Good news - Neu 1.1 has been submitted to the Mac App store, and is currently in review.

Meanwhile, for the brave-of-heart, beta version 1.1b5 is available from the betas page.

Work on version 1.2 is also well under way… more on that soon.

Hot on the heels of the first one, I’ve just released a second beta of Neu 1.1.

In addition to the changes in 1.1b1, this version has a few tweaks to the default preferences, and a new pdf-based manual, available from the Help menu.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve just released the first beta of Neu 1.1.

This is a relatively minor update, but there are a few new features as well as some bug fixes, hence the upgrade from .0 to .1…

Hilights from the change log include:

• Added “behaviour” and “appearance” preference panes, removed “general” pane, reorganised preference items.
• Improved handling of symbolic links, added support for Finder aliases, and added options relating to them.
• Fixed a couple of bugs relating to template files and file extensions.
• Improved OS X Lion support.
• Added “Create Document On The Desktop…” and “Create And Open On The Desktop…” service menu commands.
• When documents are created on the desktop, they are now just selected on the desktop in the Finder, rather than another “Desktop” window being opened.
• Added some more substitution variables (templateFullName, templateName, templateActualName, templateType).

When you’re developing an application that provides Services in OS X, you sometimes need to change the definitions of the services.

These are stored in the info.plist in your application, but just changing it and rebuilding the application isn’t enough, you also have to force the system to re-index the services so that it spots your changes.

You can do this by calling NSUpdateDynamicServices() in your application, or by running /System/Library/CoreServices/pbs on the command line.

I recently came up against a problem with this though. When pbs scans, it seems to just pick up the definitions from the first version of a given application. If you’re developing, you often have multiple copies lying around, and you don’t seem to have any control over which version pbs will come across first.

I’m guessing that pbs simply scans your volumes in alphabetical order. I had an issue where it was picking up an old version of an app in the “Archived Applications” section of the “Derived Data” folder on a different partition, before finding the version that I had just built.

I’ve found a simple fix which worked for me - simply move the new application into /Applications temporarily, and run a scan. This seemed to be enough to get pbs to pick up the correct app. Whether it will always work, I’m not sure, and it’s a pain to have to keep copying it there if making multiple changes, but luckily the services settings are something that you tend not to have to tweak very often.

Finally, we’ve completed our relocation, and are now based in Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides. This is quite a change of scenery compared to South London!!

The move has been a great distraction over the last few weeks, so there hasn’t been a great deal of development work on Neu, Ambientweet, or any of our other projects.

However, the internet connection here is just fine, and as the dust settles I should once again be able to focus on development. First priority is checking both Neu and Ambientweet for Lion compatibility. After that, I’m hoping to finally get an initial version of Ambientweet into the store, and to work on some updates for Neu.