As I get more and more reports for issues related to appledoc, and I tend to reply with similar message each time, I decided to write a post about support and news :)

In recent weeks I started working on major update to version 2.0. As I’ve described in one of my recent posts, most common issues with v1 are related to it’s doxygen parsing back-end, so v2 uses it’s internal source code parsing algorithms. I thought this will take quite some time, however due to using open-source parsekit framework, I was able to get it done in about one day of work! At it’s present form, the utility is able to parse all my code, however it doesn’t do much besides logging parsed data to output. You can check it out from appledoc’s github page (as it’s much too early to use it as production code, it’s available on development branch - master branch still contains 1.0 codebase.

I will take care to keep new version as backwards compatible as possible to make the upgrade as painless as possible. But some things will break, hopefully for better efficiency… For example command line will change, but is should provide more control (BTW - I use another open source component for this - ddcli). Another thing that frequently crossed my mind was actual source code documentation formatting. I wanted to have it as readable in-code as possible and as I’m no longer relying on doxygen, I experimented with markdown-like syntax and it turned out pretty cool. So I decided to go with it for stuff that would make sense while keeping common doxygen commands such as @param, @warning etc. You can see the syntax “in action” on github.

It’s been real fun to get back to appledoc and I’m looking forward to coming weeks / months :) I do have a lot of work in other projects too, so I will not be able to work on appledoc continuously. Therefore it will take a while until I can release first usable beta. However I will devote my time and effort to get 2.0 finished instead of fixing 1.0 as I think most of the issues will automatically be dealt with due to not being relied on doxygen (of course it will have issues of it’s own, but it’s not a perfect world we live in too ;)