UnicodeChecker 1.12.1¶
314 words on earthlingsoft
Just a week after its predecessor, another update to
UnicodeChecker – version 1.12.1 – has been released. It solidifies earthlingsoft’s appreciation of silly version numbering schemes. (I think I’ll just go for Unicode Roman Numerals should I get to pick a version numbering scheme for an application again…)
This release sneaks in a great new feature: automated download of the Unihan data file. This resolves a weakness of the application ever since Unihan support was introduced. Actually being able to use that feature required users to manually download and ‘install’ the Unihan data file from the Unicode servers. As the file in question is thirty times the size of all of UnicodeChecker and many people won’t use it, this seemed to be a reasonable strategy for adding the feature without making UnicodeChecker a huge download and blowing our bandwidth quota. But it wasn’t the ideal solution in terms of user friendlyness and may have kept that feature in obscurity as getting to use it required people to perform all those manual steps.
In this version UnicodeChecker introduces a button that reduces the effort for downloading and installing the Unihan data file to a single click. Perhaps that gets more people to investigate that cool Unihan database which can almost be used as a lightweight dictionary for Asian languages.
Other subtle improvements include a guide in the Help book on changing the keyboard equivalents for UnicodeChecker’s many Services Menu entries and the nice fact that you can now successfully use the Quit command while the Find sheet is open in UnicodeChecker’s main window. That, in fact, is a detail I really like and one I frequently dislike other applications for: non-critical sheets preventing an application from quitting – it may be Cocoa’s default behaviour but it’s just wrong in many situations. Oh and there were some technical improvements and bug fixes as well.
