Thoughts

So I've heard several different responses to the recent announcement. Many of the e-mails that I have received have been positive, which I appreciate greatly. There had been many people wondering in the past why this didn't happen a long time ago. So I felt emboldened by that. But some people seem to have the wrong idea about what is going on. I am not selling MacJournal to Mariner software. I will still do all the same things that I do now, but at the same time they will be out there telling people about it and raising its visibility. This isn't about the money at all. If time is money then I am in the red so far that it is not even worth considering. But that's not why I had been doing MacJournal and not why I will continue. Products have to evolve to survive and this is the next step in the evolution. Some people trust a product more if it is guaranteed to be around in a few years. While a few others seem to trust anything less if it costs money. So I guess the only conclusion there is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. I'm just going to keep trying to make the best application I can.

MacJournal has been free for a long time but it also wasn't very good for a while at the start. There was a point a while back when I was ready to stop developing it. I actually took about nine months off. But I got excited about working on it again and now this guarantees that I will be working on it for years to come. You don't want to put all of your data in a place where it's just going to get stuck and now it will keep evolving and improving for years.

I hope this clears up a little of the confusion. I know not everyone will agree with me and my reasoning. Some people will always think that I sold out because any time something costs money it must be inherently bad. All software should be free, perhaps because it is intangible. But I thank everyone out there for their support in this transition.

MacJournal 3.0b2 is out

This is the second beta release of MacJournal 3.0, formerly called 2.7. There was a development in the availability of MacJournal 3.0 that you should know about as you read this. MacJournal 3.0 will be republished by Mariner Software as a commercial product. It will be $30 with a $15 upgrade price for existing users. I will continue to develop MacJournal and still creative control over it. For scheduling reasons, 3.0 will have to be English-only. I regret this as I am very proud of the localizations that MacJournal supports and they are of great importance to me. But there just isn't time. After 3.0 is finalized and sent off to the CD factory, localization will begin and I hope to have a (free) update to it that includes all previously supported localization.

Important: MacJournal now has serialization. If you don't have a serial number it will time out after 7 days. For this beta only use the serial number "MacJournal Beta Serial Number" to get it to serialize.

Here are some of the changes for beta 2:

- Reorganized the menu bar. It's different, but I think it will be better. It fits in with the system more.
- Fixed some things like Underlining for Full Screen mode
- Improvements to List Style (current line will switch to the new style correctly now)
- Improved the Auto-scrolling in Full Screen mode (Shift-Command-2 for now)
- Added support for Smart Quotes (enabled by default)
- Blogger and LiveJournal sheets will respect the system settings for Web proxy.
- More Jaguar compatibility (Full screen mode should be working now)
- Implemented some new windows to deal with being a Commercial Product:
• End User License Agreement (EULA)
• Welcome window asking you to register
• Registration window for serial number

There are plenty more fixes; be sure to read the Version History.

Some of the larger changes and/or additions in 3.0 as a whole:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback

More Questions Answered

How much will it cost?

$30

Who will develop MacJournal in this new deal?

All development of MacJournal will continue to be done by me. Mariner's job begins when I hand off the final code for a version. I also retain control of what features will be added. I will just keep doing my thing and they will work to let people know about MacJournal in the meantime.

The Big News

There are big changes afoot for MacJournal. For the past three years, MacJournal has been a freeware product with no marketing. It has survived on word of mouth and a good review here and there. But that doesn't reach a large portion of the potential users. If you've got a quality product you have to let people know about it. That's why MacJournal will now be republished by Mariner Software as a commercial product! With this new arrangement, MacJournal finally has the marketing attention it deserves and it is poised to reach a whole new audience. In time you could see MacJournal in a box at your local Apple Store. It wasn't an easy decision because I like how things work right now and I could easily go on as before, but I think MacJournal deserves more. It has evolved into a very capable application and it is only getting better. I'm confident this will be a positive move for MacJournal and will ensure it's survival for years to come. More details will be available in the coming days, but here are some answers to questions you might have right now

When will this happen?

Soon. The goal is to have a new version of MacJournal for the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. This will be MacJournal 3.0 (formally known as 2.7). MacJournal 2.6 will be the last version of MacJournal as a freeware product.

What will happen to 2.6?

Version 2.6.1 will be released shortly before 3.0 and will address any serious issues with 2.6. The biggest issue that exists is with Multiple Spaces To Spaces (it can produce unexpected results over long selections of text).

Will there be upgrade pricing?

Yes, there will be an upgrade path for current users of MacJournal. Contact sales@marinersoftware.com for upgrade details. I will handle a few special cases personally.

What does this mean for the future?

Good things. This will ensure the future of MacJournal better than I can by myself. Who knows what the future holds and this deal will put MacJournal in a better position should anything unexpected happen. Mariner Software has competed against Microsoft™ Word for many years and is still around so they know a thing or two about that. I will continue to develop MacJournal for many versions to come. I have big plans for the next version after 3.0 and I already know it will be great

Is this just so you can get more money?

No, this is to gain a greater exposure for a product that I feel deserves it. I am not a good marketer (marketeer?) and I can't get it into stores by myself. There are a lot of people that might like MacJournal and this is a great way to let them know about it. Expect to see MacJournal show up in more places and be more visible.

When is 3.0 coming out?

3.0 will be out on January 4th. It will be available on CD and as a download with a time-limited trial. Stop by and see us at booth #2410 at MacWorld in San Francisco to chat if you can and pick up a copy. I'll try to post on the News page when I will be there.

10.3.7 is good for you

Mac OS X 10.3.7 was released today via Software Update. Users of MacJournal should update to 10.3.7 because it fixes a bug in the operating system that has afflicted MacJournal for quite some time. If you copied some text out of Safari that contained pictures and pasted it into MacJournal (or used a Service to get the text in), MacJournal might crash when saving the text. There was nothing I could do about it except wait for Apple to fix it. And fix it they did today. So 10.3.7 is a recommended update from me; I'm running it right now with no problems.

MacJournal 2.7 hits beta

Download the release at danschimpf.com.

Welcome to the first beta release of MacJournal 2.7! This release fixes a lot of problems with the newer stuff introduced in the alpha. Specifically, Full Screen mode is much improved. It now has its own preference pane and some cool settings that you can customize for it. There is a new look for the scrollbar that should make it fit in a little better. Tagging along with Full Screen mode is Text Zoom, which finally has working line wrapping when zoomed past 100%. Huzzah!

As a refresher, this is how the different milestones for this release will look:

Alpha: all features are in and functional. No known crashers. No features will be added afterwards.
Beta: all UI is frozen and localizations will begin to be updated. No known bugs.

This is an beta release which means there might still be bugs lurking. A backup of your data will be made automatically, but whenever you use pre-release software (from any source) it's good to back up your important data.

