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Ukelele version history

Jonathan Kew, 2005-12-02; 7604 reads

This page records the release notes from older versions of the Ukelele tool; the latest version of the software, and recent release notes, can be found on the main Ukelele page.

May 1, 2006: released version 1.6.7

Double-clicking a dead key changed the key with no modifiers (or, actually, what modifiers were current when the dialog ended). It is now fixed to behave as expected.
Added a section in the help and manual to explain the codes necessary to make keys into control keys such as Home, Page Up, arrow keys, etc.
Removed Hangul, SCIM & TCIM keyboards, as they are not useful on their own, since they are part of various input methods. At present, input methods are apparently not able to use other keyboard layouts.
Moved some initialisation code so that you don’t get warned about a missing KCAP resource when double-clicking a keyboard layout document.

February 24, 2006: released version 1.6.6

Improved the display when switching windows.
Try to solve a crash that some users get when working with dead keys (not too sure why it’s crashing, so I don’t guarantee it’s fixed).
Handle the case when a key is double-clicked and the output is deleted, when in a dead key state (gives the terminator, rather than a null output).
Show correct output in some dead key cases, where null output showed instead of the terminator.
Converted all the keyboard layouts provided with Mac OS X 10.4.5, giving a few more layouts than in previous versions. In particular, there are Hangul, SCIM and TCIM layouts which were not available before.

December 30, 2005: released version 1.6.5

Fixed a crash when adding a new modifier combination.
In previous versions (1.6.2–1.6.4), not all keyboard types would be available when opening or creating a new keyboard as the start-up action. This is now fixed, and all keyboard types are available at start-up as well as when opening or creating a new keyboard layout with the menu commands.
Ukelele now uses “Smart Crash Reports”. If you are running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you can go to http://www.unsanity.com/smartcrashreports/ and download the client software. It enables you to send any crash logs directly to the author. This is not required for Ukelele to operate, and is intended to help the developer respond to crash reports more quickly.

September 22, 2005: released version 1.6.4

The fix in 1.6.3 didn’t work correctly. I believe that it’s fixed correctly now.
Fixed the code in naming new files so that you don’t get two .keylayout extensions in the file name.
Changed the handling of key down events slightly to improve visual appearance when the command key has been held down.

September 13, 2005: released version 1.6.3

Fixed a bug causing a crash on saving of a keyboard layout without any dead keys.

September 9, 2005: released version 1.6.2

Fixed an issue when undoing a change to a key which did not already have output.
The modifiers editor was not deleting the last row when a combination was deleted, and trying to delete it again led to a crash. This is now fixed.
Fixed a bug which caused a crash on quitting occasionally.
Added support for more keyboard types (all types recognised by Keyboard Viewer for Panther and Tiger or Key Caps for Jaguar).
Tweaked the code for determining whether to show output as small or large on a key cap.
Fixed a bug which failed to refresh the display of a key with no output, leaving it looking as though it had whatever output was last displayed. This was most noticeable when editing dead keys.
Correctly calculate the maxout figure, the maximum number of characters produced by a keystroke or sequence of keystrokes. A bug in calculation in earlier versions made some keyboard layouts behave incorrectly.

July 19, 2005: released version 1.6.1

Added a version that will run on Mac OS X 10.2.x (Jaguar) — identical except that it does not provide information about XML errors when opening a file that is not valid XML.
Fixed a bug that caused a crash when creating a dead key when the trigger did not have any output assigned to it.
The dialog asking whether to save changes now shows the long name of the file rather than the 31-character shortened version.
Fixed some issues with display when the Fn key is down (on some iBook and PowerBook keyboards).

June 29, 2005: released version 1.6

Fixed a problem which caused a crash when double-clicking a key which has no output.
Handled a problem which could cause a crash when clicking the splash screen just before it goes away with the timer.
Improved the display of control characters and symbols for control keys.
Improved the speed of determining whether the text will fit on the key cap.
Changed button labels in some dialogs to avoid using "Yes" and "No", so that it is clearer what action will happen when the button is clicked.
Fixed a crash when creating a dead key.

April 28, 2005: released version 1.6b1

Added the capability of changing the output of control keys by double-clicking them (not drag and drop).
Changed the way that Ukelele determines whether to show a key cap in the normal size or the reduced size, based on what will fit into the key cap on screen. Also tries to be intelligent about how to show non-printable characters. Unfortunately, this is a lot slower.
Fixed a bug which caused doubling of comments in the actions element in the keyboard layout file, when there was a comment between two actions. Duplicate comments are now deleted on saving the file.
Fixed a bug which caused a crash when creating a dead key from a key that had no output before creating the dead key.
Repaired an error in the Serbian keyboard layout which prevented it being used.
Fixed a cosmetic bug in the display when changing state names (some characters would appear to disappear).
Fixed a cosmetic bug when the menu would display “Hide” for a floating window (State Stack, Key Code or JIS Palette) that had been closed with the close button rather than through the menu.
Reworded an error message that would appear if the selected physical keyboard layout could not be loaded (which should never happen, but appears to happen to some people).
Provided more information about the error in the dialog box displayed when a file is invalid XML.
Changed the default keyboard layout to the same as Keyboard Viewer (original “Cosmo” USB keyboard).
Fixed a crash when double-clicking the key cap in the terminator dialog.
Ukelele should now correctly display characters out of the Basic Multilingual Plane (i.e. code points greater than U+FFFF).
Fixed a bug which would sometimes cause a keyboard layout to be invalid when creating a second-level or higher dead key (i.e. a dead key starting from a state other than "none").
Fixed a crash when saving a keyboard layout which was read from a file not encoded as UTF-8.

