Tuesday, April 25, 2006

MacJournal 4.0

Holy cow, MacJournal 4.0 is out! After development of just over a year, it is finally out and available for download. Go to Mariner to get the final release. The betas will continue to work until they expire in a few weeks. There are already plans to get back to .Mac syncing very soon and hopefully get that working for reals this time. I don’t have a real timeframe for that yet, but I expect there will be betas for that as well.

Pricing details are on Mariner's website, but for the curious there is a $15 upgrade option for 3.0 users.

In the meantime, there are a certain number of things that are best done after a project is over, like switching version control systems. I’m thinking of switching to Subversion, so now is an opportune time to do that. Not that it matters at all to the user, but I just thought I’d mention it.

Onwards and upwards!

Friday, April 07, 2006

MacJournal 4.0b4

Get it here.

This is the fourth (and probably final) beta release. This release fixes a few small bugs here and there in the application. A few crashes were fixed and a few small behavioral and appearance bugs were squashed. The biggest area of change was in the blogging: FTP-ing images works again, and sending categories to Movable Type blogs should work now.

Remember, last release I enabled some new licensing code in this release. If you haven’t used 4.0b3, You will be prompted for your serial number but the 3.0 serials will still work. I want to shake out any bugs in this new code before the final release.

Changes in this release:
- Fixed categories with Movable Type blogs.
- Fixed an occasional range exception in the journals drawer (usually seen when searching).
- Downloaded entries will be checked more thoroughly for duplicates before adding them to the journal.
- Improved the custom I-Beam cursor during Full Screen mode.
- Improved auto-recognition of Movable Type blogs.
- Lots of other little improvements; check out the Version History for the full details.

Keep in mind that this is still 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
- All-new blogging architecture
- New per-item attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
• blog server
- Browser-like tabs for quickly switching between entries
- Audio recording
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support
- Improved Full Screen mode
- Improved searching

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.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar.


Reporting Bugs

This is a beta release so things are pretty much locked down. If you see any problems in this build please let me know about it so I can fix it before the final is released.