Here are some of the changes for beta 1:

- New preference pane for Full Screen customizations
- New scrollbar for full screen mode
- Text zoom new can wrap lines
- No longer fully capturing the display when entering full screen mode (a la games). This means some other things will start working, such as Exposé, Command-Tab, text dragging, and contextual menus.
- Selecting a number of lines and then changing the List Style will apply that list style to each selected line (not just the first as before)
- Fixed a bunch of preferences that were broken by a big rewrite of the Prefs window
- Journals created in the Journals drawer will end up at the top-level in more cases, which is usually what you want. You can always drag them around.

There are plenty more fixes; be sure to read the Version History.

Some of the larger changes and/or additions in 2.7 as a whole:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

Beta 1 later tonight or tomorrow

Expect 2.7b1 to come out either late tonight or tomorrow evening. Things are going well and it's in late testing. Localization is the concern here as all of the localization files will be sent out after beta 1 is finalized. It should be a great release though. Full Screen and Text Zoom are the big winners for this release.

MacJournal 2.7a1 is released

Welcome to the first alpha release of MacJournal 2.7! This release will (and already does) have a metric boatload of new features and changes. Some of the smaller fixes will be rolled into a smaller 2.6.1 release. Please please read through the Version History file to see what has changed. I know it's long but it's good to know what has changed if you're going to use an alpha release. For this release, this is how the different milestones will look:

Alpha: all features are in and functional. No known crashers. No features will be added afterwards.
Beta: all UI is frozen and localizations will begin to be updated. No known bugs.

This is an alpha release which means there might still be bugs lurking. A backup of your data will be made automatically, but whenever you use pre-release software (from any source) it's good to back up your important data.

Here are some of the larger changes and/or additions in 2.7a1:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

Alpha soon

I promise: alpha soon. I'm really behind in my e-mail, which always makes me feel bad. Plus Thanksgiving is coming up. I'll try to get it out before then so I can work on it over the break. It really is a solid release (it's actually beta or even final candidate quality), but all of the other things are getting in the way right now.

Scheduling comes more into focus

The scheduling for the next update to MacJournal is starting to work itself out and I just wanted to let y'all know about it. But first, a word about 2.6.1: there will indeed be a MacJournal 2.6.1. The primary driver for this is a problem with "Multiple Spaces to Space" in the Clean Up menu. It can cause things to go a little wacky if used over large areas of text. So there's a few small things that will be fixed as well. No new features, just some good fixes. 2.6 was a fantastic release in terms of total amount of changes vs. bugs found after shipping. 2.6.1 should be out within two weeks; I have all the bugs fixed in 2.7 so it's just a matter of bringing those changes over to the 2.6 code base and integrating them in there.

Before we get to 2.7, I want to mention printing though. 2.6 corrected some printing appearance issues that people had been complaining about, but it appears to have to changed some other things. To me, it seems like you want the printed output to match the screen exactly and anything different is a bug. But apparently TextEdit prints stuff to A4 differently than I would have expected. It's kind of shrunken, except I don't know why or to what degree. So I'm kind of in a quandary here: I don't know what's really correct for the different paper sizes.

But anyway, back to the issue at hand. The first alpha of 2.7 should be finished this week. 2.7 has a much shorter schedule than 2.6, so the milestones will be defined a little bit differently this time around. The alpha milestone will represent "feature complete" in the traditional sense: all the expected features will be present and at least functional (if a little incorrect and/or buggy at times). This is what alpha typically means and this time I'll stick to it. There just isn't time in the schedule to keep adding things like I have in the past post-alpha. The good news is that there already has been a metric boatload of changes and 2.7 won't be lacking for good stuff. There are some things on the questionable side that may have to get cut (page numbering is the prime example there). There may only be one alpha depending on how it goes and beta might hit come start of December. Beta will mean that all the features are in and all bugs are squashed for the most part. It will mostly be for localization purposes; they will all need to get updated again (however it should be lighter than 2.6). Then hopefully 2.7 will get out the door before the end of the year. That's the plan anyway.

Progress Marches On

Yes dear friends, work on MacJournal 2.7 has begun in earnest. If you've noticed the recent changes that have gone in you can see a lot of nifty features have been added. As I've said in e-mail many a time, a lot of this was done in the 2.6 timeframe but was disabled for testing reasons. I just couldn't make sure everything was satisfactory for 2.6, so I postponed it. That was when I thought I was going to release 2.6 in July or August, but oh well. Nested journals, lists, Wiki links; it's all good now. A lot of hidden preferences have been "promoted" into the real preferences. In fact, I took the time to completely rewrite the Preferences window on Sunday. It's a lot more flexible now, which has allow me to integrate the Hidden Preferences window directly into it as a pane right alongside the others (but will still only show up if you have the hidden preference set for it).

Talking about the Hidden Preferences window, I discovered that a whole portion of it is busted in 2.6. The Drawers group in the "Syntax" tab wasn't hooked up at all to anything. So anything you do there won't matter at all. It's not a big deal; you can apply the same preferences from the Terminal (instructions here), but it's just unfortunate that the pleasant UI doesn't work. If I do a 2.6.1 I'll fix that, but at this point it's looking like that won't be needed. 2.7 will be out a lot quicker that 2.6 was, so it'll be okay.

Tonight I'll probably work on allowing journals to be empty. Right now you have to have at least one entry (or journal) in a journal at all times, but it would be nice to be able to have a completely empty journal. It's kind of expected, since you can have empty mailboxes in Mail. There are about a thousand other examples of empty containers in other applications too. I don't really remember why I did it in the first place. ☺

(By the way, the little smiley faces that you've seen in my posts over the last few weeks actually come from MacJournal. I'm writing this inside MacJournal right now and will post from inside the app. There is a hidden preference in 2.6 to discover smiley and frowny faces and convert them to the Unicode characters you see above. This is now a standard feature in 2.7.)

Keyboard Navigation in 2.6

One of the things I tried to address in MacJournal 2.6 is better keyboard navigation. For those of us with laptops, keeping our hands on the keyboards as long as possible is very advantageous and programs that make every attempt to facilitate this prove a lot more usable than those that don't. To that end, you can do just about everything you want in MacJournal from just the keyboard. The biggest sticking point is getting the window focus where you need it easily. To do that, you can now use the F-keys to move around the window. F1 puts the focus in the main text view, F2 for the topic field, F3 for the last drawer opened, and F4 for the search field. You can also use the Tab key to move between the first three things listed (as an aside, it's not really possible to tab out of a toolbar item right now, but this is a limitation of the operating system itself). Obviously pressing tab in the main text view will give you a regular text tab, but you can use Shift-Tab to get back to the topic field (Shift-Tab is like reverse-tab). If you have multiple drawers open, you can press F3 multiple times to cycle through them, and pressing tab inside the drawer should get you out of it.