January 16, 2005: released version 1.5

Lowered the baseline so that tall characters (such as those with two diacritics) show up correctly (this was in 1.5b2, but not noted then).
Fixed a bug where dragging and dropping certain characters could create an output file which is illegal XML, and so would not appear in the input menu.
Fixed a bug which, in certain circumstances, would put the program into an infinite loop when creating a dead key.
Changed the pop-up menus for action and state names to make a more readable form (convert to MacRoman rather than UTF-8).

January 7, 2005: released version 1.5b2

Included XML versions of all the non-Unicode system keyboard layouts (converted to XML with Apple’s klkchrtoxml and kluchrtoxml tools, part of Font Tools 2.0).
Fixed a bug that caused a crash when the JIS palette was closed with the close box.
Fixed a bug that caused a crash when clicking on a key to select it as a dead key trigger.
Corrected the output for the up arrow and down arrow (they had been reversed).
Fixed a bug that caused a crash on save if the opened file was not in UTF-8 format but still valid XML (e.g. ISO 8859-1 coding).

December 21, 2004: released version 1.5b1 — first test release of Ukelele 1.5, adding significant new features to the 1.0 version:

Rewrote the code for displaying keyboards so that any physical keyboard layout that the system knows about can be displayed.
Key sizes can be made larger to see longer output strings.
Added output for non-editable keys (return, enter, tab, escape, delete, F-keys, arrow keys, page up, page down, etc) when starting from an empty keyboard layout.
Missing non-editable key output is diagnosed and can be repaired when a keyboard layout is opened. A menu command is also provided so that it can be done at any time, if you elect not to do so when opening the file.
Added display of symbols for modifier and non-editable keys so that they can be recognised.
Added a palette for use with JIS keyboards to allow changes to be for JIS only or for all keyboard types.
New menu commands to change state and action names.
New menu command to remove unused states.
New comments editor that allows you to add your own comments to the XML keyboard layout file, and edit or delete them as well.
Improved the new file dialog to allow creation of an empty layout, a layout based on a system keyboard layout, or a copy of an existing, non-system keyboard layout.
Changed the dialog for editing or creating dead keys to allow easy access to existing dead keys.
Added a command to import a dead key from another keyboard layout.
The modifiers editor window now shows the default modifier index.
Added more keyboard shortcuts.
You can undo almost any action now, including creating a dead key.
Wrote a real manual, as well as updated the help book.
Made first steps to making Ukelele ready for localizing.
Improved error reporting from keyboard layout files that are not valid for some reason.

September 20, 2004: released version 1.0.5

Fixed a bug that meant that use of the Fn or Num Lock keys did not work correctly (the keypad and non-keypad keys were mapped together). However, some keyboard layouts affected by this bug may still have problems caused by the bug, and may need to be regenerated. The problem can be fixed by editing the XML output file. If you really want to do that, ask for details.
Changed the position of the state window so that it can be seen on 800 x 600 screens.
Finally fixed the bug noted in 1.0b4, where creating a keyboard layout based on a system keyboard layout would crash in Mac OS X 10.2.8, and perhaps other versions as well.
Added a feature showing the names of missing actions when reading a keyboard layout file which is missing some actions.
Added a new command to set the script code and numeric ID of the keyboard.

August 14, 2004: released version 1.0.4

Fixed an issue that crippled the modifier combination dialog.
Corrected the handling of double-clicking the terminator key cap in the dialog asking for a terminator.

August 2, 2004: released version 1.0.3

Really fixed the bug with keyboard layouts created with “New…”. (The fix in version 1.0.1 didn’t actually solve the problem.)
If the bug was manifested in a keyboard layout file, it will be corrected on opening in 1.0.3. A dialog will tell you if this has happened.
Added comments to the keyboard layout files indicating creation and modification times.
Removed some unused code.
Fixed a memory leak when saving a keyboard layout file.
Added information about keyboard names and icons to the help book.

July 17, 2004: released version 1.0.2

Made deleting a dead key work correctly and properly flag it as non-undoable.
Improved documentation of multi-level dead keys in the help book.
Cosmetic changes to various windows and dialogs.

July 13, 2004: released version 1.0.1

Corrected a bug which made keyboard layouts created with “New…” invalid.
Added the ability to edit dead-key terminators.

June 28, 2004: released version 1.0

This is the final release of Ukelele 1.0, with no currently-known bugs.

April 13, 2004: released version 1.0b4

Fixed a problem where an XML control character (&<>") was assigned to a key, resulting in invalid XML.
Known problem: One user reported a crash when creating a new keyboard layout based on a system keyboard layout. It may be a Jaguar vs. Panther issue, but I haven't been able to reproduce it. If you can reproduce this problem, please let me know exactly what you did!

March 31, 2004: released version 1.0b3.

Fixed a bug which caused Ukelele to crash after the state window was closed.
Created a real JIS keyboard layout for PowerBook/iBook keyboards.
Added preferences window for setting whether the splash screen is shown at startup and the startup action.
Added a splash screen.
Fixed a bug which caused Ukelele to crash when adding a new modifier combination to a keyboard with exactly one existing modifier combination.
Fixed a bug with creating dead keys which put them onto the wrong modifier combination.

March 20, 2004: released version 1.0b2.

This version corrects a problem in 1.0b1 that was generating invalid XML files.