It's exciting times here at Beach as we continue to push forward our vision for our products and the way we build websites today, tomorrow and in the future.

We've got some big news and changes coming with regards to the way we distribute Hammer, in particular - but I don't think there'll be much of a surprise. We'll be moving out, not entirely, but significantly, from the Mac App Store as the main point of distribution. I'm not going to make a big deal out of it, but having given it a lot of thought since taking over Hammer, decided that to have the most flexible options for both product development and how we price and market our suite of products, is of highest priority for now.

In readiness for this we're working to make sure the product is in the best shape possible. So the Hammer compiler is getting a public release update today. 5.2.x has been in testing for a little while now and appears to be stable. Importantly, it has a number of little but important bug fixes and improvements as well as a few new features. Here's what it's all about...

Changelog:

5.2.1

Sourcemaps for SASS
Sourcemaps for Coffeescript

5.2.2

Hammer.json is here!

We wanted a way to prototype new features faster and provide more advanced and custom functionality without clogging up the simple UI of the Hammer app.

The Hammer.json file is a small configuration file that sites in the root directory of your project. With it you can do all sorts of new cool stuff, like activate sourcemaps and use post-css's autoprefixer.

Hammer.json example

The features that are most popular and become most important will then be promoted to an appropriate area of the Mac app user interface.

You can read more about the Hammer.json options in the Hammer Docs.

5.2.3

Optimisations and restructure of the hammer.json parsing
Sourcemaps working with autoprefixer
Autoprefixer added. Read about it here on the github repo and stay up to date by following @autoprefixer on twitter

5.2.4

Fixed variables bug for markdown includes

5.2.5

Enable using Hammer tags as plain text, e.g. for Documentation. To do so, use double symbols, such as:

<!-- @@include _head -->

<!-- $$value -->

Enabling change of Build folder location. This should be set in your Hammer.json configuration file.

Here's an example of a build folder relative to the project folder, if the folder is not found, it will be created:

{
"buildDir": "myFolderInsideSource"
}

Here's an example of a build folder at an absolute path on your computer, again, if not found it will be created at Build time.

{
"buildDir": "/home/users/me/my_project"
}

5.2.6

Fix bug preventing re-definition of Hammer variables
Fixes for buildDir parameter
Allowing the use of ~ in buildDir path, for example:

{
"buildDir": "~/Desktop/myFolderInsideSource"
}

{
"buildDir": "~/Dropbox/myFolderInsideSource"
}