Time for MacJournal 4.0d2

Head here to download.

This is the second developmental release. I fixed up a lot of bugs from the first developmental release and added a few new features. The goal here is to provide a little more stability before ripping a bunch of other stuff up. I started a bit on the new blogging features but I'm still working that out mentally so there isn't anything different on the surface right now. A new window has been added for "Advanced Search." This is all done via Spotlight so the window will not be available on Panther. Right now there is only one field that searches everything (like the other search field) but I hope to add more fields for more of the data types (one for the topic, one for text, etc.) to make it truly more "advanced." However, it's pretty nifty already if you always wanted a separate, flat search listing.

Changes in this release:
- Added the aforementioned Advanced Search window
- Fixed up tabs a bit to hopefully resolve some of the problems people have been seeing
- Added new UUID links. There is a hidden preference to enable their creation. These links are both ugly and location-independent.
- Drag objects out of the drawers or search window into the entry text to add links to them.
- Select a bunch of items in the drawer and use Paste Ruler (along with previously available Paste Style)
- Added a disclosure triangle in the Stats window to hide the big Word Frequencies table.
- Added an Export button to the Welcome window if your trial period has expired so you can export any data out of the app.
- Added Bigger and Smaller menu items to the Text Zoom submenu.
- Lots of under the hood work, bug fixes, and appearance tweaks to things.

Keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- New per-object attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
- A real implementation of tabs
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther.

Special Note for Blogging: the blogging areas of the app are next on the list to be overhauled. Lots of functionality will be added, but for now they might work a little differently than in 3.2.

Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some icons are temporary (such as non-editable entries) and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the changes though.