Thankfully, it seems Blogger fixed the problem they introduced when they rolled out their new beta services recently and MacJournal can now safely post to Blogger via Atom again. That crisis averted, I spent most of the weekend working on .mac syncing. I don’t have any prior experience with SyncServices against which to judge this, but I think things are almost there. I have it doing a round trip with data on the same computer. The next step is actually syncing between two computers and working out whatever problems pop up there. After that, another beta can be released with this functionality turned on (finally). I’m looking forward to having it working soon!
Monday, August 28, 2006
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Problems with Blogger
Blogger (aka Google) rolled out some new services a few days ago and it seems to have changed the way existing applications can send data, which is charming. I suspect it's the authentication, but I will look into it some more. I wasn't planning a 4.0.5 before 4.1, but this might require a change of plans. Of course, it could turn out to just be server problems on their end relating to the new functionality that will be worked out soon. We can hope, at least.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
MacJournal 4.1d1
Get it here.
Welcome to the very first test release of MacJournal 4.1! This is quite a large release with some new features and a lot of enhanced functionality. Before we proceed with what is new, a quick word about version schemes. This release is labeled, 4.1d1, where the 'd' stands for "development" or "delta" (no one is really sure, but "diggity" is my favorite guess). That is a stage that comes before "alpha." Alpha is when all the features of a release are more or less included. After that comes "beta," where most of the bugs have been fixed and the user interface changes have all been made and locked down. After that comes the final release to the public. But 4.1d1 is before all that because it is still missing some key functionality that I want it to have. Keeping that in mind, let us continue on to what is actually in this release:
Big Items
- Recording has been completely rewritten to use QuickTime. This should provide a more stable platform going forward and allow for a lot more configurability. It also means iSights are usable.
- You can now send multiple entries to a blog at once. They must all go to the same place though.
- Exporting has been much improved. You can specify a text encoding for plain text files. More of your metadata is saved along with the file so if you export an entry and the re-import it, things like labels and edit-ability will be preserved. You can also specify what metadata you want included in the text of the file (instead of date+time or nothing).
- I gave up waiting for Apple to fix their bug in tables and worked around it. Tables should now be useful, even after you relaunch the app.
Little Enhancements
- Creating a new journal may insert the journal into another journal, depending on where you are in the app.
- New "Highlight" toolbar icon (it looks better)
- "Lock journals after idle" will now use the time that MacJournal itself has been idle, instead of the whole system.
- Attachments in the text will display their filename, Mail-style.
- You can now specify whether or not you want to enable comments on a Movable Type post.
- You can now specify the key equivalent for Full Screen mode right in the (real) prefs.
There are loads more changes that are too numerous to mention, including some bug fixes. You should check out the Version History for the full details.
Not Included
- .mac syncing. More work needs to go into this. Probably quite a bit. I wanted to get all the other changes into people's hands before I devoted my time to that though.
About the last public release:
MacJournal 4.0 brings major new features and large improvements to existing features. Every single part of MacJournal has been improved in some way. For bloggers, the blogging support in MacJournal is all-new. MacJournal now supports more kinds of blogs and it is easier than ever to use them. Each journal can have a different blog and the entries will remember their settings so they can be updated on the server later.
MacJournal 4.0 also has a lot of other new features:
- 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
- Improved keywords configuration
This is just the list of big features. If you want to see the full list of all the changes in the included Version History.
MacJournal requires Mac OS X 10.3.5 (Panther).
Reporting Bugs
If you see any problems in this release please let me know about it by using the "Report a Bug" menu item in the "Help" menu to send me email.
Welcome to the very first test release of MacJournal 4.1! This is quite a large release with some new features and a lot of enhanced functionality. Before we proceed with what is new, a quick word about version schemes. This release is labeled, 4.1d1, where the 'd' stands for "development" or "delta" (no one is really sure, but "diggity" is my favorite guess). That is a stage that comes before "alpha." Alpha is when all the features of a release are more or less included. After that comes "beta," where most of the bugs have been fixed and the user interface changes have all been made and locked down. After that comes the final release to the public. But 4.1d1 is before all that because it is still missing some key functionality that I want it to have. Keeping that in mind, let us continue on to what is actually in this release:
Big Items
- Recording has been completely rewritten to use QuickTime. This should provide a more stable platform going forward and allow for a lot more configurability. It also means iSights are usable.
- You can now send multiple entries to a blog at once. They must all go to the same place though.
- Exporting has been much improved. You can specify a text encoding for plain text files. More of your metadata is saved along with the file so if you export an entry and the re-import it, things like labels and edit-ability will be preserved. You can also specify what metadata you want included in the text of the file (instead of date+time or nothing).
- I gave up waiting for Apple to fix their bug in tables and worked around it. Tables should now be useful, even after you relaunch the app.
Little Enhancements
- Creating a new journal may insert the journal into another journal, depending on where you are in the app.
- New "Highlight" toolbar icon (it looks better)
- "Lock journals after idle" will now use the time that MacJournal itself has been idle, instead of the whole system.
- Attachments in the text will display their filename, Mail-style.
- You can now specify whether or not you want to enable comments on a Movable Type post.
- You can now specify the key equivalent for Full Screen mode right in the (real) prefs.
There are loads more changes that are too numerous to mention, including some bug fixes. You should check out the Version History for the full details.
Not Included
- .mac syncing. More work needs to go into this. Probably quite a bit. I wanted to get all the other changes into people's hands before I devoted my time to that though.
About the last public release:
MacJournal 4.0 brings major new features and large improvements to existing features. Every single part of MacJournal has been improved in some way. For bloggers, the blogging support in MacJournal is all-new. MacJournal now supports more kinds of blogs and it is easier than ever to use them. Each journal can have a different blog and the entries will remember their settings so they can be updated on the server later.
MacJournal 4.0 also has a lot of other new features:
- 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
- Improved keywords configuration
This is just the list of big features. If you want to see the full list of all the changes in the included Version History.
MacJournal requires Mac OS X 10.3.5 (Panther).
Reporting Bugs
If you see any problems in this release please let me know about it by using the "Report a Bug" menu item in the "Help" menu to send me email.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
