Charles v3.3 public beta
Hi all. Happy holidays!
I’ve put the finishing touches on some new features for Charles:
- Validation of Markup (HTML/XHTML), RSS / Atom & CSS
- XML import/export format for recorded sessions
- JSONP support
Validation is a really exciting addition for web developers. If you’re trying to build valid HTML / XHTML pages (and the accompanying CSS and RSS/Atom feeds) then this will be invaluable for checking your work. First record your pages in Charles, then select them and choose Validate from the context-menu or the toolbar; Charles will validate each page, one at a time, using W3C’s validator web services. You can view a simple summary of the results or detailed warnings & errors for each page. Double-click the error message line numbers to view that line in the source. Note that the validation uses the source recorded by Charles, it doesn’t just pass the URL to the validator, so this correctly validates dynamically generated pages where the same page may emit different markup depending upon input or state. I’m very interested to hear feedback on this feature. Credit to Rowan Simpson and Glen Barnes for the idea to integrate validation into Charles.
Charles can now export and import recorded sessions in an XML format. This is useful if you want to analyse the data collected by Charles in your own software. To this end the Auto Save tool now also supports saving in any export format, rather than just the Charles session format. I’m going to be looking at more ways to integrate Charles into automated monitoring environments in the near future.
Finally, JSONP support was a small but irritating omission in Charles’s JSON support that is now fixed!
This is a public beta so I’m hoping for feedback and bug reports on the new features, especially if I’ve introduced any bugs! There have also been a few bug fixes in this release: fixes to the request editing feature, Map Remote with SSL, and using an external SOCKS proxy.
Please leave feedback in the comments or via the contact form on the Charles website.
December 31st, 2008 at 10:03 am
Hi Karl – really great App, huge timesaver!
A suggestion right after purchasing
How about making a button for pinning the Charles window always on top? Is that possible with Java?
I think this would make things even more cooler. Especially on small laptop screens, where browser window needs to be maximized, I find that one switching keystroke (CMD-TAB) a bit annoying. Imagine Charles would just float above it..
Anyway, keep up the good work!
Steff
December 31st, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Thanks Steffen. You know that is possible and really easy. Also on Windows there is a hot-key Windows-C to bring Charles to the front, which I haven’t got on Mac OS X. I’ve added a “Window Always On Top” option in the Preferences that you can turn on. Download the update beta to grab it
Also in the updated beta some small improvements around viewing the validation. No rest!
December 31st, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Wow, that was fast. Works perfectly! Thanks alot, happy new year!
January 13th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Where can i get the icon for a linux shortcut?
January 13th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Good question. I can add something to the Linux distribution of Charles – a GIF or PNG of the icon? I have 16×16, 32×32, 48×48 and 128×128. Which would do the trick or should I just bundle them all? Is it possible for me to bundle something else that is useful for the shortcut?
January 19th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Hello Karl one thing that is bugging me is in the sequence menu!
When it is showing in sequence if after I click on duration size host mthd etc it doesn’t show them by order
for example in duration if I should click on it it would have to show duration in order putting the sites by order of the duration:
529 ms
546 ms
719 ms
You see what i’m meaning here and also an option for that to the structure to set by order of appearance or to show them by size would be quite nice
January 19th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
@João Yes, absolutely. I will be looking at all of these sorts of improvements in 3.4.
February 15th, 2009 at 10:32 am
[...] about these, and other new features, so I’m just going to link through to those! Read the first announcement and the second [...]
March 6th, 2009 at 7:17 am
Hi Karl,
I love Charles, use it all the time.
Noticed you mentioned you’ll be looking into integrating Charles with automation. I think anything you can include in that area would be very helpful. What kind of functionality are you thinking about?
Thanks,
Austin
March 14th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
@Austin I’m still working that out. Recent releases added more functionality to the Auto Save tool which lets you save exports from Charles regularly for analysing the data with 3rd party tools. That’s the beginning. What sort of uses do you have in mind?