Updated download: Bat'leth 3.1

This weekend I've been working with Bat'leth, a tool I wrote a number of years ago for text processing and data format manipulation, on a project for my Computational Linguistics graduate work that I'll be blogging about soon. As I worked with it, I noticed that it was looking quite dated. It didn't support XP-style controls, some of the button images were inconsistently styled and not properly masked, and so forth. (I also found a bug or two!)

As I wrote a few days ago, I have a love/hate relationship with my old Visual Basic code: I love how easy it is to hack together a "quick and dirty" tool when I need one, and I hate how hard it is to make it actually look polished and modern when finished. Then I stumbled across an add-on for VB called vbAdvance. It extends old-school VB in some very welcome ways, including the ability to compile an XP manifest file into your apps so that they support the newer visual styles (other cool features include the ability to create DLLs with function exports, console apps with no GUI, and several other nifty bits). Though originally commercial, it's now classed as "unsupported freeware," so if you or anyone you know does any work in classic VB, this is well worth your time.

Anyway, thanks to vbAdvance and a little surplus time this weekend, I've updated Bat'leth to version 3.1, now available on my downloads page as both an install package and full VB6 source code. Enjoy, and let me know if you find this at all useful.