MacJournal Development Blog

This blog chronicles the development of MacJournal, and other software by Dan Schimpf Software.

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!

posted by Dan Schimpf @ 2:07 PM  

42 Comments:

  • At 3:04 PM, April 25, 2006, Anonymous Conrad said…

    Congratulations Dan!

     

  • At 3:43 PM, April 25, 2006, Anonymous dukemeiser said…

    Wow, less than a year since I paid for the last update and now I have to pay again? I had been very supportive of MacJournal, but I'm afraid my support must end here.

     

  • At 4:00 PM, April 25, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    You don't have to pay; 3.3 will continue to work just as well as it did yesterday. If you're interested in the new features that 4.0 provides, there is an upgrade option for 3.0 users. If you bought 3.0 within 90 days there is a free upgrade as well.

     

  • At 4:49 PM, April 25, 2006, Anonymous frank said…

    I'll probably be sticking with 3.3 as well for the time being. I'm going to give 4.0 a spin but don't see myself upgrading - not because of the $15 but because what initially motivated me to use and ultimately register MacJournal was its 'lean-mean-note-machine' character.

    I don't need or want a note-taking app that creates podcasts or publishes my notes to a blog. To me personally (= 'no one needs to agree'), those seem a bit like the onset of an MS Word like feature-bloat.

    Nonetheless, I love my MacJournal and thanks for the hard work!

    =)

     

  • At 5:05 PM, April 25, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    Feature bloat should be a concern to every application designer out there; it's something I try to manage very closely. The goal behind the new blogging features in 4.0 was that if you didn't care you didn't have to deal with it at all (or even see it). Sure, there's a lot of functionality there, but you don't ever see if it you don't want to; it's pretty easy to ignore. And you can just use the regular editing features without worrying about anything else. But this distinction that I am making here is largely subjective, so I can understand your feelings and I appreciate the comment.

     

  • At 5:10 PM, April 25, 2006, Anonymous Yoram Blumenberg said…

    I found maybe a bug: You can’t retrieve old entries from your WordPress blog IF you put your wp-directory in a sub-directory like eg. “http://domain.tld/wordpress”. If you have your WordPress Installation in your main directory everything will be fine.

     

  • At 7:40 PM, April 25, 2006, Blogger (Å) Alan Edinger said…

    Good Work Dan,

    Can wait to implement the release. I dropped the beta testing a while back just because I depend on Mac journal in too many different categories professional & personal.

    Hopefully, the release is solid with no DB issues - only minor bugs.

    Maybe now you can take a reflective breather and focus on the future, instead if heads-down coding.

    Did the template feature make it as we discussed a half a year ago? - I'll find out shortly.

    -Alan

     

  • At 8:25 PM, April 25, 2006, Anonymous Chad said…

    Doh!

    And I bought MacJournal 3 about 91 days ago! Actually, I'm not kidding. I bought it on the 21st of January, so I think that is just a tad over the 90 day limit.

    And during most of that time, I've been using the delta/alpha/beta versions of MJ 4!

    Decisions, decisions...

     

  • At 11:10 PM, April 25, 2006, Anonymous Raphael said…

    Dan,
    If I'd been using the alpha and beta versions of MacJournal, can I go back to v 3.3? Is the data format still compatible?

     

  • At 12:29 AM, April 26, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    raphael: the data format is indeed still compatible with 3.3. You will lose anything like labels that is new to 4.0, but the core data that are in 3.3 will be there.

    chad: it might be worth emailing Mariner anyway. You never know. :-)

    alan: I think it should be solid on the DB side. That part of the application hasn't been touched in some time. Let me know of any problems though.

     

  • At 12:47 AM, April 26, 2006, Blogger Gualt said…

    Thank you Dan!
    Even though I fully agree with Frank (I only need of a note-taking app, I don't need to create podcasts or blogs), right now I paid for my upgrade fee.
    Why? Two reasons above all: I saw so many "fixes" in the release notes and to me 15$ is a reasonable price for all of them. Also, I got used with this app and its lovely old blue icon, so I like to support you Dan.

     

  • At 2:38 AM, April 26, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    $15 for such a wealth of improvements really is fantastic value for money. If you put the new blogging engine and associated functionality to one side and just consider some of the small but ingenious tweaks that have been made then this upgrade is easily worth paying for.

    Date adjustment: you can now use the arrow keys to change all date and time attributes (tiny but brilliant)

    Labels: a flexible approach to creating groups/categories of work (work-in progress, final etc.)

    Templates: the ability to create a default template for every journal (small business invoicing made easy)

    The potential uses for MacJournal are endless, and I look forward to future versions that refine the wealth of features that it offers (an inspector dedicated to formatting functions would be a massive bonus). I only hope that all of those $15 upgrades prove to be ample reward for one years' worth of dedicated time and effort.

    Best regards

    duki

     

  • At 3:13 AM, April 26, 2006, Anonymous Adrian B said…

    "If you bought 3.0 within 90 days there is a free upgrade as well."

    Yeah, but where? I couldn't find any upgrade info anywhere. (I bought MJ 3.3 on March 15, after free upgrades to 4.0 was promised here on the development blog.)

     

  • At 3:57 AM, April 26, 2006, Anonymous Martin said…

    Congrats, Dan!
    Having used all the 4.0 betas I’m happy to see the final version now. I’ve upgraded and payd my fee yesterday and must say, that you’ve done a great work.

     

  • At 5:00 AM, April 26, 2006, Blogger Lee said…

    Congratulations on the new release! As soon as I get paid, so will you.

     

  • At 9:36 AM, April 26, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    adrian: I can't find it either; try emailing sales(at)marinersoftware.com for the upgrade.

    Thanks to everyone for the kind words! I appreciate it a lot.

     

  • At 10:49 AM, April 26, 2006, Blogger (Å) Alan Edinger said…

    Dan,

    FYI

    Ver 3.3 doesn't notify the new version.

    When I manually checked (Help/Check for Updates...) it's resulting windows says;

    "No update needed"
    "Your version: 3.3"
    "Current version: 3.3"

    -Alan

     

  • At 11:05 AM, April 26, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    This is true. Because is it is a paid update, it seemed to be more annoying than helpful to have updates for 4.0 pop up in 3.x.

     

  • At 1:40 PM, April 26, 2006, Blogger (Å) Alan Edinger said…

    Oh' I see Dan,

    Still, from a marketing perspective you may want to consider a method to notify your existing customer base of new releases.

    I assume that this is part of what Mariner – as your publisher – does for you.

    However, to note, If did not subscribe to the RSS feed I would at this moment be unaware that there was a new version available.

    Hopefully sooner than later you will have more customers that are users of MacJournal than a highly focused sub-group culture, that is hyper-aware of every move you make.

    -Alan

     

  • At 3:23 PM, April 26, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    This is very true and I'm considering ways of handling this for 3.x users, probably similar to what iLife does.

     

  • At 9:12 AM, April 28, 2006, Blogger webhill said…

    This post has been removed by a blog administrator.

     

  • At 12:35 PM, April 28, 2006, Anonymous Roy Judd said…

    Upgraded... paid for... I've worked through the alpha and beta releases simply because I'll always support good software that does exactly what I want it to. Final release was well worth the wait. This program is, in terms of both quality and usability, just about the best I've ever used.

    Thank you Dan.

     

  • At 4:48 PM, April 28, 2006, Blogger webhill said…

    Ok. I think I found the option for uploading images to a server and having blog posts reference them. So I configured a MacJournal to use a particular blog, and to post images to .Mac. However, I have a problem. If I make a MacJournal entry that has, for example, four pictures in it (which I have put into the entry via drag-n-drop), and I use the "send to blog" button to tell it to publish it to a configured default blog for that journal it seems it only sends ONE image, and uses that image for each one.

    Also, when I then post ANOTHER image-containing post from the same MacJournal to the same blogspot blog, the NEW image in the NEW post gets put into the previous post as well!! It's kind of freaking me out actually :)

    Is this a known problem? Is it something about how I configured MacJournal? Please advise. And thanks again for the great software. I'm sure the kinks will come out soon enough.

     

  • At 4:52 PM, April 28, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    What is the file name of the image as it ends up on the remote server vs. the original file name when you dragged it in? Is this an entry you made in 4.0, or one from before?

     

  • At 7:20 PM, April 28, 2006, Anonymous Ted Barker said…

    Dan,

    thank you for all the hard work. MJ has its foibles, but is generally a pretty comfortable environment to work in.

    Just a couple of comments

    (1) Searching for keywords
    Keywords are assigned from a user defined list, but searching for keywords is free format. In other words you have to remember the keywords in order to search for them. Cant the keyword filter in the search bring up the keyword list and the user choose from that? Why was this design descision made?

    (2) iPod export
    Should the iPod export split long entries and maintain the max block size for iPod Notes? I think the limit is 4k. Currently the iPod exporter/saveas function doesn’t seem to conform to that limitation.

    (3) Icon Design
    The original blue icon is so much nicer than the Mariner version. Is there any hack to get it back?
    Alternatively, make it a preference...

     

  • At 4:19 AM, April 29, 2006, Blogger webhill said…

    Dan, you asked "What is the file name of the image as it ends up on the remote server vs. the original file name when you dragged it in? Is this an entry you made in 4.0, or one from before?"

    The file names on the remote server is "s640x480.jpg" whereas the file I drag in is DSCxxxxx.jpg where xxxx is some 4 digit integer.

    When I have MacJournal send the whole entry, directly to .Mac, I see it uploads the photos as s640x480-1, ...-2, ...-3 etc; but like I said - so far, when I choose to publish to blog and just put the images on .mac, it does that wierd thing.

    That being said, I use iView Media Pro for photo storage and manipulation. It's not the happiest camper on my intel-based mac. I'm going to try an experiment dragging some pix in from iPhoto and see if that has any effect. You never know.

     

  • At 4:19 PM, April 29, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    Ted:
    Thanks; I'm glad you like the new version.

    1+2. I will write these down for the future.
    3. The blue icon is still included. If you'd like to switch it, open the Package Contents of the app and find the Info.plist file. Change the line under "CFBundleIcon" to be "MacJournalClassic" instead of just "MacJournal". You might have to log out at that point to see the effect.

    webhill:
    Are you dragging these images straight from iView? I just tried uploading an entry to Blogger, directing the images to my iDisk, and they all came out fine. So you're behavior might be because iView is naming everything the same thing.

     

  • At 5:43 PM, April 30, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Am I understanding this correctly, if we already paid for MJ previously, we have to pay again for 4.0 ? You have to be joking, current MJ users should not have to pay again that's sounds like a scam if you ask me. Is that the way its going to be ? I can understand new people paying but not current users who already paid. That's just insane.

     

  • At 9:11 PM, April 30, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    it's a major upgrade - why wouldn't they charge?
    Did you think that you could just pay once and get free upgrades for life?

     

  • At 3:01 AM, May 01, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I would not refer to it as a major upgrade, perhaps a major way to make extra cash by calling it an upgrade.

    it better float on water if i'm going to pay more. I haven't seen much differences from previous versions nothing to write home to mom about. My grandma could have done these updates. We all know in most cases an upgrade is just a way to make extra cash.

    It's not that there's an issue with paying but it hasn't changed much except for some little things and eyecandy. How often will upgrades happen where current users will have to dish out more $$ ?

     

  • At 6:39 AM, May 01, 2006, Anonymous Martin said…

    So if you couldn’t see any useful feature in 4.0, nobody forces you to upgrade. The 3.x version would still run fine on your machine and unless you need one of the new features, you weren‘t forced to spend any money. For me, the new Tabs, the Audio features, Labels and the new inspector are very useful and therefore worth the fee. Also there are some smaller 4.x updates to come that also may contain some improvements.
    If you grandmother could have done all those things, she should look out for a job as a software developer.

     

  • At 8:19 AM, May 02, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    What changed with the find command?
    It doesn't seem to work llke it used to. I haven't had time to research it, but I've got about 4 years of notes in multipe journals and now the pain of finding stuff I know is in there is high.
    (Yes, I've paid for every upgrade).
    Maybe I'm missing something, but been so busy I haven't had time to figure it out.
    Anybody figured out how to do Command F and Command G and have it step through multiple journals?

     

  • At 11:04 AM, May 02, 2006, Anonymous Chad said…

    I've been following MJ4 for the past several months, and have barely even used MJ3 since I purchased it several months ago. The few oddities I've seen seem to have been cleared up, so this application is looking great! I'm also glad to see that the older brown version of the icon is back. The blue application icon is decent, but I prefer the leather bound icon, instead.

    Oh, and the sales at Mariner Software were great and let me upgrade to Version 4, even though I originally bought MJ3 about 91 days (or very close to that) before MJ4 came out. So, very cool for them.

    The only major feature that I'd like to see in MJ, is the ability to open up a whole new Journal. But I use it primarily for containing a lots of little facts and data at work, so it works out pretty well for right now, but what if I wanted another separate journal for lyrics to songs? That just wouldn't fit very well with computer data. :)

    And as mentioned, the blog features seem fairly hidden to those who have no interest in using them...like me. I just like to record and save data, so at this time I don't need the blog features. However, would it be possible to export the data to Wiki-style pages? That would be pretty sweet.

    Awesome job, Dan! MacJournal is the best application I've found, for the application I've been dreaming of for the past several years.

     

  • At 5:19 PM, May 02, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    Previous post:
    The find window accessed with Command-F never searched more than the current entry. It is the standard text Find window that you can get in most any application. For searching across multiple entries, use the search field in the toolbar.

    Chad:
    Thanks a lot! I appreciate it. The thing you're looking for is something I'm going to be working on for the future.

     

  • At 6:55 AM, May 03, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Seems like the search in the toolbar used to search across all journals instead of just the entries in one journal.

    Unfortunately, I never paid attention to the nuances of the application before, I just used it.

    I think it used to show each Journal that had the object of my search in the drawer or something. All I know now is that the way searches are done is different and I'm having trouble adjusting. Can't put my finger on it.

    I've used MJ for years and have 50+ Journals, it's akward to select each one separately to do a search.

     

  • At 10:25 AM, May 03, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    Searches from the toolbar are global (as they were before). They are just displayed differently in MJ4.

     

  • At 10:56 AM, May 03, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Dan,
    Ignore my posts about searching. I finally found a few minutes and figured it out. I was just used to seeing the results a little different.

    Is there a way for each Journal name to appear above the found entries when displaying search results so I can tell at a glance which Journal an entry is in?
    thanks.
    Sorry for the confusion.

     

  • At 11:31 AM, May 03, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    There's no way to view the source journal at the same time right now, but I'll keep it in mind for the future.

     

  • At 1:04 PM, May 03, 2006, Blogger Dave said…

    I'm having problems contecting to my blog.
    Its a Movabletype platform. I keep getting "there was an unknow error communicating with the server"

    Any ideas

     

  • At 4:14 PM, May 05, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    Send me some email and let me know what settings you are using.

     

  • At 8:40 PM, May 07, 2006, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    I've been happy user for long time. But one thing puzzles me. There is no bread crumb function that let's me go back to a recent entry. Now that I have lots of entries I am getting lost trying to move around previous entries. Am I missing something? Similarly tabbed views would help, but I can't see how to open an entry into a new tab.

    What's the future of link histories or such?

    Bill (dusty at stonemuse com)

     

  • At 9:02 PM, May 07, 2006, Blogger Dan Schimpf said…

    If you click and hold on the Browse toolbar item you will get a history of the entries that you have looked at since you launched the app. Let me know if this isn't what you're looking for.

     

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