TOKYO (Tom Bluewater) – The CodeBlue series is the software title that I use most frequently. Unfortunately, the last release, CodeBlue 3, is bug-infested. One of the most serious bug is that it will be driven to crash after you list code snippet titles many times. And its within-code search isn’t so reliable. So I’ve decided to work on a major overhaul with CodeBlue. Finally, I submitted CodeBlue 4 to Mac App Store several minutes ago.

We live in a confusing world where there are many different programming languages to develop software. Even when you work with the same language for several years, things can change from time to time. Take Swift as a programming language for example. We have seen so many deprecated classes although it’s been around for just four years as of July, 2019. The way you deal with the NSKeyedArchiver and NSKeyedUnarchiver classes are different since iOS 11 was introduced. And Cocoa and UIKit don’t share all the same classes. So you probably want a bank system where you can keep track of your programming code snippets under different groups.

CodeBlue 4 (hereafter, CodeBlue) offers one of those centralized systems to which you can go back and find an important chunk of code you have written in the past. It is now more than six years old. And this major release is No. 4. It’s been designed such that you can classify code snippets into different groups.

If you have used CodeBlue before, there have been some changes since the last major release. For example, you can now run a search with up to three keywords in order to find what you are looking for. Secondly, you can highlight the title of an important code snippet with three different color levels to choose from.  

What’s new?

1. Run a within-group search with up to three keywords.
2. Run a global search with up to three keywords.
3. Reorder reference URLs.
4. Highlight the title of an important code snippet with not just one but three levels of importance.
5. 26 new group icons are available.
6. Show or not show only unique group icons that have not been used by others when creating a new group.
7. The application is now available as freeware with an in-app purchase that gives you full functionality. You can use the application with free of charge for one week. After a week of fully-functional use, it will verify your purchase receipt. Therefore, continuous use of this application will require an in-app purchase.

Features

1. Create dozens or even hundreds of groups under which to store code snippet records.
2. Choose one of 224 icons to characterize a group.
3. Only show a list of icons that have not been used by other groups.
4. Create a list of tags to syntax-highlight for a given group.
5. Store programming code snippets under different groups.
6. Attach one or more URLs to each code snippet as reference URLs.
7. Highlight the title of an important code snippet with three different levels of importance.
8. Local search: Run a search with up to three keywords under the selected group to find code that you are looking for.
9. Global search: Run a search with up to three keywords across all groups to find code that you are looking for.
10. Within-code search: Locate a specific key phrase within the selected code snippet.
11. Save a code snippet as a data file so that you can recover the same code snippet with a remote computer.
12. Save the entire dataset as a backup data file to your disk. Recover data from a backup data file.
13. Create backup data files internally. Recover data from an internal backup data file.
14. Save data for the selected group as an XML-formatted text or a JSON-formatted text file to your disk.
15. Replace a group of key phrases (up to 10) for the selected code snippet with another.
16. Select a window color from a list of more than 135 colors.
17. Select a family font name and text size for showing code.
18. Sort the titles of code snippets by date or by name (ascending or descending).
19. Select a syntax-highlighting color, title-highlight colors, search-matching color from a list of more than 135 colors.
20. Move the selected snippet record to another group.
21. Reorder groups.
22. Reorder reference URLs for a given code snippet record.
23. Double-click on the title of a code snippet in the list to see its creation date with an alert view.
24. Double-click on the title field to show the creation date of the selected code snippet.
25. The fullScreen mode is supported.
26. Languages: English only.
27. Application file size: 47.6 MB.
28. The application comes with a built-in 22-page user guide. Click on the button that says ‘User’s guide for CodeBlue 4’ in the Home screen.

System requirements

1. 10.13 (tested with 10.13.6), 10.14 (tested with 10.14.4)
2. 64-bit system

Limitations

1. You can use the application with free of charge for one week. After a week of fully-functional use, it will verify your purchase receipt. Therefore, continuous use of this application will require an in-app purchase.

Version history

Version 4.1.0 (Released on October 24th, 2020)

1. A number of changes have been made to fix the retain cycle.

Version 4.0.9 (Released on October 4th, 2019)

1. A set of fixes is made to make the application compatible with macOS 10.15.

Version 4.0.8 (Released on July 30th, 2019)

1. Fix: The application rejected the keyword containing the period (.) when running a search.
2. Fix: When the user ran a global search without selecting a group, the segment control located at the bottom-left corner remained disabled.
3. When the user renamed the title of the selected code snippet, the application did not select the same record after the name change.

Version 4.0.5 (Released on July 17th, 2019)

1. A minor fix on the local search and global search functions.
2. When the user opened Preferences, some of the commands were accessible when they shouldn’t have been.

Version 4.0.4 (Released on July 14th, 2019)

1. When the user clicked on CodeBlue 4 at Mac App Store in the home screen, nothing happened.

Trial/Demo version

There is no trial or demo version available since the application is available for free.






Video tutorial

There is no video tutorial at this time.






Privacy policy

This application does not collect or utilize privacy data (user name, user address, user phone number, current geographical location, etc.) from its users. And it does not share any type of information from you with a third party.






Terms of use

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CodeBlue 4 is a product of Tom Bluewater.
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