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.