TableFlip v1.6.0 got approved to the Mac App Store (direct customers got the update a bit earlier, as usual). Check out TableFlip The least exciting feature first, so that it doesn’t go unnoticed: you can now scale the font in TableFlip (aka “zoom in and out”).
I’m looking for testers for my macOS apps TableFlip and WordCounter to get an opinion on Reach out if that’s you! hi@christiantietze.de
TableFlip v1.5.1 just got approved to the Mac App Store (direct customers got the update a bit earlier, as usual). Again: kudos to Marin Todorov for the export improvements on HTML! From the release notes: Oh boy, just wait for v1.6.0 🥁 It’ll be really cool. Until then, get TableFlip today and enjoy some plain text table flipping.
TableFlip v1.5.0 just passed App Store Review. Direct customers got the update already. Thanks to Marin Todorov for helping on this version! The better performance with large tables, HTML export, and overall fixes are of his making ❤️
TableFlip v1.4.1 passed App Store review and is now released: In my original draft for this post I wrote this: Direct customers got the update on Monday already. This plan was somewhat sort of holding up, but it was actually last week that I intended to publish it. And direct customers need to download the latest version manually, because I broke the auto-updater in the previous version.
I’ve released an update to existing users of TableFlip last week. It works well so far, so now’s the time for the official announcement of the new version, available for direct download.
Most notable changes:
; or \t just fine, which means export from Numbers works out of the box.For my nerdy readers, behind the scenes I also upgraded Sparkle from the XPC branch to the actual Sparkle 2.0 stuff. I sincerely hope it will ingest the upcoming updates, too. (It’d not be the first time I broke the update mechanism of one of my apps, heh.)
TableFlip is a fast tabular data editor – the ideal companion app for Markdown users who want beautiful tables in their documents. Open the file in both TableFlip and your text editor, and you’re set: TableFlip lets you edit all tables it finds inside your document and updates live as you edit your text.
Well, and you can edit CSV files, too, and export to LaTeX.
TableFlip v1.4.0 is available from the website and the Mac App Store.
TableFlip v1.3.0 just passed App Store Review. Direct customers had access to the update since yesterday evening. Here’s what’s new: Credits got to Alex Käßner for iterating on the “classic” TableFlip icon and bringing it to the Big Sur era of superellipses, soft gradients, and smooth arrows!
The latest version of TableFlip hits the digital shelves this weekend. It contains various fixes for CSV file handling, including those I wrote a series about over the course of the last months.
This is an overview of a short series of posts I wrote about TableFlip’s 2020 bug. People were getting a “You don’t have permissions” error, a Sandboxing error, when they worked with .txt files, but not with .md files, even though the app treated them the same. The issue boiled down to a misconfiguration on my side that went by unnoticed until I enabled Sandboxing. I was wrongly defining document types in the app’s Info.plist, and I was reporting supported file types in the NSDocument subclass in a manner that didn’t work out well.
Users have reported problems with TableFlip saving their files recently. One wrote about it in the Zettelkasten forums, if you want to see the problem in context. To reproduce the problem: when you open foo.txt in TableFlip and a text editor, then change the file in the editor rapidly, TableFlip would show a “You don’t have permissions” error once you tried to save changes from TableFlip later.
Here’s some more background info for indie devs. To follow up the release of TableFlip on the Mac App Store and me noticing that yes, people buy the app without any marketing, I wanted to share sales origin stats today: according to the available data collected by the App Store, 100% of purchases were made after a search inside the Mac App Store so far.
Since I put TableFlip on the Mac App Store, I sell about 1 or 2 copies each day. I didn’t invest any time in marketing, yet, apart from the announcement post here plus a tweet. That’s why I think these sales are driven by search terms through the Mac App Store. Then again, maybe not, I cannot say.
TableFlip is now available on the Mac App Store!
I also released updates to the non-Mac App Store version that fix CSV editing problems and improve the user interface. Of course both versions have the same features, so you’re not missing out on anything if you only own one version.
The app store page is a feast for the eyes. There’s a demo video (I already know how I can improve it a lot with the next update), Zebras, and lovely icy mountains.
Please share the news to help the app get traction. That would be super helpful!
I pushed the button. Now TableFlip is here! TableFlip is a text-based visual table editor. It will become your go-to application to edit tabular data because it’s blazingly fast, lightweight, and fun to use. You can use it to quickly create tables from scratch and copy the result anywhere – or you can use it to edit tables in existing documents. That’s what “flipping” stands for:
It is time to go public: I’ll release TableFlip in October. Sign up for the release notification: http://tableflipapp.com/ Much love goes out to my beta testers! ❤️ You are great! I didn’t anticipate that we’d have so many discussions. Thanks for all your amazing feedback so far. The past 12 weeks were wild; now it’s time to calm down a bit and make things right.
A beta tester of TableFlip suggested I make the table grow automatically when one navigates to the edge of the table and presses the arrow key in direction of the edge. I am conflicted about this proposal. On one hand, being able to grow the table easily is important. Spreadsheet applications usually present you with an infinite canvas. This is behavior people know (and maybe even expect).
Today was the second time during the development of TableFlip that I started to implement a new feature in the wrong way: starting with an explicit event type that is triggered by pressing a button in the user interface. This is a 1:1 mapping of user intent to an event that performs changes in the model. Next time I’ll start from another point of view instead to not rush too many minuscule changes until I hit a roadblock and hate myself. Here’s what went wrong.
I’ll send out a beta invitation to everybody on the TableFlip Newsletter this week. If you want to help me find quirks in the app and overall make it more usable, this is your chance!
Everyone who reports an issue will get a free license when the beta ends. Also, I’ll invite interested folks in batches, so you may not get your hands on the app this time but maybe in 2 weeks.
Tell your friends and in general everybody who’s using Markdown and/or deals with lots of tabular data in their work.
Now that TableFlip is nearing completion, I want to share details of how I created this piece of software with you. Today, I’ll start with the bigger picture: the application architecture. Earlier this year, I got to know ReSwift from a talk by Benjamin Encz which I loved.
I’d like to officially announce my next project: TableFlip. Open any Markdown file with TableFlip and you can visually edit the tabular data included. Save and the Markdown file is updated. It’s that simple. It’s also Markdown-aware simple table data editing app. It’s fast and lean and pretty. No need to fire up monstrosities like Excel for Mac or even Apple’s own Numbers to edit simple data that naturally fits the 2D-arrangement of a table.