With a little help from Full Keyboard Navigation in Panther you can access all of the menu items and toolbar items to access all of the sheets (some have keyboard equivalents too). I'd like to bring the Keywords sheet up specifically, as that used to be impossible to navigate with the keyboard. Now when the sheet drops down the focus should be on the table view. From here you can tab down to the "+" button to add a keyword, or you can just start typing. If the focus is on the table view you can just start typing and your keystrokes will get added to a new keyword. I wish more tables worked like this. ☺

Talking about things I wish more tables did, all of the tables in the drawers now support type-selecting. This means that you can start typing the first few letters and the app will look through any visible items and select whatever matches. It's important to note that it only searches the visible items. This means that entries inside journals that are not expanded will not get taken into account (but items that are just not on the screen but would be visible if you scrolled down are). This is to reduce the "noise" that might make it hard to find exactly what you want.

It was impossible in 2.5 to use the arrow keys in the journals drawer in 2.5. This was because you couldn't select journals so you couldn't move past any journal. This restriction has been removed and you can now move about the journals like you would any hierarchical view in the OS. Use the Right arrow key on a journal to expand it (will unlock if necessary). And, special to MacJournal, you can use Command-Up to move up a level in the hierarchy (from an entry to its parent journal). Command-Down also works as expected. This will become very helpful when nested journals arrive. And, just because there isn't a better place to mention it, press Option-D to cycle through the view modes for that table (Date, Topic, Text, Combined).

Keyboard navigation is one of the areas that improved by leaps and bounds in 2.6. There may be a few other things that I'm not thinking of right now, but those are the large areas.

MacJournal 2.6 Post-Mortem

MacJournal 2.6 has finally been released and so far the reaction is fantastic. I've gotten a lot of good e-mails and no serious bugs so far (or non-serious bugs, for that matter). This release is a big success. I'd like to thank everyone that helped out during the development process, such as localizers and anyone that used the beta versions and sent in bug reports. Your help is appreciated and I couldn't have done it without you.

I'm currently trying to get the word out to a few different Mac news sites. I sent a press release-y thing to MacNN (I'm not good at writing those), and I'm trying to do the same for MacCentral. I don't know whether or not I'll post stuff in forums about it; it might look a little cheesy if the developer starts a thread in a forum to talk about his own product. But I'm just trying to let people know that this is a final, released version and that it is safe to use (in fact, safer than any previous version). Tell all of your friends! :-)

In terms of the future, I will now branch the sources and start working on 2.7. I always planned to do a 2.6.1 release, but so far I don't have a very compelling reason to do so. If any bugs get reported that warrant a dot-dot release like that (even if they aren't that serious) then I'll pull it together. Another potential reason for 2.6.1 will be to pick up additional localizations, especially those that didn't make it into 2.6 (Dutch and Icelandic were in 2.5 but are not in 2.6). As for 2.7, I'm shooting for a January release for that. I'm going to aim for the MacWorld Expo as a target date, partly because just having a concrete and immobile date helps in the planning. No plans yet for any pre-releases (alphas or betas), but that doesn't mean there will never be; I just haven't gotten there yet.

So here's a cool tip about 2.6: the Hidden Preferences window! That's right, all of those crazy hidden preferences have their own window now in the final version of 2.6. The Hidden Preferences page has the details, but essentially you need to set the key "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" to "YES" in the Terminal. When next you launch MacJournal there will be a new menu item for the Hidden Preferences. Enjoy!

MacJournal 2.6 has been released!

Download it here (1.6 MB), or English only (640 KB).

Welcome to MacJournal 2.6! This release is a followup to MacJournal 2.5.2, which came out late last year. 2.6 features a lot of improvements, both in stability and in new features. Here is an outline of the new features in 2.6:

• Enhanced Exporting:
  • export any set of entries or journals
  • export journals with one file per entry
  • export entry to Word documents (Panther only)
  • HTML exporting now supports more styles and colors
  • checkboxes can be exported to any format
• Improved Importing too:
  • Import or drag folders of files in to create entries with those files
  • New Service to append selected text in any application to any entry in MacJournal
• LiveJournal enhancements:
  • iTunes button to get the currently playing song in iTunes
  • Change who can view the entry as you upload it
• Performance and stability enhancements, especially for large data sets
• Interface improvements
  • Greatly enhanced contextual menus for both drawers
  • Mail-style "Add" and "Action" buttons
  • Use Combined view in the Journals drawer (previously only seen in the Entries drawer)
  • Lots of small improvements to enhance user experience
• More workflow options
  • Preferences to automatically close journals that you aren't working in
  • Hold down the Option key to bypass most warnings on a case-by-case basis
  • Copy a style in some text and then select some entries in a drawer and use Paste Font to paste that style onto the selected entries
  • Spring-loaded Entries: Drag text onto an entry and that entry will become current into which to drop the text
• Improved Keywords sheet
• Improved Undo functionality
• Improved options for setting the default text and topic for entries (including font and color)
• You can set a background picture (as well as randomizing through a whole folder)

There are many more small improvements. The included Version History file has all the details on all of the changes that have been made. That and this Release Note are always available from the Help menu.

Donations

While MacJournal is freeware, donations are accepted and appreciated at http://danschimpf.com/. Thank you for supporting the development of MacJournal!

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. New in 2.6: use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

The Mechanics of a Release

So I know I said I'd get 2.6 out this week come Hell or high water, and it still might happen (depending on your definition of "week"). But you can't always predict everything, such as when work is going to blow up and take all of your time. These things happen. However, I do have good news: the code is finalized and ready to go. The final candidate went very well and only minor modifications were needed. So that's all done and ready for release. But unfortunately there's more involved in a release than just code. I'm going through the release notes right now and some of the build scripts. I think I'll make an English-only release available on the website this time as well (it's about 640K vs. the full 1.6MB download). There's also the possibility for some kind of press release to publish on news websites, which I'd have to pull together. And the website needs to be updated, which is probably the biggest hurdle. As I've mentioned before I tend not to give the website a lot of attention as web design is not my forté. A very nice person volunteered an alternate design that's better, but I haven't had the time to work with her yet. I may use the one that I linked to here a while back temporariliy and get the better one online next week at some point so 2.6 can come out sooner rather than later.

Be back soon with more details of the release....

As promised...

You can download the final candidate build of MacJournal 2.6 at this link:

http://danschimpf.com/download/macjournal26fc1.tar.bz2

"Final candidate" means that this could be the final release itself. I have full confidence in it and I think it's a great build (but the normal warnings about pre-release software apply). But I'm providing this build while I do final testing just to make sure everything is sound before the general public gets their hands on it. This won't show up on the main website or in the in-application update mechanism. Please don't inform any version tracking sites about this either as the final version will be out soon enough.

There are a large number of changes from beta 5, but they're all for the better and everything should be good. The issue with typing accented characters has been solved. There is also a new hidden preference to activate a window containing the rest of the hidden preferences for easy access. Please read the included version history for all of the details. Let me know your experiences with this build: whether or not everything went smoothly for you. If you've noticed any problems in the past, check them out again and let me know if they are all fixed now.

I'm looking to release the final version on Friday. I will continue to test until then. This build will expire approximately 2 weeks from now.

Final Candidate tonight

Check back later tonight (or maybe early morning for you East Coasters) for the Final Candidate build of MacJournal 2.6. It will only be posted here; it will not show up in your in-application update mechanism. Along the same lines, please don't post this build anywhere or notify any version tracking sites about it. The final version will be out later this week and that's what I want everyone to hear about and use.

Until tonight then....

Status update

The only thing that will prevent the release of MacJournal 2.6 next week will be my untimely death.

After that will come MacJournal 2.7. I decided that there were enough features that could be implemented rather quickly given the work that went into 2.6 to justify a quick 2.7 release. 2.7 will likely still support Jaguar (although the minimum may be 10.2.8 vs. 2.6's 10.2). 3.0 will not support Jaguar.

Searching Upgrade

The final candidate build of MacJournal 2.6 is still in the any-day-now phase, but in the mean time I had the opportunity this past week to implement one more small feature. When searching for an entry, words are now considered separately. So the order of the words doesn't really matter any more. This also helps when searching for dates, as you can just search for "16 July" to get everything from July 16th. There is one additional feature in there: to group words together into phrases, use quotation marks. To get the previous behavior, enclose the whole string in quotation marks. There won't be any Boolean operator support (AND, OR, or NOT) in 2.6, so don't ask. ☺ Everything is AND for now.

Progress Update

I had intended to have 2.6 out today in a final release, but some external issues forced me to push the release to next week. But I've been testing things for a while now and it is going well. I actually rewrote the part that imports text files and tries to separate out entries (the "Discover entries" button) and it's a lot better for it. I also ran it through a few hoops on Jaguar to make sure it still runs there. Jaguar and MacJournal won't be together for that much longer, but 2.6 will definitely run well enough on it. I'll keep testing things over the weekend and I'm still pondering the possibility of quietly posting a final candidate build for people to try out.

Schedule Update

It seems that 2.6 finally has a release date! Sort of! Well, if you can call "next week" an exact release date. ☺ It looks like all of the pieces will come together early next week and then after some additional testing it will be ready to go out the door. I may do a kind of "final candidate" release for some select people just to make sure as well (mostly localizers to double-check integration). I may post the download link on here too, but I won't be putting it in the in-app update mechanism. I worry that too many updates close together will cause some people to miss the second (and more important) update.

Things have been going well in MacJournal-land. I haven't actually had to touch the code in a few days now. After a few issues with the new system for not saving back to disk when not necessary were worked out, things have been smooth. It's what I like to see leading up to a major release like this. I'll just be testing stuff over the weekend and exercise parts of the app that I haven't seen in a while to make sure they haven't been broken accidentally.

For the Romantic language speakers out there, there will be both French and Spanish localizations included (that was a point of concern noted here earlier).

And for fans of all of the hidden preferences in 2.6, I have one last trick up my sleeve for you, but I'll give more details when 2.6 actually comes out.

Onward and upward!

New Homepage Design

Preparing for the impending release of 2.6, I've also been working on the updated web page. You can check it out at <http://danschimpf.com/macjournal26.html>. The colors are a little different, but the layout is basically the same. The everything-on-one-page layout scheme isn't good, but I don't really have the time or the patience to make a nice-looking website. ☺

MacJournal 2.6b5 Released

I know I said beta 4 was the last, but other factors compelled me to release this. I also wanted to test out a new improvement to the saving mechanism to hopefully clear up some problems. MacJournal will now only save to disk only when needed. This helps in a few areas:

- Quit time will be improved if there is nothing to save.
- Auto-save will no longer writing the file to disk each time. This will improve performance in the application and allow the system to sleep the hard drive if you leave it running over night.

Please let me know if you experience any problems related to this.

Here are some of the other changes:

- Performance of the Font Face and Size toolbar items has been greatly improved.
- Fixed printing sizing; output should match that of TextEdit now.
- Option-click the forward and backward Browse buttons to use them like Safari-like history buttons.
- Updated Spanish localization
- Fixed hang with changing data locations in the preferences.
- Fixed dragging pictures into the Finder.
- Shift-tab works in the text area to get back to the topic field.

Other enhancements are noted in the Version History.

As always, install and use developmental software at your own risk! Be sure to back up your data before each new build just in case. Just for fun, MacJournal itself will back up your data with each new build that you install as well.

Please let me know of any problems that you have with this build as soon as possible.

Fighting with AppleScript

While I'm waiting for some external things to get finished up for the 2.6 release, I've been tinkering around with AppleScript support. It's been kind of a rocky road. AppleScript from the developer's side isn't always as easy to implement as they tell us. In a simple case it can be easy from what I hear, but what is a simple case anyway? Supposedly some apps can do it with zero extra code. MacJournal 2.6 is entirely MVC-friendly, but I've still encountered problems. I've been able to get some things working, but other things are broken inexplicably with little or no apparent reason why. AppleScript is hard to debug: Script Editor gives you no help when something goes wrong. You end up with an error name that isn't descriptive and an error number that isn't explained anywhere. I lost a lot of time to a problem that really shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. Apple is assuming something about how I set up my application that turns out to be wrong, and now I have to work around it by adding more extra code. It's always a little disappointing whenever that happens.

The heart of AppleScript-ability lies in two well-formatted text files. It seems weird that with all the fancy developer tools they give us, a simple graphical tool to create these files weren't include. At the very least something to validate the files would have been nice because small errors can be very hard to ferret out, especially when you don't know where the problem is. Maybe something like this will be coming in Tiger with the new release of Xcode. One can only hope.

But I am optimistic about MacJournal's AppleScript support. Admittedly this is my first AppleScript implementation that I have done, so I'm hitting a lot of the first-timer roadblocks that will no doubt get easier with experience. Hopefully a basic set of features can be available for the very next version, with more features coming after that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can I put journals inside of other journals?
Not yet. This is a big change inside of MacJournal and it needed to happen slowly in order to protect your data. This will be coming in the very next version of MacJournal after 2.6. MacJournal 2.6 represents a lot of work behind the scenes that is not yet visible, but will pay off after 2.6 with a lot of features that will be able to come quickly.

Q: Can I drag entries around inside of journals to reorder them?
Not yet. Right now everything is assumed to be sorted; it's been this way from the start. A more level-headed developer probably would have made everything unsorted to begin with and then add sorting later, but such is life. So it's another big chunk of assumptions that will need to be removed before this will work. This should be coming in MacJournal 2.7 along with nested journals.

Q: It takes a really long time to launch and quit; what's up?
This is due to a very large data file that MacJournal has to encode and write out to disk. This is most likely because of a lot of pictures being stored in the data file; having a lot of entries and/or journals will not generally cause this by itself. So what are the solutions here? An option to store pictures outside of the big data file is forthcoming, but a better solution is to allow for multiple data files better coupled with a fancy new file format. This will probably be coming in something like MacJournal 3.0.

Q: Why is the data file stored in Application Support? Wouldn't my Documents folder be better?
This may seem arbitrary, but putting the data file where it is was actually thought out and it was decided to be the best place. In its current incarnation, MacJournal handles all of the data for you behind its back so you don't have to. So because the user does not have day-to-day interaction with the data file, it is not appropriate to put the data file in their Documents folder by default (you're free to change it yourself). It's the difference between Address Book and TextEdit: TextEdit documents are all distinct and need to be handled individually, whereas Address Book handles your data for you. It would be annoying if Address Book put its data in your Documents folder because you would never touch it and it would just take up space. Microsoft Word creates a "Microsoft User Data" folder in my Documents folder every time I open it and it annoys me more each time. In the future, if MacJournal becomes more document-based, changes would be made. But for now it remains in Application Support.

Q: It would be cool if I could resize pictures that I drag into MacJournal. Is that a possibility?
Yes, this is being considered for the future. This is one of those things that might be really easy for me to do, or really really hard. I have yet to sit down and attack it, but I have been thinking about it. I'm hoping for really easy. :-)

Q: Why do the MacJournal alphas/betas have an expiration date?
MacJournal 2.6 is the second time I've done public pre-releases. It worked fantastically for 2.5 and has been even better for 2.6. But one of the things I learned from the 2.5 process is that people won't always update to the latest pre-release build even if they understand it is pre-release software. I can understand it from their perspective (as the user who wants things running smoothly and if it isn't broken then don't fix it), but from my perspective (the developer who can't support pre-release builds forever) it's less than optimal. I can't support 2.5b4 18 months after 2.5b5 was released. I need people to stay as current as possible to ferret out any problems that they may have. If you tell me about it now, I can fix it for the final build. If you e-mail me a year later I can't help you. So it works to everyone's advantage to stay within a build or two of the most current release. I try to stage the 2.6 releases so at least 2 builds still work, so if the most recent one doesn't work you can still use the last one for a while until a fix is released. That way everyone is happy when the final product is released.

Q: I don't like thing 'X' that you added in 2.6! Can you take it out?
Most changes that have been made have been done in such a way to provide minimal interference with what is already there. Too many toolbar items available? Remove the ones you don't want or just hide the toolbar entirely. Through tweaking some interface elements and preferences, you can achieve a simpler UI than what is enabled by default. However, if that isn't enough for you, there are generally hidden preferences that you can enable to customize the appearance even more. I'm just one guy working in my spare time so I can't do everything, but I try to make people happy.

Q: Why are there so many hidden preferences in MacJournal 2.6?
There are two reasons for creating a hidden preference (a preference that does not show up in the actual user interface but must instead be activated via the Terminal):
1. Option or feature came too late in the process and could not be accounted for in all of the localizations that have already been updated
2. Option falls outside of the intended functionality of the program.

Number 1 is pretty easy to understand; I have to lock down the interface at some point to get the many localizations updated so things added after that either have to be delayed until the next release or only exposed from the Terminal and English-only. Number 2 is a little trickier. MacJournal 2.6 has a hidden preference to change the main window to be a metal window, a la Safari or iPhoto. There are many things wrong with this on a UI standpoint: text editors should never be in metal. But some people want it and it's kind of a fun like setting to tweak and see how it looks. So it's there, but will never be an option in the Preferences window. Some are in a little more gray territory: I don't think they'll ever be options, but they might if it becomes useful enough, so making it available from the Terminal is a good way to do that. In the next release I hope to have a better system of enabling hidden preferences though. Maybe there will be one switch you throw in the Terminal (or even in the UI) that shows a bunch of checkboxes for all the different hidden preferences with appropriate warnings everywhere about hidden preference support. But for now the Terminal is your friend.

Q: Can I create a link from one entry to another?
Indeed you can! You could actually do this in 2.5, but it wasn't very easy to figure out or even know that you could. However, MacJournal 2.6 makes it a lot more apparent. In the sheet for editing links there are two new buttons: one for linking to an entry and one for linking to a file. Clicking the latter will bring up an open panel to select a file on disk and clicking the former will bring up a different kind of open panel: it will show you all of your journals and entries and you can select the one to which you want to link. These are just assistants; you can still just type in the URL manually, or drag an entry from a drawer or a file from disk into the URL field to paste the URL.

Q: Can I send entries to Movable Type blogs?
Yes, this is possible via the Blogger sheet. See the Movable Type website for details about how to accept Blogger connections on the server side.

Q: What about TypePad? Weblog Service X?
Most services accept the Blogger protocol as a de facto standard. Check with your provider to see if they do and what the details are. In the future, MacJournal will use the Atom protocol (once it is finalized) as this will allow for a greater range of features and should allow you to send to any ol' arbitrary website. Atom is supposedly the protocol-to-end-all-other-protocols and all of the major sites have committed to supporting it. Some sites already do (including Blogger). This will mean that there would be just one Atom sheet, instead of a Blogger and LiveJournal sheet, that is powerful enough to send to any server. In theory, of course.

Q: Can I download entries off of my weblog into MacJournal?
Not at this time. MacJournal isn't an online blogging client per se, so features like this are mere conveniences. With the whole Atom thing (and a standard, singular sheet for interacting with a server) it may be a lot easier to grab a bunch of entries off of any server in the world, so I will definitely reevaluate things at that point. I'd like to do it if it could be integrated into the existing UI nicely and it was fairly reliable (dealing with the Internet is a pain and a half).

Q: Can I send you a million dollars?
Yes. Yes you can.

Setting the Data Path in 2.6b4

There is a bug in 2.6b4 where trying to change the data path in the Advanced preferences will lock up MacJournal. Here is a workaround for this until the next release comes out:

1. Quit MacJournal
2. Open Terminal
3. Type defaults delete com.DanSchimpf.MacJournal StoragePathAlias and hit Return
4. Type defaults write com.DanSchimpf.MacJournal "Storage Directory" "~/Desktop" and hit return
5. Open MacJournal

Replace the "~/Desktop" with wherever you want your data to be saved. When you open MacJournal again, that's where it will look for its data.

Last Call For Spanish

Pending a few external issues, MacJournal 2.6 is pretty much ready for a release. I have had a few small bug fixes in the days since beta 4 has been released and I'm confident that the release is ready. There's even a Taiwanese localization now. But we're still missing Spanish and French localizations. I've got a possible lead on French, but still nothing for Spanish. If you'd like to donate some of your time to translate 2.6 into Spanish please email me so we can work something out fast. Otherwise 2.6 will have to ship without Spanish.

MacJournal 2.6b4 Released

Welcome to the fourth and final beta of MacJournal 2.6. Download it from here. This release picks up the Serbian localization and a number of small changes. 2.6 is going to be a great release.
Here are some of the changes:

- Text sent to Blogger and LiveJournal will no longer be heavily stylized. I tried to cut out a lot of what they already do, like font and color. Bolds and italics will still be sent. Also, any changes in font size or text color from what the majority of your text looks like will also be picked up.
- Titles of entries may very well be sent to Blogger now.
- Copy and Paste support in the drawers for moving entries around
- You can now delete a locked journal if you have the system administrator password
- You can now drag attachments from entries into the Finder and elsewhere
- Other smaller, but important bug fixes.

Other enhancements are noted in the Version History (there are a lot of little items).

As always, install and use developmental software at your own risk! Be sure to back up your data before each new build just in case. Just for fun, MacJournal itself will back up your data with each new build that you install as well.

Please let me know of any problems that you have with this build as soon as possible.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. New in 2.6: use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

More Status Updates

Where is MacJournal nowadays? As I've said many times before (but this time I mean it), MacJournal 2.6 is very close to release. I'm waiting for one or two things now and then I will release 2.6b4 to everyone. Very soon after this will come the final 2.6 release. The reason for this is I want to give everyone a chance to see beta 4 and report any bugs that are found before the final release. I've been doing a lot of testing with the current daily builds and I think it's really solid. I know I said I wanted to get it out before August, but then I went on vacation. :-) As always you can check out the current build notes before beta 4 is released so you know what is coming.

MacJournal Status

What's going on with MacJournal right now? There are a few areas to cover here.

Localizations

This is the biggest block to ship right now. There are two critical localizations missing in action: Spanish and French. At this point it is looking like 2.6 will have to ship without them. They'll be picked up later on I guess. If you can help out localizing 2.6 into these two languages please contact me immediately.

Crashing

Depending on what you are doing, you may have experienced a crash seemingly at random. This is actually the background saving that is crashing. Unfortunately for everyone MacJournal isn't crashing in its own code (which would be fixable), but rather in code provided by the operating system (which is not fixable). For those that are interested: NSAttributedString + attachments + NSKeyedArchiver + NSThread = ☠. The options are either ship with this crasher (which seems to only attack a small amount of people), or change the data format to store the data in a different way that won't crash. I'm currently weighing these two options, but I'm leaning toward the latter: application and data stability is more important than being able to open your 2.6 data on 2.5. 2.6 carries the same requirements as 2.5, so everyone should use 2.6 after it comes out (or now really). Besides, I already kind of changed the format by changing how checkboxes are stored.

Schedule

I know I said it might not happen, but it looks like there will definitely be a beta 4. Technically it's probably Final Candidate 1, but I thought I'd keep things simple for this release. You can see what's on the plate for beta 4 in the usual place. I guess there's technically a new feature or two in it, but it's something that should have been there in the first place: you can now delete locked journals by providing an administrator password for the system. So if you don't want your kids deleting your important data, don't give them admin accounts!

Localizations notwithstanding, I'd like to ship 2.6 next week. There are a few things that need to be tied up, but I really want to get 2.6 in the hands of everyone out there.

Hidden Prefs

I've gotten a few e-mails about a posting I did earlier regarding hidden preferences in MacJournal 2.6. I have updated the post for 2.6b4 and put it at http://danschimpf.com/hiddenprefs.html for everyone to see. I'll try to keep it updated as things change. These aren't "hidden" preferences per se; just ones that don't have any UI or any guarantee of inclusion in a future version. I'd like to come up with a better way to handle this in the future. If you've seen Quicksilver before you'll know that its preferences window actually has a button to show "Beta" or "Unstable" features and controls. What I might do for the Advanced Preferences in MacJournal is move all the checkboxes into a table and provide an option to add all the currently hidden switches. This would make it very easy to add new preferences in the future as well.

MacJournal 2.6b3 Released

This is potentially the last beta release of 2.6. This release is primarily to test out updated localizations. The following localizations have been updated:

- Korean
- Italian
- Norwegian
- Danish
- Catalan
- German
- Japanese

Here are some of the other changes:

- Fixed links to entries with forward slashes
- Greatly improved HTML exporting
- Lots of general interface improvements
- Edit the topic of the summary for the journal to change the name of that journal

Other enhancements are noted in the Version History (there are a lot of little items).

As always, install and use developmental software at your own risk! Be sure to back up your data before each new build just in case. Just for fun, MacJournal itself will back up your data with each new build that you install as well.

This is an alpha build, which means features are still in flux, as well as the interface. That means that no localization updates should take place. When the first beta comes out, the interface will be frozen for 2.6 with no exceptions this time!

Please let me know of any problems that you have with this build.

Difficulties Posting to Blogger

About 10 days ago, Blogger seemed to change the nature of its response to 3rd party clients like MacJournal when it sends Blogger a new post. This new response is not understandable to MacJournal and throws up an error on your screen whenever you try and send a post. Sometimes it seems that the post actually makes it through, but you always get an error back. The error message is "Error receiving response" and if you open up Console you'll get a bunch of XML code with "The server did not return a 'text/xml' response." in there somewhere. Originally I thought this was MacJournal's problem, but it seems other Mac OS X blogging clients are experiencing the same difficulties. There is a post in ecto's forum that shows the same behavior. The maker of ecto responded with a link to a preview post about Atom support, but the original posting refers to the Blogger API, which is what MacJournal uses. So, long story short: it seems that Blogger has done something to make the Blogger 1.0 API incompatible with Mac OS X for now. I will be contacting their support channels to see if I can get any word on when this will be fixed.

Beta 3 is coming soon

Beta 3 will be out sometime this weekend. A lot of little things have been improved and I hope this will be the last beta before final ship. Many localizations have been updated, but we're still missing a few key ones that will potentially delay the final release. MacJournal 2.6 will be released this month though, localizations or not. We can pick up additionaly localizations after the final release as they don't require any change to the actual code. The other big improvement in beta 3 beside localizations is the HTML exporting, which I talked about in a previous post here. Further improvements have been made since then and it's looking even better. I've tried it out in a lot of situations and everything comes out looking good and validates with the World Wide Web standards group (W3C). Other than that, there have been a lot of small improvements to a lot of different places. Look for the release soon.

WWDC Reactions

For those that haven't seen it, go see the preview of Mac OS X Tiger right now because that's what I'm talking about.

So I'm here at WWDC and I'm hearing all about Tiger. I've already gotten some questions about MacJournal's support for some of the new features. It's reasonable to assume that a lot of these features will be making it into MacJournal in the future. Tiger doesn't come out until next year, so I have some time to get up to speed on it. In particular, I'm looking at Spotlight to supplement MacJournal's searching abilities. I was looking at some Panther-only searching technology before WWDC, so I'll have to see how this fits in with that now. Another goodie is the Sync framework that is new in Tiger. I've gotten a lot of requests for iSync-like syncing of MacJournal data between multiple computers. Now, with this new technology it can be integrated into the same place that everything else is, which is huge. There's also Automator, which is a new kind of drag-and-drop scripting application. I'll have to see what kind of support MacJournal can offer for this new application. I never did get AppleScript worked in, but I'll see what I can do about both of them at the same time perhaps. There's also Core Image, but I don't think MacJournal needs a ripple transition run entirely in the graphics card in between entries. :-)

HTML Exporting Improvements

I had some free time today and ended up cleaning up a lot of HTML exporting stuff and making it a lot more powerful. This also applies to Blogger and LiveJournal. The end result should be a lot more standards compliant as another benefit. I made a really complex entry, exported, and it came out as valid XHTML 1.1. Always nice.

So, here are some of the new text features that the HTML exporter supports:

- Fonts
- Subscript
- Superscript
- Underline
- Strikethrough
- Text Shadow

In addition to what was already there:

- Text color
- Background color
- Bold and Italics
- Links

Localization Update

Localization efforts for MacJournal 2.6 are coming along. I have gotten updated localizations for Japanese and Korean back already. Also, a first for MacJournal: a complete Italian localization! We may not get all previous localizations updated for the 2.6 release, but hopefully more will fall into place for a 2.6.1 release. New help documentation is also along the way for 2.6. I will release beta 3 with the 3 new localizations and a few bug fixes next week at some point (probably later in the week or the weekend).

How to activate hidden preferences (i.e. the Metal App)

MacJournal, like most apps, has a few hidden options that you can use. These are things that I think don't really fit into the overall design of the app, but might be useful for a limited few. The most notable (and newest) is the option to make MacJournal a metal application, like Safari or the Finder (in Panther). To activate this option, quit MacJournal and open Terminal. Type (or paste) this in:

defaults write com.DanSchimpf.MacJournal UseMetalWindow YES

To break the down, defaults is the name of a tool that Apple provides for modifying an application's preferences from the command line. write is the operation you are performing; type man defaults on its own line for more details on what operations are available. com.DanSchimpf.MacJournal is MacJournal's domain. This is the unique identifier string for MacJournal in the OS. UseMetalWindow is the name of the preference itself, and YES is the value you are setting it to. You can substitue NO to reverse the effects. The next time you open MacJournal, it will magically be a metal application!

Another good example that popped up in 2.6 is SimpleInterface. Try this one out if you pine for the simpler days of MacJournal 2.1.

Here are some others for 2.6:

• DisableNumericCommandKeys (YES or NO) - Setting this disables the new behavior for Command-1 through -9. If you want to use those command keys for something else, you can set this so MacJournal won't grab them away.


• HideDrawerButtons (YES or NO) - A less drastic version of SimpleInterface (YES or NO): this just hides the new buttons that rest at the bottom of both drawers in the application.


• UseShortDateFormat (YES or NO) - When set, this will always use the shorter date format, even in cases where the longer one would be used.


• AlwaysShowSummaryEntry (YES or NO) - Whether the journal is expanded or collapsed in the drawer, the summary entry will be shown (default is to only show it when the journal is expanded).


• StoreAttachmentsExternally (YES or NO) - This is a very experimental setting that stores the files you drag into the text view outside of the main data file. This has the benefits of decreasing save time by several orders of magnitude, the ability to play music and video files after you quit, and you can drag the files back out of the text view as well at any times. However, consider this very experimental at this time; you might want to wait for beta 3 as well: I'm looking over this code for the first time in a while tonight. This only applies to new files dragged in.


• InsertDateAndTimeFormat (e.g. "%X %x") - replace the "%X %x" between the quotes (but leave the quotes) with a string made up specifiers from this page on formatting dates. This is the date and time format for the "Insert Date and Time" menu item.


• ShortDateFormat and LongDateFormat(e.g. "%X %x") - Similar to the last item, this is the date formatting for the rest of the application, in both long and short modes (long mode is for exporting, short mode is for the drawers).

Keep in mind that one of the reasons that these are only accessible via the command line is that I'm not guarantying that these will work after this version. Some of them (like the date format specifiers) will hopefully make it into UI in the future. Others are conveniences for this version and might be removed in the future if they conflict with something else.

I should also note before I get a lot of angry mail that MacJournal is not a metal application! Text editors do not belong on metal; it violates the rules for metal apps even by the loosest interpretation. So that's why it's a hidden option: for those that want it, they can try it out. However, it is not the official appearance for MacJournal.

MacJournal 2.6b2 has been released

Welcome to the second beta of MacJournal 2.6. There are a lot of fixes, but no real new features, so what's there should be very solid. All known issues have been fixed. Please let me know as soon as possible if you have any problems, but be sure to check the "Report a Bug" window for the Known Issues first. Here are some of the changes:

- Tweaks and improvements to the new toolbar items for font face and size
- Fixed crash when unencrypting journal with incorrect password
- Fixed drawers not remembering their open state between launches
- Fixed exporting to MacJournal format on Jaguar systems
- Changed the way topics are set for entries created via the "New Entry With Selection" service to include the application name and Safari URL (if appropriate) or Mail message subject (if appropriate)
- Release notes will now open in a new window instead of in your current journal
- Moved the command key equivalent that was errantly assigned to Customize Toolbar to its rightful home on "Show/Hide Toolbar"
- Added Undo support for the Find panel for Jaguar systems (it's already there on Panther)
- Added temporary menu item for reverting the checkbox format so you can open your data in 2.5.
- Fixed errors importing a text file and parsing it to discover entries therein.
- Improved file importing for most cases to not create an entry empty entry with new journals
- Hold the Option key when clicking on the Lock button to unlock all the journals with the same password (you could already option-click it to lock all journals; this is the logical converse).

Other enhancements are noted in the Version History.

As always, install and use developmental software at your own risk! Be sure to back up your data before each new build just in case. Just for fun, MacJournal itself will back up your data with each new build that you install as well.

This is an alpha build, which means features are still in flux, as well as the interface. That means that no localization updates should take place. When the first beta comes out, the interface will be frozen for 2.6 with no exceptions this time!

Please let me know of any problems that you have with this build. Visit danschimpf.com to download the beta.

Beta 2 Out Tomorrow

No promises, but the second beta should be out tomorrow. You can get a sneak peak at the changes right now. Basically, a lot of fixes, no new features (but no new bugs hopefully). Localization kits will also be out with beta 2. I've tried to limit the number of nibs affected and I will provide a list of strings that have been changed and/or added to each localizer to aide them in their efforts. Hopefully the only major changes made after beta 2 is released will be adding localizations as they become available.

On a semi-related note, I'll be at WWDC this year. That is Apple's annual developer conference. I say semi-related because this means that the final release for 2.6 will probably have to wait until after the conference, however I will be contact the whole time and making any necessary fixes and updates. Hopefully by the time WWDC is over, I'll be ready to enter the Final Testing Phase of 2.6 where I basically do everything that I can think of to break the app. This is also known as the least enjoyable part of software development. :-)

So, more news tomorrow (if all goes well). It could be Friday though.

