Tiger and MacJournal 3.1

Now that Tiger has been released, a few more details about Tiger support in MacJournal 3.1 can be revealed. In addition to the 200 "big" features advertised for Tiger, there are a plethora of smaller features in the OS that apps can take advantage of quickly. One of the first things MacJournal supported was multiple selections ranges. If you hold the Command key you can select multiple discontinuous ranges of text in MacJournal (and any other Cocoa text program). Some changes had to be made to support this any time that I got that selected range of text. Instead of just one range I had to consider many ranges. In the case of most of the text cleanup commands the length of one range was changed as well. But I'm happy to say that everything should just work as expected with multiple selection ranges: text cleanup, strikethrough, and everything else should work. While 3.1 was billed as the "Tiger-compatible" release, most of these things will work all the way back to MacJournal 2.6 (which shows you how long Tiger has been in development). For some extra fun hold the Option key while you drag for some square selection!

One fix that 3.1 brings is a few tweaks for Resolution Independent UI. This is a feature in Tiger that is not exposed in any user UI. It's there for developers to update their applications for the future. With this you can scale any application that you launch on your system to an arbitrary amount. For example you can make any application run 2 times larger than normal, which might be handy on that 30-inch display that we all have. MacJournal 3.1 should operate just as well under these conditions.

A suggestion that I get a lot regards what happens when you drag an entry or a journal onto your Desktop (or any other folder in the Finder). In Panther and before it would create this lame text clipping of the text in whatever you dragged. This was, well, enormously lame. Thankfully, the support exists in Tiger to create a real Rich Text file at the destination that you can actually use.

Another popular suggestion is page numbering while printing. Once again Apple has helped out here and there is now an option in the MacJournal pane in the print window for enabling page numbering.

Tiger also supports Tables and similar things in text views. TextEdit can to Tables and Lists all by itself. MacJournal can access these features as well, but the menu items weren't put in until after localization had finished. I will add them for 3.1.1 but you can add them right now in English using a Hidden Preference.

What is not there is syncing or Spotlight. Spotlight is nasty because it needs a distinct file for each searchable datum. Since MacJournal stores all of its data in one file, there's no way to separate each entry for Spotlight. How, you may ask, do Safari and Address Book handle this, since they put all of their data in a single file as well? Safari and Address Book also maintain a separate listing of small files for each datum. Check out your Caches folder if you want to see them. This is essentially what MacJournal will have to do. While not trivial, it might be easier than syncing at this point so I might work on that now and release a small update containing that functionality.

MacJournal 3.1

Download it here

Welcome to MacJournal 3.1! This release provides a few new features, some bug fixes, and full Tiger compatibility.

New Features:

1. Highlight toolbar button
2. Automatic discovery of lists
3. Option to automatically back up your data
4. New Calendar view in the Journals drawer and Change Date sheet
5. Encrypted journals are indicated with a gold lock
6. Export journals directly to a .Mac account
7. Added button in Full Screen mode to automatically scroll the text

Bug Fixes:

1. Improved performance after exiting Full Screen mode
2. Fixed problem when using more than one "Discover" preference and saving
3. Blogger performance and reliability should be greatly improved
4. Fixed loss styling when clicking next to a checkbox and typing
5. Improved searching performance and behavior
6. Fixed various problems associated with switching list styles

In addition, MacJournal 3.1 has been fully tested on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Several Tiger-only features have been added; check the MacJournal Development Blog for more details after Tiger has shipped.

Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don't have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release. There is a 3.1.1 release planned to pick up a new Italian localization and any bug fixes that pop up.
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MacJournal 3.1b2

Go here to download now

This is the second beta of MacJournal 3.1. There are more code changes than localizations in this release, but there is now an updated Korean localization to be had. All that are missing are the Japanese and Italian localizations. If anyone can help out with the former please let me know; it should be a very short and simple update for this release.

On the code improvement side, here are the highlights:

1. Added hidden pref for controlling what the first day of the week is in the calendar for localizations that use Monday as the start of the week (which actually makes more sense than Sunday if you think about it.)
2. Fixed a problem that could prevent a new entry from being selected in the journals drawer after you created it inside a nested journal.
3. Nested journals will now lock If you have a preference set to automatically lock journals and the parent journal cannot lock itself.
4. Added a calendar to the Change Date sheet, which I should have done a while ago but I forgot.
5. Improved some areas of performance, including launch time.
6. Added a checkbox and typing some text, then putting the insertion point next to the checkbox and typing again used to destroy all styling due to a quirk in the OS. No more!
7. Another fun quirk in the OS caused the Blogger panel to lock the app up from time to time (more in some situations). That area of code has been rewritten to avoid these areas. As a side effect I think it’s a lot faster too.

There are a few more changes so check out the Version History when you get a chance. This should be the last beta: as soon as we get the Italian and Japanese localizations in 3.1 will be finalized and released. Please let me know of any bugs that you find.

3.1b2 soon; Tiger

Expect a new beta of MacJournal 3.1 in the next day or two. I rewrote a lot of the Blogger networking to avoid an issue that I see in the OS and hopefully it should never lock up the app ever again. There's also some other good stuff in there that I'd like to get out while waiting for the last two localizations to come back.

Tiger was announced yesterday over on Apple's site, and while I obviously can't talk about it a whole lot until it is released (those pesky developer NDAs) but rest assured that MacJournal works just fine on Tiger, both 3.x and 2.6.x. I'm not sure about 2.5.x, but you should be using 2.6 anyway. ☺ More details on this when Tiger ships on the 29th.

More 3.1 updates

MacJournal 3.1 is pretty much done. We're waiting for localizations at this point: Japanese and a new Italian localization. I hope to get those in soon (at least the Japanese one since it's a small update) and get 3.1 out the door by the end of the month. This will be the last release to support 10.2 and I'm anxious to leave that chunk of code behind. ☺ There are a lot of things on the plate for the next update and I've started tinkering around with some of the larger ones but shipping 3.1 will make life easier. I'm happy with how 3.1 turned out though and I look forward to getting it out the door.