Blue Static

Archive for the ‘MacGDBp’ category

MacGDBp 2.1.2 Released

Posted on May 19, 2022 at 18:35 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: software, MacGDBp,

MacGDBp 2.1.2 is now released containing one bug fix.

You can download MacGDBp 2.1.2 from the product page.

MacGDBp 2.1.1 Released

Posted on February 27, 2022 at 19:00 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: software, MacGDBp,

MacGDBp 2.1.1 is now released. The significant change is that the release is now code-signed and notarized by Apple.

You can download MacGDBp 2.1.1 from the product page.

MacGDBp 2.1 Released

Posted on January 2, 2022 at 07:00 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: software, MacGDBp,

Happy New Year! Today I’m releasing MacGDBp 2.1, which improves compatability with macOS 12 Monterey. The major new change is native support for Apple Silicon. In addition, there are some visual tweaks to work better on macOS 12.

Another notable change is that on newer macOS versions, Apple have stopped shipping a PHP executable by default. MacGDBp previously relied on this to highlight the source code viewer. This release now adds a preference to specify the PHP executable path to enable syntax highlighting.

You can download MacGDBp 2.1 from the product page.

MacGDBp 2.0.2 Released

Posted on April 18, 2020 at 07:00 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: software, MacGDBp,

Today I’m releasing MacGDBp 2.0.2 to address a major issue with the auto-updater and some other minor product bugs.

Somehow when upgrading the Sparkle updater framework when working on MacGDBp 2.0, the auto-update relauncher binary lost its executable bit. This resulted in the auto-update installation hanging indefinitely. Unfortunatley there is no way to automatically recover from this state. Users can run:

chmod +x MacGDBp.app/Contents/Frameworks/Sparkle.framework/Resources/Autoupdate.app/Contents/MacOS/*

… and re-run the in-product updater. Or simply download version 2.0.2 which has resolved the issue.

You can download MacGDBp 2.0.2 from the product page.

MacGDBp 2.0.1 Released

Posted on April 11, 2020 at 07:00 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: software, MacGDBp,

In March I quietly promoted the 2.0 beta 1 release to be the final, stable build. I decided to not do a blog post because there were no changes from the beta build.

Today I’m releasing 2.0.1 to address some issues. Thank you to everyone who reported these bugs. The release also improves dark mode support in the source viewer, which you can see below.

You can download MacGDBp 2.0.1 from the product page or by updating via Sparkle.

MacGDBp 2.0 Beta 1 Released

Posted on January 4, 2020 at 13:30 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: software, MacGDBp,

While I did state that the first beta of MacGDBp would be out by the end of the year, I decided against pushing a new build before immediately disappearing on holiday for two weeks. But today is the day!

Version 2.0 is not a complete rewrite, but virtually every aspect of the app has been updated and improved. The biggest changes are under-the-hood, particularly around the interaction between the frontend and the remote debugger, which now accurately tracks “transactions.” This allows MacGDBp to fetch the contents of long arrays or large objects without issue. In addition, several components have been refactored to improve the project’s code health and the app’s robustness. These improvements fixed numerous long-standing bugs in the app.

The biggest new feature, by popular demand, is the ability to set symbolic breakpoints. This will pause the debugger any time a function of a given name is called, rather than having to rely solely on file/line breakpoints.

Unfortunately, the app will remain un-sandboxed and not code signed. The Sparkle updater is not yet compatible with the app sandbox. And Apple’s annoying two-factor authentication requirements rule out (for me) obtaining a signing certificate. Sparkle will still verify the updates’ signature, however.

Finally, MacGDBp 2.0 sports a new, unified interface. All of the panels and windows have been collapsed into a single, tabbed window.

See the changelog for the full list of new features and bug fixes.

You can download MacGDBp 2.0 Beta 1 from the product page.

Looking Towards the Future

Posted on October 28, 2019 at 15:30 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: software, MacGDBp,

First, welcome to the new Blue Static! The site has a fresh coat of paint, it has been made more mobile-friendly, and I have updated much of the content, pruning extremely old things while keeping still-old-but-maybe-interesting items around for posterity. For the first time in the history of the site, Blue Static is no longer powered by PHP: the entire site is now rendered as static files by Hugo.

