Avoiding Neighbours

Have you ever wanted to load a List in your application context from a file? Perhaps you want to define a variable number of settings to be injected in, or in my case I wanted to pull in the Hibernate mapping files into an AnnotationSessionFactoryBean. Spring doesn't appear to have a way to do this out of the box, so here is how I have done it. So you want to load a list of strings defined in a file called names.txt such as: James Adam Peter Paul Your application context would look something like: <bean id="resourceList" class="com.fizzpod.spring.ResourceListFactoryBean"> <property name="targetListClass"> <value>java.util.ArrayList</value> </property> <property name="locations"> <list> <value>classpath:names.txt</value> </list> </property> </bean> The ResourceListFactoryBean is (obviously) a factory bean for creating a list from a Spring resource. Now this

Version 1.4 is out and as normal my methodology of trying to do frequent releases means the list of new features is short so short it is a single feature. What is it? Well now you can copy selected text from any page into a note. How? it's as simple as selecting the text and right clicking to get a context menu. It's not just for selecting text though, you can also just right click on a link and copy that to a note as well as just right clicking on a page and you get the title of a page and the url. Simple. This time there is a catch... The context menus are only available in version 6 of chrome. So this means that Simple Notepad no longer works in chrome 5, sorry for all the chrome 5 users but progress marches on.

Hot on the heals of version 1.2.0 comes version 1.3.0. This time with a bit more feedback on synchronization. There is now a synchronization status bar at the bottom giving you feedback about when the last synchronization happened, allowing to synchronize now and if synchronization is disabled it allows you to turn it on.

New version. So What's changed? You can now resize the note area to what ever size you want give it a go...

I've just released the latest version of Simple Notepad. So what's new? To be honest it's only a single feature: Cursor/selection memory; when you leave your note and go back to it the cursor/selection is still present, even when you change note and go back to it the cursor is just where you left it. My hope with this (as with everything with Simple Notepad) is that it is so simple that you don't even notice it, but it should really enhance the usability of Simple Notepad.

It's been out in the wild for a few weeks now so I thought that I would detail what I wanted from Simple Notepad. To create a notepad that was easy to use - usability is always high up my list of priorities. I could create multiple notes (not all of the existing notepad extensions can do this). Would synchronize my notes to Google docs. These seem like simple enough goals. I guess the other unwritten goal was to learn and use some of the HTML5 features that are supported by Chrome. So with that in mind I set about it.

Well as part of saying why I made Simple Notepad I thought I should start at the beginning and say why I moved to Google Chrome. For years I had been a fan of Opera, not the music although they do have some catchy tunes, but the browser. I can't remember when I first started to use it as my main browser but it was around 2002 probably. Now I am obviously not the longest serving Opera user, nor did I use all of its features. I did appreciate however that it was the fastest browser around and that I got an inner glow for using a browser that complied with specifications. I even put up with it not working with every web page I visited and needing to fall back to IE at times. I can't pinpoint the exact release where it started to go wrong, but was either in the late 9.x versions or the early 10.x versions. So what was wrong? Occasionally I would not be able to log into my Gmail account, a bit weird and it was reported a lot with a few settings tweaks to fix it which certainly made

Today is a momentous day, at least for me. It's not my birthday, nor any other day similar to that, and on the grand scale of things it's not nearly as momentous as my children being born. So what happened then? Well I finished a personal software project woohoo, well when I say finished I actually mean I released the first version of my Google Chrome Extension Simple Notepad . Why did I create it? What is it for? I'll leave that and the things that I learnt whilst doing it to subsequent posts.