Tuesday, February 26, 2008

MacJournal 5.0.3b4

Get it here.

This is the fourth beta of MacJournal 5.0.3. There are fixes in lots of places, including a few crashers. Printing information should be saved better, downloading entries from blogs should work in more circumstances, image resizing should work better, and the Change Tags sheet should behave more logically when dealing with multiple entries. The entries list should go away after a search more reliably. Fixed some display issues with the sidebar as well.

Check out the included Version History for the full details.

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

MacJournal 5.0.3b3

Click here to download.

Here comes the third beta of 5.0.3. This includes changes for the backup dilemma that I posed earlier. Daily backups will now wait until the application has been idle for a minute before starting the backup. It also won't cause any disturbances should that happen in the background. This should improve that situation. There are a few other fixes, including a workaround for a crash on Tiger. Let me know of any problems that you have.

Friday, February 15, 2008

On automatic backup vs. annoyances

In MacJournal 5.0.2, I turned on automatic daily backups by default. New in version 5 is the ability to cull the automatic backups older than a certain date so it wouldn't consume unlimited disk space, so I felt it was useful at that point to make it the default. While I don't think anyone would argue that backups are generally good things, the way MacJournal currently handles it could be improved. If you have auto-saving turned on, this will trip the backup mechanism if you haven't saved yet that day, which could force you to pause mid-sentence for a minute while it backs up. That's annoying. Also, if you have MacJournal in the background and it decides to back up then, it will bounce in the dock and jump onscreen to show the sheet. That's annoying. The second item is the default behavior for showing a sheet on a non-visible window, but I'm working to get around that for 5.0.3. I'm also thinking about ways to tackle the first point.

Waiting until quit to do the backup is out because some people (such as myself) never quit MacJournal, instead just closing the window and leaving it open in the background. Disabling the automatic backup and having a "Backup" option in the UI somewhere is also not favorable because remembering to back up is not always successful. This could still be added, but it is outside of the automatic backup issue.

Viable option #1 for me is to wait until the system is sufficiently idle to start the backup. Perhaps after 5 minutes of no activity in the application, it would do the backup. The same mechanism is already used to determine when to lock journals automatically after an idle period. Option #2 is to wait until you switch entries before starting the backup since that could represent a mental break anyway. I'm currently wrestling between these two options for 5.0.3. The hybrid option #3 is to just do both option #1 and option #2 and do the backup for whichever event comes first.

Leave a comment if you have any strong feelings one way or the other. It should also be noted that this progress sheet only comes up when the backup takes more than a trivial amount of time, so some users won't see it at all.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

MacJournal 5.0.3b2

It's the second beta of 5.0.3 and you can download it here. It's got some more various fixes over beta one in blogging, printing, and a few other areas. Let me know of any problems.

I'm getting down to the end of my email backlog. I will try to get the rest out by the end of the weekend.

Happy Valentines Day, everyone!

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

MacJournal 5.0.3b1

The first beta of 5.0.3 is out now. You can download it here. It's got fixes for syncing, sending to blogs, adding tags, automatic lists, and a few UI-related areas. There are plenty of small fixes across the app. Let me know of any problems you have with this build.

Please note that this is a beta build, not a final release. Beta builds have an expiration date to make sure they aren't used forever, while final builds do not have such an expiration date.

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

MacJournal 5.0.2 is out!

Today brings the release of 5.0.2. This release contains several critical fixes for users of 5.0 and 5.0.1. You can get it at Mariner's site, from the Help menu's Update item inside MacJournal, or direct download here. There are several fixes over the last beta as well, so be sure to update.

This release is still English-only, but I'm going to start the localization process soon and hopefully get some more languages released soon.

This version has a tweaked application icon as well. It's a cross between the icon from 5.0 and the original blue MacJournal icon.

I'll be working on my other website, http://danschimpf.com/, over the next few days to update it for 5.0, in case you have been wondering what is the deal with that. I'm also going to really attack my backlogged email now that 5.0.2 is out. I suspect that will be the answer for most of the questions I have received.

Sunday, February 03, 2008

MacJournal 5.0.2b5

Hot off the heels of beta 4 comes beta 5, available here for download. It has some fixes for recording and .mac syncing. It should hopefully unblock people that were having trouble in those areas. The final release should be out next week, so let me know of any problems as soon as possible.