Today we are extremely excited to announce Cappuccino 0.9.5, featuring over 90 new features and improvements in addition to numerous bug fixes. Here are some of the new features we think you’ll really like.

Modern scrollbars

Cappuccino now features new scrollbars which fade away automatically when not in use, giving more space for the content of your scroll views. If the user’s browser does not support or use overlay scrollbars, Cappuccino automatically detects it and falls back to old style scrollbars.

Documentation Overhaul

The Cappuccino documentation has not only been extended but also visually refreshed. Many more classes and methods are now in the documentation and it’s an easier read.

Popover Widget

A popover control is a small window that appears to ‘come out’ of a part of your user interface, and which remains attached to it until the user dismisses it. It’s an easy way to ask for extra information when that ‘create’ button is clicked, or to show a list of individually selectable downloads when the ‘downloads’ button is clicked.

CPPopover originating from a button. Level Indicator Widget

A level indicator shows a discrete graduation from ‘empty’ to ‘full’, useful for certain gauges like space usage. Level indicators can also be editable and can be placed inline in table cells.

Level indicators, some in a ‘warning’ state. Predicate Editor

Predicates are powerful tools for encoding ‘search patterns’, and combined with the power of Cappuccino’s Array Controller class they make it incredibly easy to create user searchable tables or other views. The new predicate editor allows users to create their own saved searches with almost no work for the developer.

Tooltips

A much requested feature has been tooltips. We didn’t want to release something that wasn’t as powerful and flexible as everything else in Cappuccino and we don’t think we will disappoint. Cappuccino tooltips can be attached to any control, position themselves intelligently and support multiline tips.

Stronger Interface Builder Integration

If you want to easily create and edit your user interfaces using a visual editor, you have the best tool in the market available for use with Cappuccino: Interface Builder. Every aspect of the nib2cib experience has improved, with better support for fonts, smarter realignment of widgets to match Cappuccino sizes and support for more controls than ever before. Best of all, the new XcodeCapp application automatically creates an Xcode project out of your Cappuccino project and lets you place UI components with ease.

New Installer

The new bootstrap installer is much simpler to use and installs all the packages you will need by default.

You know you want to. Notable Improvements

There are too many improvements to list them all here but here are some highlights:

• CPNumberFormatter with CPNumberFormatterDecimalStyle.
• More powerful objjc CLI.
• CPButton continuous mode.
• Keyboard navigation, improved submenu handling and auto validation in CPMenus.
• Support for pattern fills when drawing using CG.
• Many new bindings features and optimisations, including CPNullPlaceholderBindingOption, CPContinuouslyUpdatesValueBindingOption and better object controllers.
• CPUserDefaultsController which can be used to easily bind controls to user default keys in Interface Builder or elsewhere.
• CPColorWithImages convenience function to quickly create a `CPColor` from single, 3-part or 9-part images.
• Support for autosaving and collapsing views towards the right in CPSplitViews.

For the full list of changes, see the Cappuccino 0.9.5 change log.

The Team

We’re also happy to announce we’ve added Klaas Pieter Annema, Aparajita Fishman and Antoine Mercadal to the core team. Their contributions to Cappuccino have been invaluable.

- The Cappuccino Core Developer Team

Download Cappuccino

I’ve been a big fan of Cappuccino since late 2009 and have written and spoken about it pretty extensively. This past July I went to sunny Tetbury, UK to record a video course entitled “Cappuccino for Cocoa Developers.” Here’s some background on how the course came into being…

In addition to being a tony little country village where Prince Charles has one of his castles, Tetbury is famous for being the home town of iDeveloperTV, a company much loved by indie Mac and iOS developers for putting on NSConference, along with the extensive library of video courses and podcasts it has produced over the years. This past Spring, Steve “Scotty” Scotty invited me to give a presentation on Cappuccino at NSConference in the UK. It was extremely well-received, so I reprised the talk at the first CappCon in San Francisco this past Summer.

My goal for both talks was to show existing Cocoa developers how they can leverage their existing skills to craft desktop-caliber web-apps. In the course of preparing for these presentations, I ended up developing a series of carefully-designed tutorial apps, designed to feel comfortable to Cocoa developers while highlighting some web-specific architectural considerations.

These tutorial applications thus formed the basis of the 4 hour course. We shot the video against a white background so that the “talking-head” video could be mixed-in with the screen capture from my laptop as you see here:

The net effect is quite like having your own personal trainer. Scotty’s role is to make sure that I highlighted the points that may not be obvious to first-time learners.

The video is delivered in high-quality, DRM-free H.264 video that you download to your machine. Sync it to your iPad if you wish, then watch it in bed before dreaming of Cappuccino. The resolution lets you clearly read the code while listening to the discussion. Work along with the same source code shown in the video, adapt it to your needs, then build something meaningful to you. Since data persistence in web-apps is a major consideration, I’ve even included the source code for a simple RESTful Web Service written in Ruby on Rails so you can see how things work end-to-end.

I’m extremely proud of the work I did in creating this course, and I think Dave at iDeveloper TV did a bang-up job with the editing. Scotty has been kind enough to release the course at the exceptional price of US $29.99 in order to put in reach of everyone. Complete details can be found here:

http://ideveloper.tv/video/cappuccinocourse.html

I hope you enjoy the course. Feedback is greatly appreciated. Hopefully, I’ll have the chance to make some additional courseware in the future.