It has been well over seven years since this site was last updated, and that is because I no longer have the substantial amounts of time I once had to dedicate to Blue Static software. Since I now spend all of my working hours writing and maintaining software, the allure of doing so as a hobby has unfortunately diminished.

Over the past few months, I’ve pondered how to move forward with the various Blue Static projects. I’ll outline some of those decisions now:

MacGDBp still has a large number of loyal users. I’m happy to report that in these intervening years, I’ve worked sporadically on the next major version. The first beta of MacGDBp 2.0 will be released before the end of the year! The entire core debugging engine has been rewritten and made more robust, which has fixed many bugs and added new features. The new version will also be code signed and notarized to be compliant with Apple’s increasingly locked-down macOS.

RGB Converter will remain available for download, but because Apple has removed Dashboard in macOS 10.15 Catalina, the widget will not be updated anymore.

Bugdar is the project that I’ve struggled to make a decision on. It is fairly safe to say that any 2.0 greenfield rewrite will not happen. However all of Blue Static’s bugs remain in the Bugdar instance that runs on this site, so it cannot go anywhere over night. I am not currently enamored with other options, such as Github’s issue tracker, so despite Bugdar’s visible age I will continue to run it for Blue Static’s purposes. There may be an infrequent maintenance update, but I do not expect to make major changes to the software at this time.

What drove these decisions is that I have largely stopped writing software in PHP. It is no longer my language of choice, and my interests have moved on to other programming languages and software domains. MacGDBp remains important to me beacuse others find it useful and the code is still fun to work on.

I’ll close with a teaser: there is at least one new project that I will be publishing in the future under Blue Static. It has to do with email and is geared towards power-users.

Look forward to MacGDBp 2.0 Beta 1 coming to a Sparkle update near you!

MacGDBp 1.5 Released

Posted on September 3, 2012 at 01:50 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: Cocoa, mac os x, MacGDBp,

MacGDBp 1.5 has been released. This update fixes a crash on 10.8 when adding a breakpoint. Credit for the fix goes to Paul Mitchell and Sam Fleming.

This release also includes a new feature that allows you to evaluate and see the result of an arbitrary PHP expression. For example, you can use print_r to get a different view of PHP objects:

Full details are in the changelog.

Tracking Info:
Current SHA1: 0508dff
Version: 1.5.0.104.0
Last Release Build: Sun Sep 2 21:13:38 EDT 2012

MacGDBp 1.4.1 Released

Posted on April 29, 2011 at 04:58 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: Cocoa, mac os x, MacGDBp,

MacGDBp 1.4.1 has been released; this is a maintenance update that fixes a few bugs. I meant to get this release out a few weeks ago, but I’ve been travelling recently and didn’t have the time.

You can download MacGDBp 1.4.1 from this page. Please file any new issues in the bug tracker.

Tracking Info:
Current SHA1: 7fde123
Version: 1.4.1.91.97
Last Release Build: 2011-04-29 00:33:16

MacGDBp 1.4 Released [u]

Posted on February 26, 2011 at 18:08 UTC, filed under the category MacGDBp. Tags: mac os x, MacGDBp,

After a slight delay trying to track down some bugs, I’ve decided to push MacGDBp 1.4 to stable distribution. While this release is not quite perfect and there are a few known issues (listed on the project page), I was tired of blocking the release on relatively minor bugs. This release has been a year in the making, and it makes significant improvements over the 1.3 branch. To find out more about what went into making this new version, check out some of the older posts on the blog.

You can download MacGDBp 1.4 from this page. Please file any new issues in the bug tracker.

Update: A minor bug had to be fixed with the released package. I’ve pushed a new binary and the few people who have downloaded the update will be prompted to update again.

Tracking Info:
Current SHA1: 4ce0d31 d746f73e
Version: 1.4.0.85 .83
Last Release Build: 2011-02-26 14:21:17 2011-02-26 12:29:16

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