Tab Multiple Lines

Well I didn't expect to get this done so fast, but I did. You can now tab or untab multiple lines of text inside Regex Hero by hitting tab and shift+tab on your keyboard. It works pretty much the same way as it does in Visual Studio.

Here's a video demonstration:


I didn't make this very clear in the video, but the size of the tab seems to be outside of my control. I'm hoping to find a way to fix this when I upgrade to Silverlight 3 or 4.

Show Group Names and Jump to a Match

I've added a couple features this weekend. You can now see a list of matched groups when available. And you can jump directly to a match just by typing in the number.

Rather than taking screenshots I thought I could explain this better in a video:

Faster than 94% of sites

I've always taken performance seriously so this statistic was pretty cool to learn about. Google has added a new section to their Webmaster Tools called "Site Performance." The stats here are gathered by users who have the Google toolbar.

And here's what they have to say about regexhero.net :

Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 0.7 seconds to load (updated on Dec 9, 2009). This is faster than 94% of sites. The chart below shows how your site's average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

Not bad. The funny thing is that I know there's still room for improvement. The blog actually has a lot of elements in it from blogger that all add to the latency time. At some point I'll be switching to something like Umbraco or Orchard and I should be able to improve this.

December Giving

So I've decided to give the proceeds from all sales this December to the Alliance for Children Everywhere organization.

100 License Giveaway Is Over: Thank You Early Adopters

Since I wasn't prepared to make the switch in an automated fashion, I actually gave free licenses to 105 people in total. So if you're one of those 105 who signed up for an account already you should now see a license key in your account. This whole giveaway was a way to reward the early adopters of Regex Hero that were with me from the beginning. Thanks guys!

I spent this weekend making final touches to the ordering process. I chose to go with PayPal only for now. Of course it'll allow you to pay with your PayPal account. Or if you don't have a PayPal account, you can simply enter your credit card information. It works pretty nicely. The side benefit is that PayPal works well with international orders as well. And in fact only 38% of website traffic to Regex Hero comes from the U.S., so accepting orders from other countries is important.

Regex Hero is not entirely free anymore, but I still want it to be a good deal. So I've set the price at $15 and that includes free upgrades for life. If you've missed your opportunity to get a free license you can buy it now.

Yahoo Login Problem Resolved (Thank you DotNetOpenAuth)

Apparently Yahoo made a breaking change to their OpenID provider system which conflicts with the DotNetOpenAuth release I was using. Fortunately the guys maintaining the DotNetOpenAuth project were all over it and just released an emergency fix in version 3.3.1. After I learned this, all I did is upload the dll from this latest version and that fixed the problem.

So if you were previously unable to login with your Yahoo OpenID, you should be able to now.

Still Growing

I've blogged before about the growth of the site. And I guess I'm doing it again. After all, I'm pretty excited about it.

So here it is again, this time from April through November.

All Visitors


Returning Visitors


Once again the trend of ever-increasing returning visitors continues. That's pretty cool.

Exciting Things to Come: My To Do List

I still have a lot planned for Regex Hero so I thought I'd take the opportunity to share it all.

Display Match Groups (Completed)
This was an idea by controlgeek that I plan to implement. Soon Regex Hero will optionally display the matched text from all groups (if any) as well as their corresponding group names. Technically this is easy to do but I just have to plan the UI carefully.

Tab Support (Completed)
I've made a number of customizations to the textboxes in Regex Hero already. But one thing that still bugs me is the way tabs work inside the textboxes. Whenever you hit tab, it skips to the next textbox. So you can't easily type a tab into a textbox. So I plan to fix that, and while I'm at it I want to find a way to tab multiple lines simultaneously. This is a feature common to most text editors nowadays so it's about time I catch up.

Regular Expression Highlighting
I want to add some simple highlighting to the regular expressions. The character classes, groups, and comments all need distinct color coding. I also want to give some indication of the location of corresponding parenthesis. So when you place your cursor next to one parenthesis it'll highlight the other.

Code hinting (an Intellisense-like feature)
I love Intellisense, as I'm sure most .NET developers do. I had the thought a few weeks ago that it might be possible to incorporate Intellisense-like functionality for the regular expression language. For example, I see this being helpful for many of the constructs that start with a parenthesis. Named groups, lookarounds, and even comments start with a parenthesis.

Built-in Tutorials
This is a big one. I want to develop a recording system that I can use to record mouse input, keyboard input, and my voice. Then I can create tutorials that are built into Regex Hero. I'll start off with more basic tutorials of course. But essentially you would select a tutorial to play, and then Regex Hero would automatically shrink to a fixed size (for coordinate-matching purposes) and you would see me take over the app, explaining everything as I do it. The benefit of doing it this way is that you can pause and interrupt the tutorial at any point. Having this ability means you can experiment with the app even if the virtual version of myself was in the middle of typing out a regular expression.

Desktop Version (Completed)
Silverlight 3 introduced the ability to run a Silverlight application out of the browser. However, Visual Studio 2010 is still in Beta. And from a practical standpoint I don't think it would be wise to release a Silverlight 3 or 4 version of Regex Hero built in a beta development environment. But when the new Visual Studio comes out I'll release a new version of Regex Hero that can run on your desktop for licensed users.

That's everything on my to do list as of now. I'm always coming up with new stuff to add or improve. Some of these things will take a lot of work. But I'm pretty excited about getting it all done and scratched off the list. Oh, and keep the suggestions coming.

In other news, 91 people have created Regex Hero accounts now. That means there's just 9 to go before it goes on sale. If you haven't signed up yet, read here for details.

Update: The 100 License Giveaway Is Over: Thank You Early Adopters