Perfect Assistant 2.0 is here

We released the Perfect Assistant 1.0 in March of this year, and with over 7,500 users of 1.0 we got some fantastic feedback from the community.

Out of that feedback has come the release of Perfect Assistant 2.0. We have way more features coming, but “real art ships”!

It’s been hard to choose my personal favourite new feature of PA 2.0, so here are the highlights, in no particular order.

Project & Deployments view

The list of projects and deployments is now reorderable. Drag & drop, simple as that. Along with that, addressing what might possibly be my most persistent gripe, is the ability to group projects! I don’t know about you but I have over 100 Perfect projects in that list and now I have them all grouped and categorized. No more cogitative overload.

Along with that grouping and ordering, you can now filter projects. That’s heaven for people like me with so many in that list.

More options

OK so this app is called the “Perfect Assistant”, but we strongly believe in the power & love implied in the “open” in “Open Source” so 2.0 brings you the ability to not just start and work with Perfect projects, but now includes the option to start and manage a Kitura, Vapor or Zewo project. So, if you’re a Vapor user, you can now use PA 2 to work with all the things Perfect users have been able to do for months, and then deploy with ease to AWS, Google App Engine, and more!

Redesigned project window

Next up, we took an axe to the project window. In fact, we pretty much started again.

Some of my personal highlights:

• The redesigned project window puts all available commands just a click away with a highly customizable toolbar, so you can organize it the way you want.

• The new “available project dependencies” search filter makes it easy find the dependencies you need;
• The new “Project Deployments” list makes it easy to add or remove deployment options;
• Project “Dev Ports” makes it easy to start a Docker container for Linux testing on your Mac;
• The new Linux toolchain selector lets you easily change your targeted Swift version;
• And the “Build Deployment Image” gives you a ready-to-go Docker image for your project including all apt dependencies.

Deployment configuration

One of the hardest things to get sorted after you’ve written your project, is to deploy it somewhere so your team and testers can get at it. After all, if you don’t share your work it’s no real use, right?

While were in “redesign to remove roadblocks mode” we decided to change the deployment configuration editor window to deliver a more logical approach to configuring deployments.

The new “Associated Projects” list now lets you easily see which projects are being deployed and jump straight to them. You can do things like renaming of instances more effectively too!

Touchbar support for all project commands

Kyle was lucky and got one of the new “Touchbar” MacBook Pro’s. Almost the first thing he added to the 2.0 branch was support for the touchbar — so it you’re lucky enough to have one of the new shiny MBP’s, PA 2.0 supports the Touchbar out of the box.

The future…

Even with all these new features the main focus for Perfect Assistant 2.0 was to set the platform for some great new features that are actually still to come. We already are cranking on 2.1 which is in beta already. Stay tuned for some tasty new deployment options!

One senior developer who’s been working with 1.0 and now 2.0 stated that Perfect Assistant saved him around 25 minutes a day. Our goal this year is to save people an hour each day…

OK, OK, enough already, where do I get it?

You can get the latest download here.

If you want to find out more about it before you jump in however, here’s the “overview” https://www.perfect.org/en/perfect-assistant.html

Once you dive in, you’ll need docs, we have those too!

Questions or any support related issue, head over to the Perfect Slack channel via http://www.perfect.ly — there’s a nice friendly community there, with dedicated channels for the obvious things like #help, and #perfect-assistant.

And for those that like watching, there’s a YouTube playlist of how-to’s here… with the first one right here: