All new Okteta features for KDE Apps 4.7 in a picture

KDE Apps 4.7 is out, and with it the hex editor Okteta 0.7!

For 0.6 and 0.5 I missed to give updates, like done for 0.4, 0.3, and 0.2.

So what is new since 0.4?

Not that much as in the early versions, since life has been busy for both Alex and me. So the biggest issues are yet to be solved: no smart handling of very large files (still completely loaded into memory), no storing of bookmarks. But besides that there is still nice progress:

(Eh, small glitch with the otherwise awesome new KWin in KDE Workspaces 4.7 is that shadows are not working for non-Oxygen styles, please ignore)

First thing to notice (besides the very first start of the program after updating to 0.7):

• much faster program start-up thanks to Alex’ analysis and improvements
  (what, you cannot see this in the picture? 😛 )

Other stuff:

• More support for char encoding/decoding:
  • New charset conversion tool: rewrites the bytes so the respective chars are the same as with the other charset
    (only 8-bit charsets supported, and unmatched chars are currently substituted with a value hardcoded to 0, setting is disabled)
  • New encodings: ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-16, Codepage 874
  • Fixed: show bytes without a defined chars as such
    (missed before that some of the supported charsets are incomplete)
• Many improvements in the Structures tool by Alex:
  • Structure definitions can now also be “described” in JavaScript (see the manual)
  • Begin of a structure can be pinned to a specific offset
  • Structure definitions can be installed using KNewStuff directly e.g. from kde-files.org
  • Support for strings (various Unicode encodings) in definitions
• New formats available for “Export to file”/”Copy as”:
  • Base32 (classic, Base32Hex, z-base-32)
  • Base85 (Ascii85 for now)
  • Uuencoding (historical, Base64)
  • Xxencoding
  • S-Record (16,24,32-bit address size)
  • Intel Hex (8,16,32-bit address size)
• Added embedded terminal
  (might be useless to most, but only needed a few code lines to implement 🙂 )
• Menu entries to set the count of bytes per line and per grouped bytes
• File info tool now estimates the mimetype also for the unstored/edited data in the working memory
• Bytearray views and tools are updated on change of default fixed font in System Settings

Oh, and headers for the Okteta libs and Kasten libs are finally installed since version 0.5, including the Qt Designer plugin. So if you are interested to make use of these libs in your own code, see for Kasten and OktetaKasten e.g. this blog entry (hm, Binspekt code needs updating to current API, will not compile) and the code of the plugin for KDevelop, for the Qt Designer plugin this blog entry and the example code.
But beware: the next version of the libs, coming with Okteta 0.8, will already have a different API/ABI, but that will be protected by proper namespacing.

For future versions there are still plenty of ideas for Okteta left, let’s see what gets realized 🙂

So for now “Happy bytes peeping and pushing!” also with the 0.7 version of Okteta!