New 7-Day Trial

I've been lacking a good way for you guys to try Regex Hero Pro before you buy, until now. The new trial lasts 7 days and allows you to experience everything Regex Hero Pro has to offer, including code hinting.

To start the trial all you have to do is create a login. Or if you already have a login, then the trial will automatically start the next time you visit Regex Hero.

Code Hinting for Replacement Groups

I was planning this one for awhile. I just needed to set aside some hours to build it.

Code hinting has been available for regular expressions for a couple months. But now all pro users will see code hinting for the replace box as well...



You can see the named groups ${LastName} and ${FirstName} at the top of the list. My hope is that this will promote the use of named groups in regular expressions, rather than numbered groups. I think named groups have a way of better expressing the intention of the regular expression and to be able to select them from a list is pretty awesome.

Enjoy.

Selection Bug Fix when CrLf is Checked

I discovered yesterday that in some cases the wrong text is selected when you're stepping through the matches with the Previous/Next buttons. Specifically it would happen when you're working with multiple lines of text and "CrLf marks a line ending" is checked. I just now fixed the problem so it won't happen again.

CPU, Memory, and Hard Drive Usage Improvements

I made a few improvements to the application this weekend. I managed to find a more efficient way of doing a few things, eliminating unneeded steps during each regex matching cycle for real-time highlighting. In so doing I've sped it up slightly.

I also found that I was calling the auto-save function a little too frequently so I tweaked the interval settings. That should reduce memory and hard drive usage when working with large target strings.

And lastly I turned on GPU bitmap caching for several elements within the app. GPU acceleration features in Silverlight are still minimal, but this is one thing I'm able to do that actually has some small performance benefits.

New "Regex Hero Pro" Name, and a Lower Price

When I released "Regex Hero for Desktop" several months ago I had named it the way I did because I was inspired by Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop.

In fact Regex Hero shares a lot in common with Balsamiq the way we both started. I mean, obviously their app is a prototyping tool and mine is a regex tool. But Regex Hero is supported and maintained by just one man (me), as was Balsamiq back in the day. And they have a killer web app that thousands of people use, as do I. ;)

However, I've come to realize that while I do admire Balsamiq and just about everything they do, my app is just not the same. You see, Regex Hero is actually very usable on the web. And when you buy it, you get an account and license key which then allows you to use all of the features all within the web version. You can then optionally install the desktop version and get all of those same features.

So because the paid version can be run with the same feature sets inside or outside of the browser, calling it "Regex Hero for Desktop" is really a misnomer. So I've renamed it, "Regex Hero Pro." I think everyone understands that professional versions of an application are true supersets of the lesser version and I'm a little happier with this name.

The other thing I had changed earlier this year was the price. Originally I sold Regex Hero for $15. After I added some functionality I upped the price to $20 in March. But since that increase in price, sales have dwindled. Pricing is hard, it turns out. So I've set the price back to $15.

Silverlight 4 Adoption Rate Approaching 25%

A week before Silverlight 4 came out I added some Javascript to the tester page to track what version of Silverlight everyone was running and feed it into Google Analytics.

Silverlight 4 is still very new of course but I think it is interesting how many Regex Hero users have already upgraded. The adoption rate here is much higher than the stats from riastats.com would suggest (which of course spans a large variety of sites).

Here's a screenshot from Google Analytics showing the breakdown of Silverlight versions on regexhero.net/tester/ during the past 2 weeks:

"Silverlight 0" was my way of saying Silverlight is not installed.

Regex Hero is still built on Silverlight 3. But I'm going to begin working on some major improvements to Regex Hero in the upcoming weeks. Silverlight 4 is going to allow me to add some awesome features that I'm looking forward to. And my plan at the moment is to launch the new Silverlight 4 version when the adoption rate surpasses 80%.

If you want to see the new version of Regex Hero make sure you get the latest version of Silverlight. The sooner everyone upgrades the sooner I can launch. ;)

New Video Lessons

I began a new series of video lessons explaining the basics of regular expressions. I'm trying to be thorough in each lesson without talking about concepts that'll be learned in later lessons (a more difficult task than I expected).

I have 3 so far, and I'll add to this list as I go:

• Introduction to Regular Expressions
• Regex Lesson 1: Characters
• Regex Lesson 2: Quantifiers
• Regex Lesson 3: Assertions