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!