Wednesday, March 30, 2005

MacJournal 3.1b1

Go Here to Download 3.1b1

This is the first beta of MacJournal 3.1. There are only a few code changes but a lot of localizations are updated. The following localizations should be ready for 3.1:

- Serbian
- Spanish
- Danish
- Taiwanese
- French
- Norwegian
- German

In addition, a problem with printing was fixed and a hidden preference for Wiki links was introduced. Read the Version History for the details. The code is largely finished at this point. We're waiting on one or two more localizations, so I'm shooting for sometime in April for the final release.

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 in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

Sunday, March 20, 2005

MacJournal 3.1a4

Get It Now.

This is the fourth alpha of MacJournal 3.1. The big change in this release is with networking. All of the networking code was rewritten to use WebKit APIs, which should provide for more reliable connections and in more network setups. The areas affected are LiveJournal, the Update window and the Known Issues window. The Blogger window uses a different set of APIs that can't be migrated. Please test these areas out and let me know if they still work for you and if they actually work better. A side effect of this is MacJournal now requires Safari to be installed. You can either have 10.2.7 or higher installed, or 10.2 with Safari. You don't have to actually use Safari at all, just have it installed.

Some other changes:

- Daily backups can now be manipulated in the Advanced prefs, as well as the period of days in between between backups.
- Decoupled the Full Screen Text Zoom pref from the other appearance prefs.
- The Stats window is now accessible from the View menu and will take into account what is selected in the drawers. It will also count words in nested journals.
- Encrypted journals will show up with a gold lock to indicate their encrypted nature.
- Added a new HTML template that is similar but written in HTML 4.01.

This will be the last alpha. In fact, the interface will be frozen very shortly to be localized. I'm hoping to get 3.1 out in April so I can get to work on the next big release with support for multiple documents, multiple blogging servers, tabs, labels, and loads more.

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 in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

Friday, March 11, 2005

3.1 coming along

3.1 is coming along well so far. I put some more work into tabs last night and got a lot of improvements in; it's shaping up quite nicely. I don't know if they will ship with 3.1 by default, but it will be available via the hidden preference if not. I got some performance improvements out of the calendar as well. I don't think any more large features will be in 3.1 (due to time constraints), however I would like to do some more under-the-hood work. To that end I am strongly considering raising the minimum OS to 10.2.7 to allow for use of WebKit (Safari's underlying engine). This would improve some of the networking functionality, especially for LiveJournal. It could also open up some interesting possibilities for HTML exporting. I don't think it will be a problem for most users, but let me know of any strong objections. I will be dropping 10.2.x entirely eventually, but I don't know how and when yet.

There have been new alphas the past few weekends but I think I might skip this weekend to do the WebKit changes. So far all the changes I have are to the tabs so I want to get something else in there in case you don't like tabs. Maybe sometime next week, although I do have jury duty....

MacJournal 3.0.2

MacJournal 3.0.2 has been released! Download it from Mariner's download page. It's a very small update that just fixes the undo problem and adds a Norwegian localization. There was a problem in 3.0.1 that caused all undo operations to get combined together after you created a journal. This is fixed now, along with a handful of very small fixes. Let me know if there are any problems with it as I'm not planning any more 3.0.x releases; everything is focused on 3.1 right now.

Monday, March 07, 2005

MacJournal 3.1a3

Get It Here

This is the third alpha of MacJournal 3.1. Before I get into the big topics that need discussing, here are some bugs that were fixed:

- Fixed a crash while switching list styles

- Fixed a problem with exporting non-ASCII characters to one file per entry

- Fixed some problems with auto-expansion in the journals drawer

- Journals should now re-sort automatically if you change the name of a nested journal

- Fixed Undo in Full Screen mode


Some new things were also added:

- A hidden preference to search entry text as well as the dates when searching from the calendar. The preference specifies the format of the date in the text that you want to search.

- A hidden preference to prevent the "Loading Data" window from appearing at app launch. The application will just show the spinning cursor until the data are ready. This will primarily help people who set MacJournal as a login item with the "Hide" checkbox.

- Added tabs in a prototype state. It's actually a hidden preference, but it is enabled by default for this pre-release (although it won't be for the final release of 3.1). There is an menu item in the Entry menu and a menu item in the contextual menu for entries to open an entry in a new tab. Please note that this is very rough implementation and not yet complete. Please do not report a lot of bugs on this. For example, unsaved changes are saved back to the entry when you switch tabs (which may not be that great). The appearance is not final either. Give it a little slack and let me know if you like it from a broad perspective.


In addition, some things will be enabled by default now: Hidden Prefs, Tabs, and Daily Backup. This is just for the pre-releases, these will be disabled by default for the real releases. I want to get Tabs and Daily Backup exercised before the final release.