601)
* A lot of internal changes that pave the way for exciting features...

Future plans

The 0.6.x line will contain only bugfixes and will not introduce any new features. I am currently working on creating a C library (libbless) that will contain and improve on many of the useful data structures used in Bless (eg efficient data buffers), so that they can be used easily by others. The 0.7.x line will be a partial rewrite of Bless that will use libbless as a backend.

Friday 31 August 2007

Bless 0.5.2 has been released! This is mainly a bugfix release. Changes from the 0.5.1 release include: 

* Plugin-ified Areas subsystem.
* Bless is now installed in a more standard location.
* Various bug fixes (gna.org #9313, #9543, #9664, #9659)

Also note that Bless is now in Debian Unstable!

Saturday 2 June 2007

Bless 0.5.1 has been released! Changes from the 0.5.0 release include: 

* New Select All action.
* Plugin to perform bitwise operations on data.
* Added right-click popup menus.
* Workaround for Mono 1.1.x bug that caused incomplete gui (gna.org #8975)
* Various bug fixes (gna.org #8916, #9084, #9094)

Friday 30 March 2007

Bless 0.5.0 is out! Thanks to all who sent suggestions and patches! Changes from the 0.4.1 release include: 

* Brand new plugin architecture (GUI and export).
* Export functionality (text and html, others with plugins).
* Reduced memory usage.
* Fixed garbled display issue.
* Localization support.
* New ways to select data ranges.

Saturday 30 Dec 2006

After a long wait, the first beta version of Bless 0.5.0 is out! In this release the internal architecture of Bless has been radically changed with the introduction of plugins. Almost everything in the GUI is now a plugin which means you can easily extend Bless to suit your needs. This release also features a powerful exporter to text and html, which can also be extended with plugins, Finally, many bugs including the annoying garbled display problem have been fixed (read the FAQ). Although great care has been taken to deliver a stable release don't forget this is still a beta, so keep those bug reports coming! Get the new release from the downloads page and if you have found Bless useful please consider making a donation

Thursday 3 Aug 2006

It's been a long time since the last Bless update and people are wondering if the project is deserted. The answer is that it is not deserted, but due to orthopedic health problems (radial tunnel syndrome) I have to stay away from computers as much as possible. Unfortunately recovery seems to be progressing quite slowly and it will probably be many months until I am well enough to continue development.

However, due to popular demand the new 0.4.1 bugfix release is out! It fixes some compilation problems with newer Mono versions and most importantly introduces a work-around for the annoying garbled display problem encountered by some users (read the FAQ). Get the new release from the downloads page.

Friday 21 Oct 2005

Bless now uses the Bazaar-NG system for version control. See the FAQ for more information.

Saturday 16 Oct 2005

Bless 0.4.0 has been released! In this release, Bless has been upgraded to Gtk# 2 (Gtk+ 2.4). The three most important new features are a toolbar, the ability to highlight patterns matching the current selection and the ability to open files by dragging and dropping them into Bless. There have also been many bug fixes and usability improvements.

Differences from Bless 0.4.0-rc1: