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.