MacJournal 2.6b1 Reactions

Beta 1 was posted (very) late Sunday night and reaction has been very positive overall. It's probably the most stable and problem-free build over all as well, which is good because a lot of people downloaded it and have started using it for the first time. The only major problem that was discovered is with unlocking an encrypted journal with an incorrect password causes a crash. For those developers out there, goto-ing past a variable declaration is bad! But this has been fixed for the next build. As soon as I can manage it, I'll have a localization kit out there and we'll start folding in updated localizations into new builds. Builds from this point will only have bug fixes and new localizations in them; any new features will have to wait for the as-yet-unnumbered next release. As always, you can use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to get the most up-to-date listing of known issues in whatever build you have.

Another thing I started doing from the first alpha of 2.6 is expiration dates. Using old builds is a Bad Idea, so they have a hard expiration date of 60 days after release when they will refuse to launch. I have gotten e-mails from people using development builds of 2.5 more than a year after it was released, so this is a way to prevent this. In general, you always want to be on the latest build, but usually the releases are scheduled so a few builds can work at once just in case. I think alpha 5 is expired, but everything after that still works. Please let me know if there's a reason that you can't move to a newer build so it can be fixed before your build expires.

MacJournal 2.6b1 is out!

Welcome to the first beta of MacJournal 2.6. This release marks the beginning of the end of the development of MacJournal 2.6. All that remains now is the localization and minor bug fixes. All outstanding bugs have been fixed as of this release, and any more are bound to be squashed before the final release. Here are some of the changes:

- Fixed loss of unsaved data when journals encrypt in memory
- Folder importing improvements
- Fixed problems with exporting certain entries to HTML or Blogger
- Hitting "New Entry" in a locked journal will prompt to unlock the journal first
- Various fixes to hopefully solve issues with creating entries from web text via the Service and with the Keywords sheet
- Fixed text encoding when sending to LiveJournal
- Locked journals will display without the "0 items" in Combined mode in the Journals drawer
- Fixed "Restore from Backup"
- Now disabling a bunch of menu and toolbar items when appropriate
- Fixed the iTunes button in the LiveJournal sheet
- Added two new toolbar items: Font Face and Font Size

Other enhancements are noted in the Version History.

As always, install and use developmental software at your own risk! Be sure to back up your data before each new build just in case. Just for fun, MacJournal itself will back up your data with each new build that you install as well.

This is an alpha build, which means features are still in flux, as well as the interface. That means that no localization updates should take place. When the first beta comes out, the interface will be frozen for 2.6 with no exceptions this time!

Please let me know of any problems that you have with this build.

To download, go to the Development section.

What is new in MacJournal 2.6?

I spent some time today trying to come up with a good short list of changes in MacJournal 2.6. If you feel I've left something off, let me know; it's probably just an oversight. I might trim it down for the final release.

• Enhanced Exporting:
  • export any set of entries or journals
  • export journals with one file per entry
  • export entry to Word documents (Panther only)
  • HTML exporting now supports more styles and colors
  • checkboxes can be exported to any format
• Improved Importing too:
  • Import or drag folders of files in
• New Service to append selected text in any application to any entry in MacJournal
• LiveJournal enhancements:
  • iTunes button to get the currently playing song in iTunes
  • Change who can view the entry as you upload it
• Performance and stability enhancements, especially for large data sets
• Interface improvements
  • Greatly enhanced contextual menus for both drawers
  • Mail-style Add and Action buttons
  • Use Combined view in the Journals drawer (previously only seen in the Entries drawer)
  • Lots of small improvements to enhance user experience
• More workflow options
  • Preferences to automatically close journals that you aren't working in
  • Use Command-1 through -9 to jump to that entry in the current journal (like Safari does)
  • Hold down the Option key to bypass most warnings on a case-by-case basis
  • Copy a style in some text and then select some entries in a drawer and use Paste Font to paste that style onto the selected entries
  • Drag some text onto an entry and wait: that entry will become current so you can drag it into its text (a.k.a. spring-loaded entries)
• Improved Keywords sheet
• Improved Undo functionality
• Improved options for setting the default text and topic for entries (including font and color)
• You can set a background picture (as well as randomizing through a whole folder)
• Improved Taco.

Beta Scheduling

Talking about betas, MacJournal 2.6 will be declared beta this week with some important fixes over the last alpha. If I had to guess, I'd say Thursday, but that's subject to anything that might pop up. At that point, I'll go through and prepare a localization package to send to all the localizers by this weekend so we can get that process started. I'm hoping to minimize the amount of things that will need to be relocalized, but we'll how successful I am at that. Localization is something that the Mac platform seems to excel in right now in general, but the facilities for updating existing localizations seem a bit bare. There's nibtool and not much else (from Apple, at least). I'm going to look into some of the third-party solutions and see what they offer in order to keep the amount of work to a minimum for the localizers.

NetNewsWire and Atom

(btw, I enabled titles in my blog. There is still no way to transmit titles over the Internet, but you can post them manually. It's a learning process for us all).

So NetNewsWire doesn't support Atom directly in any released version. I found this beta version that adds support for Atom. It's apparently a pre-release of 1.1.

Update: The next release of NNW will indeed support Atom and the release should should be a lot bigger than the 1.0.9 tag the release linked to above has (or the 1.1 tag that the page also talks about). I know how long it takes to get releases right, so more power to them.

If you want to grab the Atom feed of this blog, it is at http://danschimpf.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Blogger doesn't offer RSS feeds, but most news aggregator clients have been updated to include Atom (at least for Macs). I know Pulp Fiction and Shrook both support them. I don't directly know NetNewsWire's support for it (it wasn't evident on their page just now), but if someone wants to leave a comment about their support for Atom feeds that would be keen.

I don't want to bad-mouth my new blogging provider so quickly, but this post deals with Blogger itself. Blogger doesn't support titles on its blogs. And it's not just the Blogger site itself: the protocol used to communicate to Blogger from third party clients does not support titles. So that means other sites that support the Blogger protocol (which is pretty much every one of them) has to find another way to transmit titles. There's just no good way to do this in the Blogger protocol. MacJournal 2.6 has started to add the title to the top of the text surrounded by <title> tags, which seems to work for some other Blogger-compatible sites. But it doesn't work for Blogger itself. Eventually this will get better when the new protocol (Atom) gets finalized and supported by all the major websites. At this point MacJournal will support it too (hopefully by the next version). But for now it's just unfortunate.

As was noted on the previous blog, you can get the most up-to-date list of changes in MacJournal (including the build that is still in progress) at http://danschimpf.com/history.html. This is automatically updated daily to include whatever has been done that day. If you have an alpha build of MacJournal 2.6, you can also check out the list of known issues for your build by using the Help menu. Select the "Report A Bug" menu item and it will download the list of the known issues which is updated whenever new issues arise. But let me know if you find an issue that's not on there.

Welcome to the new MacJournal Development Blog! I decided to move the blog from my site over to Blogger so it would be easier to access and allow for comments and so forth. I will hopefully be able to update this one more with just general thoughts about software development as well as the announcements that the old one had.

If you've never heard of MacJournal before, now would be a good time to check out and see what it's all about since that's what I'm going to be talking about a lot here.