Pieces for Developers Desktop App 1.11.0 & Pieces OS 4.0.0: The Beginning of the Pieces for Developers + GitHub Era, New Search Modes, and much, much more 🤯

The Beginning of the Pieces for Developers + GitHub Integration

100 million developers use GitHub— you’re probably one of them. Today, we’re launching the first features of the Pieces for Developers Suite’s integration with GitHub: Importing Gists and Sharing as Gists. By combining Pieces and GitHub, you can take all of GitHub’s amazing features (collaboration, repositories, project management, issue tracking… the list goes on) and add the auto-magic context, easy access across your development environment, and local-first security offered by the Pieces for Developers Suite. Over time, we’ll become even more deeply connected to GitHub and your other favorite dev tools.

10X Collaboration with Sharing via GitHub Gists

Increase collaboration with your team, mentees, or developers around the world by sharing your saved materials via GitHub Gists! The Pieces for Developers Desktop App now provides users with another easy, flexible way to share their code snippets— and all their context(!)— with others. With the click of a button, turn your saved material into a public or private GitHub Gist that you can view in GitHub and share with others.

To do this, open the Link Sharing Menu and you’ll see a new option: “Share via Gist.” Once selected, you’ll be prompted to connect your GitHub account and then generate a Gist with a custom name and description, or the same ones as your Pieces asset. You can also choose to change the Gist from Public to Private (all Gists will be public by default).

After creating the Gist, you can either open or copy the link, and share away! If you edit the snippet in Pieces for Developers, no worries, you can update or redo the corresponding Gist. 😊

We’re thrilled to embed Pieces for Developers even more deeply into your current workflow and to give you an additional way to collaborate with developers around the globe.

Existing GitHub Gists, Meet Pieces for Developers

Already have GitHub Gists? Amazing! 🥳 We’re giving GitHub Gist users a super simple way to automatically import their Gists to Pieces for Developers. This is helpful for a variety of reasons:

1. Automatically enrich your Gists with contextual metadata, such as related websites & links, related people, natural language descriptions, and more.
2. Find your Gists extremely easily without ever opening your browser, and even directly within your IDE using the Pieces for Developers VS Code or JetBrains Plugins.

Importing your existing Gists in the Pieces for Developers Desktop App is simple:

1. Choose the “Discover” option above your Snippet Carousel
2. Choose the option “Select Gists”
3. Make sure Pieces is connected to your GitHub account
4. Browse your Gists in the Desktop App and select the ones you’d like to import
5. Done! 🎉

Overall, this feature represents a major step forward in our mission to provide users with the most seamless and intuitive coding experience possible. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting out, the ability to import your existing GitHub Gists is sure to make your life as a developer easier.

General Snippet Discovery Improvements

Snippet Discovery is an extremely unique, helpful feature our team is proud to have introduced for our users. In Pieces for Developers 1.11.0, Snippet Discovery got some exciting UI upgrades and performance improvements to make the process easier, more precise, and much faster.

Most notably, you will notice larger code previews that have more space for top-level context about the snippet. Today, when importing GitHub Gists, you’ll notice Related People associated with those Gists, but in the near future, we’re excited to surface Smart Descriptions, Related Links, and more. Stay tuned! 😇

Smarter, Faster Search with 3 New Search Modes

As our users save more and more materials, we want them to find 🔍 these materials as quickly as possible, and in a manner that works best for them. This release comes with three exciting search modes you can toggle right from the search bar, and customize to your liking via the Settings Menu.

1. Blended: Search against code, tags, descriptions, people, and related links
2. Full Text Search (FTS): Search against the code or text values of the saved material
3. Neural Code Search (NCS): Search via natural language to find certain materials based on a set of ML-based heuristics

To change your current search mode, simply click the search icon in the Pieces for Developers Desktop App Search Bar.

To change your default search mode, navigate to the “Customize” section in the Desktop App Settings Menu. This ensures that your search mode is configured to your liking between app restarts.

Link Pieces Accounts with the New Accounts & Cloud Integrations Menu

Now, with the introduction of our GitHub Integration, users can connect Pieces with your Google or GitHub accounts, and even link two accounts together. 🖇️

Since we plan to add more features like this in the future, we’ve added a brand-new section to the Settings Menu called “Accounts & Cloud Integrations.” From this section, you can navigate to a dedicated menu to manage your connected accounts, connect new ones if you’re disconnected, or sign out altogether.

Check it out by tapping the comma (,) key on your keyboard while the Pieces desktop app has focus.

Automatic Detection for 6 New Languages

The Language Suggestion feedback has been buzzin' 🐝, and we’re listening! We're proud to share our automatic language detection now has support for six new languages:

Check out the full list of Programming Languages that we support, or request an additional language.

Pieces OS Got a UI Upgrade 🎈

At the request of many users, we upgraded the Pieces OS Window! In addition to confirming successful launch, you can now view your Pieces OS Version, check which Pieces apps are connected, and easily get support. Now, and even more importantly, the window will automatically close!

General Bug Fixes & Performance Improvements

Along with these brand-new workflow-enhancing features, the latest version of the Pieces Desktop App includes a whole bunch of bug fixes, performance improvements, and user enhancements.

Search: Smart Focus & Navigation

When you enter a search query, the search input is focused. If you tap the "right" arrow key to navigate to the results, Pieces automatically removes focus from the search field and navigates to the carousel. When you’re navigating through the carousel and focused on the first material in there, tapping the "left" arrow key will automatically bring focus back to the search field so you can continue modifying your search.

Text Selection Controls

All right-click text selection controls (when right-clicking on either code or text) now match the application theme.

Emoji Support 🤯🚀🏆

Pieces for Developers now supports code or text materials that include emoji's! This new feature adds a fun and personal touch to code and text materials and, most importantly, will no longer throw errors!

Performance Improvements

Snippet Discovery is now 80% faster! Generating Shareable Links, connecting to your accounts, and other functions within the app are also faster.

Join the Pieces Beta Testing Program

Do you want to try the newest features of Pieces before they’re released? Do you want to make a difference in Pieces’ development? Sign up for our Beta Testing Program!

Support

As always, if you run into issues or have feedback, please fill out this quick form or email us at support@pieces.app and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible!