MacJournal 3.2b4

Get it here

Welcome to MacJournal 3.2b4. This build will most likely be virtually identical to the final release. I expect to wrap that up tomorrow or Wednesday. This release is to make sure everything is okay. Please let me know immediately of any problems you experience.

This build adds a new field in the Entries drawer for annotating entries. This is a new data type in the data file. If you save your data on an older version of MacJournal this new information will be lost.

Fixes in this beta:

- Add annotations
- Added Brazilian Portuguese
- Expanded items in the Journals drawer should be remembered across launches

Other Fixes in 3.2:

- Fixed compatibility with Jaguar.
- Added accessibility fixes for VoiceOver.
- Smart quotes will be left intact when sent to Blogger.
- Canceling the Rename sheet after creating a new journal will also remove the new journal.
- Fixed conversions to and from centimeters in the Page Margin section of the print panel.
- Other assorted small fixes.

Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don’t have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

MacJournal 3.2b3

Download it from the main site.

Welcome to MacJournal 3.2b3. This version extends the expiration date by two months and has a few fixes. The next release will contains some additional features. Annotations (a.k.a. notes) is not yet in 3.2 but will be coming in the near future once I figure out a good place for it.

Fixes in this beta:

- If "Escape < and >" is disabled for Blogger, smart quotes will be simplified inside tags. Outside tags they will remain as escaped HTML entities like “.
- Changing entries in the Edit Link sheet multiple times without editing the link text will continue to automatically update the text.
- Right-clicking or control-clicking or click-and-holding on a date in the calendar will show a menu for all available entries on that day.

Other Fixes in 3.2:

- Fixed compatibility with Jaguar.
- Added accessibility fixes for VoiceOver.
- Smart quotes will be left intact when sent to Blogger.
- Canceling the Rename sheet after creating a new journal will also remove the new journal.
- Fixed conversions to and from centimeters in the Page Margin section of the print panel.
- Other assorted small fixes.

Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don’t have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

Latest beta status

The latest beta of 3.1.3 is going to expire soon. There will be a new release this weekend. I decided to morph 3.1.3 into 3.2 with a few small features in addition to the bug fixes already present. I don’t know when 4.0 out so this gives a little something extra before then. 3.2 will be a free upgrade for 3.0 users just like 3.1.3 was going to be. There are a lot of accessibility fixes in it, which is a feature itself (if you need it). It’s looking like “notes” is a good thing to drop in this release as well: it’s fairly self-contained and often requested. If I can figure out a way to do it right without changing any localized resources it will be even better. The new beta this weekend might not have this yet but it will have a substantially longer expiration date then we were currently doing for a small release like 3.1.3. More details this weekend.

MacJournal 3.1.3b2

Get it from here

Welcome to second beta of MacJournal 3.1.3. This version has some accessibility features that prevented beta 1 from launching on Jaguar or Panther. Beta 2 should correct this. 3.1.3 should be out next week.

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed compatibility with Panther and Jaguar.
- Canceling the Rename sheet after creating a new journal will also remove the new journal.


Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don’t have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

MacJournal 3.1.3b1

Welcome to beta 1 of MacJournal 3.1.3! This release will restore compatibility with Jaguar and provide a few bug fixes. It also adds a lot of fixes for Accessibility features such as Voiceover. I also reset the 15-day demo counter. 3.1.3 should be out around the middle of this month.

Note: due to some accessibility testing, this release will only work on OS X 10.4. The next release will work on 10.2 and later.

Bug Fixes:

- Added accessibility to the calendar (for things like VoiceOver)
- Fixed a problem with oddly-formatted URLs that prevented them from being clicked or exported to HTML.
- Restored compatibility with Jaguar (for the final release).
- No longer simplifying quotes on their way to Blogger.
- Added hidden pref for always pasting text as plain text (and matching the current style): AlwaysPasteAsPlainText
- Show the main window if it wasn't on-screen when you use Spotlight to select an entry.
- Made some changes to the Service handling to prevent some problems when the "Loading..." window and the "Pick a Journal" window come up at the same time.
- Fixed unit conversions in the Page Margin controls in the print panel.
- Fixed a problem sending complex entries to LiveJournal.
- Reset the 15-demo.
- Fixed a bug with not showing the time in Japanese.
- Fixed a bug when launching MacJournal with Spotlight with large data sets that can cause confusion in the tables


Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

Quick status update

It turns out 3.1.2 isn't compatible with Jaguar at all so I'm readying a new release in a week or two to correct that problem. It will also contains a number of small fixes to other problems. This, however, will probably be the last Jaguar-compatible release ever. To work on the Intel systems you have to compile with gcc 4.0. Programs compiled with this compiler cannot be run on Jaguar. So it's out of my hands at that point. 3.1.3 will hopefully fix all the remaining small issues so that our Jaguar users won't be left out of much more than Intel compatibility when the time comes.

Alongside that I will begin posting developmental builds of 4.0. It's looking pretty good so far. Some of the new UI is still shaky, but other refinements are quite polished. The new tabs look great. Expect to see that sometime this month as well.

MacJournal 3.1.2

Download it from Mariner

Welcome to MacJournal 3.1.2! This release provides a few bug fixes over MacJournal 3.1.1 and adds Spotlight support for Tiger users. There are also some additional preferences available. It is recommended for all users of MacJournal 3.0 and above.

Bug Fixes:

- Implemented Spotlight support.
- Fixed a few crashes that could happen in different situations.
- Fixed a problem where journals could show up as locked when nested inside another journal.
- Improved HTML exporting.
- Fixed some problems with registration.
- Added a preference to disable automatic list discovery.
- Added a preference to change the first day of the week displayed in the calendar.
- Improved list support.
- Various other small fixes.
- Italian localization


Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don’t have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

Spotty

FYI: My e-mail response should be a little spotty this coming week due to various festivities. Apologies in advance if I don't respond to e-mail until the next week.

Whoops

I had previously talked about building MacJournal for Intel and the problems that popped up. I had to disable code for .Mac exporting to get it to build so I could test it at all. Well, wouldn't you know it but I forgot to re-enable it for 3.1.2b3. ☺ Worry not however: it will return for the next build. I'm expecting 3.1.2 to be released later this week, or early next at worst.

I'm putting together a larger post about the next version (tentatively labeled 4.0) which I will come back with after 3.1.2 is out. I have some things like labels already (sort of) working, but any larger changes are still in the design stage. I'm looking at ways to merge the journals drawer into the main window Mail-style. So feel free to comment one way or another on this as I'm sure some people won't like it. Drawers are kind of a heated topic nowadays; a lot of people don't like them. I don't mind them myself but I certainly respect the argument against them and general UI seems to be moving away from them lately so I don't want MacJournal to fall behind. More on this later though.

MacJournal 3.1.2b3

Download it from here

This is the third beta release of 3.1.2. This beta fixes another problem with registration on Tiger (which are always fun). A few other smaller bugs are fixed 3.1.2 provides a few bug fixes over MacJournal 3.1.1 and adds Spotlight support for Tiger users. It is recommended for all users of MacJournal 3.0 and above (when it comes out). Expect the final release of 3.1.2 later this week.

Bug Fixes:

- Titles sent to Blogger won't have their non-ASCII characters converted.
- Entries created from the calendar will adhere to the entry template.
- An open curly quote will be used instead of a closed quote in the case of a multi-paragraph quotation with quotes appearing at the start of the paragraph.
- Bolds and italics in exported HTML will now be handled by strong and em respectively.
- Fixed up permissions on the license file in case it was created by another user.


Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don’t have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

MacJournal vs. Intel

Following Monday’s announcement, I downloaded Xcode 2.1 and recompiled MacJournal 3.1.2 for Intel. I had to tweak a few settings but I got everything to compile. However, it didn’t actually complete the build. For the .Mac functionality I am using an embedded framework that Apple provides however that framework is not yet available for Intel. Because this dependent code is not ready for Intel, MacJournal cannot be built for Intel just yet. If they release an update before 3.1.2 comes out I will probably release a Universal binary (just to get it out of the way). The only issue is that the .Mac framework generally only supports the current OS and the one before it so if they release an update it might not support Jaguar like the current one does. In that case there will be a subsequent update that will only support Panther, Tiger, and Tiger+Intel. Hopefully that won’t need to happen and we can just get this behind us soon.

Other than that I haven’t made much progress on the next version because of WWDC this week. I started on labels and an Inspector but both are very rough right now. If anyone will be at the beer bash tonight on Apple’s campus I’ll be around as well. I’ll be wearing a Michigan Band shirt so if you see me say hi. ☺

MacJournal 3.1.2b2

Download it now

This is the second beta release of 3.1.2. This beta fixes a potential crash when waking from sleep and fixes a problem that Tiger caused with registration. 3.1.2 provides a few bug fixes over MacJournal 3.1.1 and adds Spotlight support for Tiger users. It is recommended for all users of MacJournal 3.0 and above (when it comes out).

Bug Fixes:

- Adding a line in the midst of a numbered list will correct all following lines better than it used to.
- Fixed a potential crash after waking from sleep after opening and closing the Change Date sheet.
- Fixed a problem on Tiger where the registration information might not get saved under some circumstances.

Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don’t have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!


Dan Schimpf
dschimpf@mac.com
http://danschimpf.com/
29 May 2005

MacJournal 3.1.2b1

Download it here

This is the first (and probably only) beta release of 3.1.2. This release provides a few bug fixes over MacJournal 3.1.1 and adds Spotlight support for Tiger users. It is recommended for all users of MacJournal 3.0 and above (when it comes out).

Bug Fixes:

- Fixed bug that would show nested journals as locked if their parent journal was encrypted and unlocked.
- Fixed a crash when sending text with smart quotes to LiveJournal.
- Fixed a problem where changing the list mode to Numbers when it was already there would eat the first character after the list item.

New Preferences:

- Added option for Spotlight never to index journals that were decrypted.
- Added preference to change the first day of week in the calendar.
- Added option to disable auto-discovery of lists.

Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don’t have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release.


Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

MacJournal vs. Spotlight: Round One

So I said 3.1.1 would have some limited Spotlight functionality but it would be disabled by default. This is true, but it has some flaws in it so I don't even really want to talk about it. The other problem is that the Spotlight importer itself (the piece that sits by itself and is loaded by Spotlight to read the files) wasn't included in the 3.1.1 due to an oversight. So let's just forget about 3.1.1. :-)

On the positive side, later tonight I will be releasing 3.1.2b1 with full Spotlight support, enabled by default, with the importer included. So if you want to try it out I invite you to check back here later tonight (or tomorrow for the more international users) and grab that. It will also fix the nested-journals-appear-as-locked bug that sprouted up in 3.1.1 and add a few preferences.

3.1.1 is out

Download it from Mariner

The list of bug fixes:

- Fixed a problem where changing multiple lines to checkboxes would add the same checkbox on each line (instead of different checkboxes for each line).
- Fixed a problem preventing the splitter position in the journals drawer from getting saved in between launches.
- Fixed a problem with smart quotes and Entourage
- Improved the numeric list recognition logic to exclude things like "8.00 PM"
- Fixed the "None" item in the Highlight toolbar item
- Fixed the "Backdate" button in the LiveJournal panel
- Fixed a problem in the calendar with months beginning on Sunday (i.e. May 2005).
- Links are now terminated when you end a line
- Fixed a crash when using a custom background color in Full Screen mode on Tiger.
- Fixed a crash that can happen when the calendar tries to automatically change days at Midnight.
- Fixed a problem when switching list modes in an empty entry.

There are one or two more that involve hidden preferences that are noted in the included Version History. I'll come back later with more information about Spotlight.

3.1.1 Status

My part of the 3.1.1 has been finished and is out the door. The Mariner folk are making some needed additions to the manual to cover the new things added in 3.1 and we hope to get everything posted on Wednesday. Check back tomorrow for the download and all the news. After that I will speak more about the next version and might even start posting builds, even though only a few small features have been added so far. I'm considering providing public access to my nightly builds that I make for myself if there is interest. Keep in mind though that these nightly builds would be even further from safety than the pre-release builds are, but it would allow stuff to get out faster.

Catch you tomorrow.

Spotlight Update

Work continues with the Spotlight implementation. I have MacJournal writing out the "special" files to disk and I have the importer written, but they aren't hooked up to each other right yet. Spotlight and LaunchServices work well when things don't change that much, but in a development environment it is easy to confuse both of them when you're changing things every few minutes. I don't have anything hooked up for encrypted journals yet, but I imagine there will be an option similar to Mail's "Index decrypted messages for searching." Any locked journal will be removed from the metadata cache, but there will be an option to never include encrypted journals even if they are unlocked (which will probably be the default behavior). I don't know if all of this will get rolled into 3.1.1 or a later update mostly because I want to get 3.1.1 out by next week and this stuff needs to bake more before it gets released.

I also have some preliminary work done on the syncing support, but the Spotlight action is much farther ahead. All I have there is the description of the data to be stored on the server; none of the client-side work is done. It turns out a large portion of developing software on Mac OS X is editing property lists to a specific format, so there's a lot of that ahead of me before the syncing will work. More on that as it evolves.

Tiger and MacJournal 3.1

Now that Tiger has been released, a few more details about Tiger support in MacJournal 3.1 can be revealed. In addition to the 200 "big" features advertised for Tiger, there are a plethora of smaller features in the OS that apps can take advantage of quickly. One of the first things MacJournal supported was multiple selections ranges. If you hold the Command key you can select multiple discontinuous ranges of text in MacJournal (and any other Cocoa text program). Some changes had to be made to support this any time that I got that selected range of text. Instead of just one range I had to consider many ranges. In the case of most of the text cleanup commands the length of one range was changed as well. But I'm happy to say that everything should just work as expected with multiple selection ranges: text cleanup, strikethrough, and everything else should work. While 3.1 was billed as the "Tiger-compatible" release, most of these things will work all the way back to MacJournal 2.6 (which shows you how long Tiger has been in development). For some extra fun hold the Option key while you drag for some square selection!

One fix that 3.1 brings is a few tweaks for Resolution Independent UI. This is a feature in Tiger that is not exposed in any user UI. It's there for developers to update their applications for the future. With this you can scale any application that you launch on your system to an arbitrary amount. For example you can make any application run 2 times larger than normal, which might be handy on that 30-inch display that we all have. MacJournal 3.1 should operate just as well under these conditions.

A suggestion that I get a lot regards what happens when you drag an entry or a journal onto your Desktop (or any other folder in the Finder). In Panther and before it would create this lame text clipping of the text in whatever you dragged. This was, well, enormously lame. Thankfully, the support exists in Tiger to create a real Rich Text file at the destination that you can actually use.

Another popular suggestion is page numbering while printing. Once again Apple has helped out here and there is now an option in the MacJournal pane in the print window for enabling page numbering.

Tiger also supports Tables and similar things in text views. TextEdit can to Tables and Lists all by itself. MacJournal can access these features as well, but the menu items weren't put in until after localization had finished. I will add them for 3.1.1 but you can add them right now in English using a Hidden Preference.

What is not there is syncing or Spotlight. Spotlight is nasty because it needs a distinct file for each searchable datum. Since MacJournal stores all of its data in one file, there's no way to separate each entry for Spotlight. How, you may ask, do Safari and Address Book handle this, since they put all of their data in a single file as well? Safari and Address Book also maintain a separate listing of small files for each datum. Check out your Caches folder if you want to see them. This is essentially what MacJournal will have to do. While not trivial, it might be easier than syncing at this point so I might work on that now and release a small update containing that functionality.

MacJournal 3.1

Download it here

Welcome to MacJournal 3.1! This release provides a few new features, some bug fixes, and full Tiger compatibility.

New Features:

1. Highlight toolbar button
2. Automatic discovery of lists
3. Option to automatically back up your data
4. New Calendar view in the Journals drawer and Change Date sheet
5. Encrypted journals are indicated with a gold lock
6. Export journals directly to a .Mac account
7. Added button in Full Screen mode to automatically scroll the text

Bug Fixes:

1. Improved performance after exiting Full Screen mode
2. Fixed problem when using more than one "Discover" preference and saving
3. Blogger performance and reliability should be greatly improved
4. Fixed loss styling when clicking next to a checkbox and typing
5. Improved searching performance and behavior
6. Fixed various problems associated with switching list styles

In addition, MacJournal 3.1 has been fully tested on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Several Tiger-only features have been added; check the MacJournal Development Blog for more details after Tiger has shipped.

Also, please note that the minimum OS requirement is either 10.2.7 or 10.2 with Safari installed. You don't have to use Safari, you just have to have it installed on your system.

Please let me know of any problems you have with this release. There is a 3.1.1 release planned to pick up a new Italian localization and any bug fixes that pop up.
s

MacJournal 3.1b2

Go here to download now

This is the second beta of MacJournal 3.1. There are more code changes than localizations in this release, but there is now an updated Korean localization to be had. All that are missing are the Japanese and Italian localizations. If anyone can help out with the former please let me know; it should be a very short and simple update for this release.

On the code improvement side, here are the highlights:

1. Added hidden pref for controlling what the first day of the week is in the calendar for localizations that use Monday as the start of the week (which actually makes more sense than Sunday if you think about it.)
2. Fixed a problem that could prevent a new entry from being selected in the journals drawer after you created it inside a nested journal.
3. Nested journals will now lock If you have a preference set to automatically lock journals and the parent journal cannot lock itself.
4. Added a calendar to the Change Date sheet, which I should have done a while ago but I forgot.
5. Improved some areas of performance, including launch time.
6. Added a checkbox and typing some text, then putting the insertion point next to the checkbox and typing again used to destroy all styling due to a quirk in the OS. No more!
7. Another fun quirk in the OS caused the Blogger panel to lock the app up from time to time (more in some situations). That area of code has been rewritten to avoid these areas. As a side effect I think it’s a lot faster too.

There are a few more changes so check out the Version History when you get a chance. This should be the last beta: as soon as we get the Italian and Japanese localizations in 3.1 will be finalized and released. Please let me know of any bugs that you find.

3.1b2 soon; Tiger

Expect a new beta of MacJournal 3.1 in the next day or two. I rewrote a lot of the Blogger networking to avoid an issue that I see in the OS and hopefully it should never lock up the app ever again. There's also some other good stuff in there that I'd like to get out while waiting for the last two localizations to come back.

Tiger was announced yesterday over on Apple's site, and while I obviously can't talk about it a whole lot until it is released (those pesky developer NDAs) but rest assured that MacJournal works just fine on Tiger, both 3.x and 2.6.x. I'm not sure about 2.5.x, but you should be using 2.6 anyway. ☺ More details on this when Tiger ships on the 29th.

More 3.1 updates

MacJournal 3.1 is pretty much done. We're waiting for localizations at this point: Japanese and a new Italian localization. I hope to get those in soon (at least the Japanese one since it's a small update) and get 3.1 out the door by the end of the month. This will be the last release to support 10.2 and I'm anxious to leave that chunk of code behind. ☺ There are a lot of things on the plate for the next update and I've started tinkering around with some of the larger ones but shipping 3.1 will make life easier. I'm happy with how 3.1 turned out though and I look forward to getting it out the door.

MacJournal 3.1b1

Go Here to Download 3.1b1

This is the first beta of MacJournal 3.1. There are only a few code changes but a lot of localizations are updated. The following localizations should be ready for 3.1:

- Serbian
- Spanish
- Danish
- Taiwanese
- French
- Norwegian
- German

In addition, a problem with printing was fixed and a hidden preference for Wiki links was introduced. Read the Version History for the details. The code is largely finished at this point. We're waiting on one or two more localizations, so I'm shooting for sometime in April for the final release.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

MacJournal 3.1a4

Get It Now.

This is the fourth alpha of MacJournal 3.1. The big change in this release is with networking. All of the networking code was rewritten to use WebKit APIs, which should provide for more reliable connections and in more network setups. The areas affected are LiveJournal, the Update window and the Known Issues window. The Blogger window uses a different set of APIs that can't be migrated. Please test these areas out and let me know if they still work for you and if they actually work better. A side effect of this is MacJournal now requires Safari to be installed. You can either have 10.2.7 or higher installed, or 10.2 with Safari. You don't have to actually use Safari at all, just have it installed.

Some other changes:

- Daily backups can now be manipulated in the Advanced prefs, as well as the period of days in between between backups.
- Decoupled the Full Screen Text Zoom pref from the other appearance prefs.
- The Stats window is now accessible from the View menu and will take into account what is selected in the drawers. It will also count words in nested journals.
- Encrypted journals will show up with a gold lock to indicate their encrypted nature.
- Added a new HTML template that is similar but written in HTML 4.01.

This will be the last alpha. In fact, the interface will be frozen very shortly to be localized. I'm hoping to get 3.1 out in April so I can get to work on the next big release with support for multiple documents, multiple blogging servers, tabs, labels, and loads more.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

3.1 coming along

3.1 is coming along well so far. I put some more work into tabs last night and got a lot of improvements in; it's shaping up quite nicely. I don't know if they will ship with 3.1 by default, but it will be available via the hidden preference if not. I got some performance improvements out of the calendar as well. I don't think any more large features will be in 3.1 (due to time constraints), however I would like to do some more under-the-hood work. To that end I am strongly considering raising the minimum OS to 10.2.7 to allow for use of WebKit (Safari's underlying engine). This would improve some of the networking functionality, especially for LiveJournal. It could also open up some interesting possibilities for HTML exporting. I don't think it will be a problem for most users, but let me know of any strong objections. I will be dropping 10.2.x entirely eventually, but I don't know how and when yet.

There have been new alphas the past few weekends but I think I might skip this weekend to do the WebKit changes. So far all the changes I have are to the tabs so I want to get something else in there in case you don't like tabs. ☺ Maybe sometime next week, although I do have jury duty....

MacJournal 3.0.2

MacJournal 3.0.2 has been released! Download it from Mariner's download page. It's a very small update that just fixes the undo problem and adds a Norwegian localization. There was a problem in 3.0.1 that caused all undo operations to get combined together after you created a journal. This is fixed now, along with a handful of very small fixes. Let me know if there are any problems with it as I'm not planning any more 3.0.x releases; everything is focused on 3.1 right now.

MacJournal 3.1a3

Get It Here

This is the third alpha of MacJournal 3.1. Before I get into the big topics that need discussing, here are some bugs that were fixed:

- Fixed a crash while switching list styles

- Fixed a problem with exporting non-ASCII characters to one file per entry

- Fixed some problems with auto-expansion in the journals drawer

- Journals should now re-sort automatically if you change the name of a nested journal

- Fixed Undo in Full Screen mode


Some new things were also added:

- A hidden preference to search entry text as well as the dates when searching from the calendar. The preference specifies the format of the date in the text that you want to search.

- A hidden preference to prevent the "Loading Data" window from appearing at app launch. The application will just show the spinning cursor until the data are ready. This will primarily help people who set MacJournal as a login item with the "Hide" checkbox.

- Added tabs in a prototype state. It's actually a hidden preference, but it is enabled by default for this pre-release (although it won't be for the final release of 3.1). There is an menu item in the Entry menu and a menu item in the contextual menu for entries to open an entry in a new tab. Please note that this is very rough implementation and not yet complete. Please do not report a lot of bugs on this. For example, unsaved changes are saved back to the entry when you switch tabs (which may not be that great). The appearance is not final either. Give it a little slack and let me know if you like it from a broad perspective.


In addition, some things will be enabled by default now: Hidden Prefs, Tabs, and Daily Backup. This is just for the pre-releases, these will be disabled by default for the real releases. I want to get Tabs and Daily Backup exercised before the final release.

Blogger Testing and UI Ruminations

The Blogger thing is elusive and hard to reproduce when I need it to. I might release 3.0.2 regardless tomorrow or Wednesday just so it's not delayed any more. I'll try more tonight. After a lot of testing, I may be prepared to blame the OS on this one. It seems to happen a lot more often if you have an ampersand in your text, which is supposedly an illegal character for the protocol that it uses to transmit (XML-RPC). I think I might have a fix though: the ampersands were getting encoded twice, leading to badness. In fact, if you see this message then it means that things are working better because there are a bunch of ampersands near the end. ☺

On the UI front, I spent some time Sunday working on some prototype UI for a future version. The interface of the main part of the window has not really changed in a long time. I'm referring to the area excluding any drawers and toolbars. Just the text view, topic field, and elements around there. Someone a while ago suggested integrating the topic field into the text view as that's more like how it is in a real journal. So I was able accomplish a prototype of that during the Oscars. I was considering posting a test application with it, but you can get a good idea of what it's like by just looking at a Mail message window. I don't know if I like it though for a few reasons:

1. Mail only uses that kind of view when the data it is representing is not editable; when you can edit those fields (sender, subject, etc.) they are shown in real text fields, like MacJournal does. So the user might not know that these fields are editable.
2. In the prototyped appearance it is a decent amount smaller, which is both good and bad.
3. What is good for Mail isn't necessary good for the rest of the world; this is probably not the appropriate design for this kind of data (see #1).

What I'd really like to do in the future is provide a more realistic journal view. So the topic and date might be integrated into the text view, but not in the way Mail does it. In addition to the current appearance settings you could also set a "Journal" view that would look like a hard-bound journal with the topic and date at the top of the "page." I had also prototyped a "lined paper" view that looked pretty good at the time. I don't know what I'll do about this yet but it looks like something will happen like this. The Mail-like view wasn't all for naught; I can easily rearrange things to look like the "Journal" I was talking about and will probably do that. I might revisit the lined paper view, but that's a little farther out for various technical reasons. In addition, the whole lined paper thing doesn't really add anything to the UI; it's just eye candy. And while eye candy is not inherently evil (if you can turn it off somehow), it does get a much lower priority when compared to "real" features. But the "Journal" view might be useful because it would be a lot simpler visually and might end up more usable because it is laid out in a more logical fashion for the app. What is there now would continue to be available of course.

Just thoughts for the future.



Epilogue

Just because Blogger loves them, here are a bunch of ampersands: &&&&&&.

Sweet.

MacJournal 2.6.1

As promised, MacJournal 2.6.1 is out today. It has a few small fixes for the known issues in 2.6.1. Chief among them is a fix for "Multiple Spaces to Space" and row selection issues in the drawers. There are also a few small fixes here and there from "top of tree" (MacJournal 3.0.1). Download it from here and let me know of any problems.

Look for 3.0.2 early next week. I want to try and debug some issues the Blogger panel locking up under certain network situations when I can get under those situations so I can try and squeeze that fix in there (if any comes about). That's the reason for any delay; the rest of it is all done and waiting.

MacJournal 3.1a2

Download it here

This is the second alpha of MacJournal 3.1. This is an alpha release, which means that most if not all the planned features are present, but there is more work to be done before beta. The user interface is not final and will definitely change before the final release.

Here is what has been changed since the last alpha release:

- Some improvements to the Stats sheet include type-selection, stats exporting, and performance boosts

- Improved appearance of auto-scroll button in Full Screen mode under "normal" appearance

- Fixed crash associated with combining search terms with quotes

- Fixed sizing of the calendar view in the journals drawer

- The .Mac sheet will now send over included attachments as well (such as pictures) unless you tell it not to.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

Releases for everyone!

Just a quick post to announce some upcoming releases. MacJournal 3.1a2 will be out tomorrow with some improvements over alpha 1. 3.0.2 will be out Monday or Tuesday with a fix for the undo problem and a few other very small fixes. MacJournal 2.6.1 should also be out tomorrow with some small fixes over 2.6. As always, software release schedules are subject to change so check back tomorrow for more information.

Whither Highlight?

The Highlight toolbar item was actually the first thing I worked on for 3.1. I had actually tinkered with it during the 3.0.1 development stage but had disabled it for the 3.0.1 release build. Before the 3.1 alpha release I added the code back in but forgot to put it in the big list of toolbar items. So it's there, but you just can't pick it. So that's useful. :-) I'll fix it for the next alpha but you can make it work right now if you want.

1. Open your preferences file in a text editor (like TextEdit or BBEdit) or even better a dedicated property list editor (like Property List Editor, including with Xcode).
2. Find the line that says "NSToolbar Configuration." If you've never customized your toolbar, this won't be there so you should make some change first, however insignificant.
3. Under the Configuration key is another key called "TB Item Identifiers." There is a list of strings under that.
4. Make a new line in between one of the strings and add this line: "<string>HighlightIdentifier</string>" and save the file.
5. Launch MacJournal and you should have the Highlight toolbar item.

You can Command-Drag it around wherever you want, but if you drag it out you'll have to edit the property list to get it back again.

MacJournal 3.1a1

Get it here

Welcome to the first alpha of MacJournal 3.1! This is an alpha release, which means that most if not all the planned features are present, but there is more work to be done before beta. The user interface is not final and will definitely change before the final release. Some of the planned changes will be mentioned later in these release notes.

Here are the larger features in MacJournal 3.1:

- New Calendar view in the Journals Drawer. Dates with entries in the current journal will be highlighted. Clicking on those days will bring you to the first entry from that day. Select multiple dates to only show entries from those days (a new kind of search).
- Better automatic lists: the list style will automatically changed based on what line you are on.
- .Mac export: a new sheet to export entries and journals to a .Mac account.
- Auto-scroll button in Full Screen mode: previously available via a hidden key combination, auto-scrolling in Full Screen mode can not be activated via a new button.
- New toolbar item for highlighting text a certain color.

On the next tier down from those are these fixes:

- The Stats window has some additional capabilities: double-click a work to go to the first instance of that word. Hit the delete key to remove that word from the frequency analysis.
- A new message in the Blogger window will tell you if there is no response from the server.
- Added a new option to back up your data daily (which doesn't have any UI yet; look in the Hidden Preferences)

Some fixed bugs:

- Fixed the undo state after creating a journal (every action after that would get lumped in with the journal creation)
- Fixed some appearance problems with fonts in HTML
- Fixed a problem where the selection in an entry wouldn't get restored if the insertion point was left at the very end of the entry

This being an alpha release, some things are not done. Here are some things that will be changed (please do not report any bugs about them):

- The appearance of the Auto-scroll button in Full Screen mode when "Use Custom Appearance" is disabled is less than perfect and will be improved.
- The statistics window will get type-selection support soon
- The .Mac panel will get added to the Share menus in the menu bar and the contextual menus
- Preferences might get added for customizing the Highlight toolbar item
- Some other prefs will get added, such as the new nightly backups
- The height of the calendar (and whether it is shown or not at all) may not get saved and restored correctly right now

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include in your e-mail what release of MacJournal you are using. I appreciate your feedback!

3.1 Alphas start very soon

The first alpha of 3.1 will be released this week when I get around to tying up the loose ends for it. Breaking with some tradition I think I'm going to include all the previous localizations in this alpha. The nature of the changes so far don't really invalidate them yet, just add some things which will be in English only for now. Everything is coming along well and I hope to get it out tonight or Friday. After that look for the first beta in March or very early April with final release in late April or May sometime. Keep in mind though that this is just a projection at this point. It could very well be June for the final release. We will have to see. ☺ I'll post more about what is included in the alpha when I post the notes for the alpha release.

3.1 Alphas start very soon

The first alpha of 3.1 will be released this week when I get around to tying up the loose ends for it. Breaking with some tradition I think I'm going to include all the localizations in this alpha. The nature of the changes so far don't really invalidate them yet, just add some things which will be in English only for now. Everything is coming along well and I hope to get it out tomorrow or Friday. After that look for the first beta in March or very early April with final release in late April or May sometime. Keep in mind though that this is just a projection at this point. It could very well be June for the final release. We will have to see. ☺ I'll post more about what is included in the alpha when I post the notes for the alpha release.

Released Versions Do Not Expire

Just to be clear: pre-release versions have an expiration date to ensure people upgrade to a newer beta build or final build. Final releases like 2.6, 3.0, or now 3.0.1 will never expire. Sometimes in the battle between planning and reality reality wins out and a release comes later than was expected a month ago when the expiration date was set and that is certainly regrettable. But there is always a release version you can use that will never expire. I will try to make sure that the expiration date doesn't run out too soon again.

MacJournal 3.0.1

Just slightly after the expiration of 3.0.1b2 comes the final release of 3.0.1, available from Mariner's site. Many localizations are included in this release:

- Danish
- French
- German
- Japanese
- Korean
- Serbian
- Spanish
- Taiwanese

There are also some bug fixes included. Problems with Services should be resolved, as well as problems switching List Styles. There are also a few more bugs fixed in this release. Check out the included Version History for the full report.

Our wacky calendaring system

Just a word of warning: this is not going to be a useful entry so if you're in a rush please feel free to skip it. ☺

I've been working on the calendar view in MacJournal off and on the past few days and the view itself matured very quickly. Then I put that done to work on some stuff for the new searching architecture. Now that that's looking better, I went back to the calendar view to get multiple selection working (so you select multiple dates to only show entries from those days). All I can say is that whomever designed our calendar obviously hated humanity. I mostly blame Julius Caesar: he had the chance to make it a lot more sane than the previous Roman calendar and accomplished some of it but he didn't go far enough. Obviously Julius Caesar when he designed the calendar in 45 BC had never written any code before and never had to describe a calendar and multiple discontinuous ranges of date selections in C.

I'm not really saying Pope Gregory hated humanity. But a zero-based array of days with a upper-limit that is easily expressed as a power of two would have made my life a lot easier right now. ☺

I don't yet know if the new searching will have any special UI in 3.1. It might not be prudent for this release. The search field and calendar view might be only ways to control the search for now. A special search window like Mail's Rules configuration is planned but will take a little while to implement so it's up in the air for now. There are other things I want to accomplish for 3.1 as well, such as a real way to start auto-scrolling in Full Screen mode (shift-command-2 was never meant to be a permanent solution) and a way to publish a journal to .Mac. We will see in time. 3.0.1 will be out very soon (the code is all finished) and I might start with 3.1 alphas sooner rather than later to just get the new features out there and in use.

I guess this did turn into a more useful entry than I had planned, but that's what happens when I get off topic and on to something actually informative.

MacJournal 3.0.1 tonight or tomorrow

Since I'm already knee deep in 3.1 stuff, I should probably release 3.0.1 before the water gets any closer to my waist. I will finish up 3.0.1 and make it available before the end of the month since the betas expire on Tuesday (although you can always use 3.0 after they expire). It should be a really good release.

I will also release 2.6.1 separately using the appropriate fixes from 3.0.1 as promised within the next few days.

Back to WordPress

Thanks to the suggestions I got I was able to do some testing with publishing to WordPress from MacJournal. From just the test text that I had everything seemed to work okay, titles included. Now, I know some people have had problems so I just don't have the right tests here. Can some that has had problems publishing before (specifically with the title) please send me some text that exhibits this problem? An RTF file would be super. At this point any changes are probably too late for 3.0.1 as that will most likely come out by the end of this week but a 3.0.2 release is a possibility and there's always 3.1.

Calendars and WordPress

Two topics to mention today:

Calendar view

I worked on a calendar view for 3.1 last night and it came out pretty well. It's not too attractive yet but it's functional. I just have to integrate it into the MacJournal UI in a meaningful manner. I've got a few thoughts on the best way to do that:

1. Clicking on a day will bring you to the first entry in the current journal from that day
2. Optionally, clicking on a day which does not have an entry will create an entry for that day (and maybe the current time)
3. Shift- and Command-Clicking on different days will start a search and only show entries from the selected days.

#3 is the most ambitious because this is something MacJournal's search engine can not yet do. However I was also ruminating over some enhanced search features (such as having an Advanced Search window with a bunch of options and such), so this might be the first usage of that.

WordPress

Does anyone know of a WordPress blog somewhere that has development accounts? I have accounts at Blogger and LiveJournal for testing protocol compliance and I'd like to test WordPress as well as it seems to be gaining in popularity. But the WordPress site itself just lets you download the server software; they don't have any servers up and running themselves. So I'm a little bit of a bind there and if anyone has any tips I'd be much obliged.

MacJournal 3.0.1b2

http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/dev.html

- Fixed Stats panel on Jaguar
- Contractions are no longer considered seperate words in the frequency analysis in the Stats panel
- Print margin settings are saved in between launches
- Fixed some rare erratic behavior (caused by exceptions)
- Fixed some more List Style behavior

Plus the following new localizations:

- French
- Danish
- Spanish
- Japanese
- German

The final release is close at hand.

MacJournal 3.0.1b1

MacJournal 3.0.1b1 has been released. It contains a few bug fixes and some localizations. More localizations will be coming soon. Read the release notes and version history for details about 3.0.1; it should fix up some issues that some people are seeing, i.e. Services.

http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/dev.html

MacJournal 3.0

MacJournal 3.0 has come out over at <http://marinersoftware.com/>! Sorry about the lack of announcement here; the past week has been very very hectic for me. I'm way behind on my e-mail too, so apologies to anyone that has e-mailed me in the past few weeks. I will get back to everyone eventually, I promise!

I'm going to post a beta of 3.0.1 tonight as localizations are updated. We've already got one back and I'm expecting a few more very soon. In the meantime there are a few bug fixes in the beta.

Localization

Localization information will be sent out very soon for 3.0.1. I’ve made a few small changes to the menus since 3.0b2 and I’ve updated the strings files to the current state. I have one more minor change to make (an invisible change) and then I will package them all up.

Thoughts

So I've heard several different responses to the recent announcement. Many of the e-mails that I have received have been positive, which I appreciate greatly. There had been many people wondering in the past why this didn't happen a long time ago. So I felt emboldened by that. But some people seem to have the wrong idea about what is going on. I am not selling MacJournal to Mariner software. I will still do all the same things that I do now, but at the same time they will be out there telling people about it and raising its visibility. This isn't about the money at all. If time is money then I am in the red so far that it is not even worth considering. But that's not why I had been doing MacJournal and not why I will continue. Products have to evolve to survive and this is the next step in the evolution. Some people trust a product more if it is guaranteed to be around in a few years. While a few others seem to trust anything less if it costs money. So I guess the only conclusion there is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. I'm just going to keep trying to make the best application I can.

MacJournal has been free for a long time but it also wasn't very good for a while at the start. There was a point a while back when I was ready to stop developing it. I actually took about nine months off. But I got excited about working on it again and now this guarantees that I will be working on it for years to come. You don't want to put all of your data in a place where it's just going to get stuck and now it will keep evolving and improving for years.

I hope this clears up a little of the confusion. I know not everyone will agree with me and my reasoning. Some people will always think that I sold out because any time something costs money it must be inherently bad. All software should be free, perhaps because it is intangible. But I thank everyone out there for their support in this transition.

MacJournal 3.0b2 is out

This is the second beta release of MacJournal 3.0, formerly called 2.7. There was a development in the availability of MacJournal 3.0 that you should know about as you read this. MacJournal 3.0 will be republished by Mariner Software as a commercial product. It will be $30 with a $15 upgrade price for existing users. I will continue to develop MacJournal and still creative control over it. For scheduling reasons, 3.0 will have to be English-only. I regret this as I am very proud of the localizations that MacJournal supports and they are of great importance to me. But there just isn't time. After 3.0 is finalized and sent off to the CD factory, localization will begin and I hope to have a (free) update to it that includes all previously supported localization.

Important: MacJournal now has serialization. If you don't have a serial number it will time out after 7 days. For this beta only use the serial number "MacJournal Beta Serial Number" to get it to serialize.

Here are some of the changes for beta 2:

- Reorganized the menu bar. It's different, but I think it will be better. It fits in with the system more.
- Fixed some things like Underlining for Full Screen mode
- Improvements to List Style (current line will switch to the new style correctly now)
- Improved the Auto-scrolling in Full Screen mode (Shift-Command-2 for now)
- Added support for Smart Quotes (enabled by default)
- Blogger and LiveJournal sheets will respect the system settings for Web proxy.
- More Jaguar compatibility (Full screen mode should be working now)
- Implemented some new windows to deal with being a Commercial Product:
• End User License Agreement (EULA)
• Welcome window asking you to register
• Registration window for serial number

There are plenty more fixes; be sure to read the Version History.

Some of the larger changes and/or additions in 3.0 as a whole:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback

More Questions Answered

How much will it cost?

$30

Who will develop MacJournal in this new deal?

All development of MacJournal will continue to be done by me. Mariner's job begins when I hand off the final code for a version. I also retain control of what features will be added. I will just keep doing my thing and they will work to let people know about MacJournal in the meantime.

The Big News

There are big changes afoot for MacJournal. For the past three years, MacJournal has been a freeware product with no marketing. It has survived on word of mouth and a good review here and there. But that doesn't reach a large portion of the potential users. If you've got a quality product you have to let people know about it. That's why MacJournal will now be republished by Mariner Software as a commercial product! With this new arrangement, MacJournal finally has the marketing attention it deserves and it is poised to reach a whole new audience. In time you could see MacJournal in a box at your local Apple Store. It wasn't an easy decision because I like how things work right now and I could easily go on as before, but I think MacJournal deserves more. It has evolved into a very capable application and it is only getting better. I'm confident this will be a positive move for MacJournal and will ensure it's survival for years to come. More details will be available in the coming days, but here are some answers to questions you might have right now

When will this happen?

Soon. The goal is to have a new version of MacJournal for the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. This will be MacJournal 3.0 (formally known as 2.7). MacJournal 2.6 will be the last version of MacJournal as a freeware product.

What will happen to 2.6?

Version 2.6.1 will be released shortly before 3.0 and will address any serious issues with 2.6. The biggest issue that exists is with Multiple Spaces To Spaces (it can produce unexpected results over long selections of text).

Will there be upgrade pricing?

Yes, there will be an upgrade path for current users of MacJournal. Contact sales@marinersoftware.com for upgrade details. I will handle a few special cases personally.

What does this mean for the future?

Good things. This will ensure the future of MacJournal better than I can by myself. Who knows what the future holds and this deal will put MacJournal in a better position should anything unexpected happen. Mariner Software has competed against Microsoft™ Word for many years and is still around so they know a thing or two about that. I will continue to develop MacJournal for many versions to come. I have big plans for the next version after 3.0 and I already know it will be great

Is this just so you can get more money?

No, this is to gain a greater exposure for a product that I feel deserves it. I am not a good marketer (marketeer?) and I can't get it into stores by myself. There are a lot of people that might like MacJournal and this is a great way to let them know about it. Expect to see MacJournal show up in more places and be more visible.

When is 3.0 coming out?

3.0 will be out on January 4th. It will be available on CD and as a download with a time-limited trial. Stop by and see us at booth #2410 at MacWorld in San Francisco to chat if you can and pick up a copy. I'll try to post on the News page when I will be there.

10.3.7 is good for you

Mac OS X 10.3.7 was released today via Software Update. Users of MacJournal should update to 10.3.7 because it fixes a bug in the operating system that has afflicted MacJournal for quite some time. If you copied some text out of Safari that contained pictures and pasted it into MacJournal (or used a Service to get the text in), MacJournal might crash when saving the text. There was nothing I could do about it except wait for Apple to fix it. And fix it they did today. So 10.3.7 is a recommended update from me; I'm running it right now with no problems.

MacJournal 2.7 hits beta

Download the release at danschimpf.com.

Welcome to the first beta release of MacJournal 2.7! This release fixes a lot of problems with the newer stuff introduced in the alpha. Specifically, Full Screen mode is much improved. It now has its own preference pane and some cool settings that you can customize for it. There is a new look for the scrollbar that should make it fit in a little better. Tagging along with Full Screen mode is Text Zoom, which finally has working line wrapping when zoomed past 100%. Huzzah!

As a refresher, this is how the different milestones for this release will look:

Alpha: all features are in and functional. No known crashers. No features will be added afterwards.
Beta: all UI is frozen and localizations will begin to be updated. No known bugs.

This is an beta release which means there might still be bugs lurking. A backup of your data will be made automatically, but whenever you use pre-release software (from any source) it's good to back up your important data.

Here are some of the changes for beta 1:

- New preference pane for Full Screen customizations
- New scrollbar for full screen mode
- Text zoom new can wrap lines
- No longer fully capturing the display when entering full screen mode (a la games). This means some other things will start working, such as Exposé, Command-Tab, text dragging, and contextual menus.
- Selecting a number of lines and then changing the List Style will apply that list style to each selected line (not just the first as before)
- Fixed a bunch of preferences that were broken by a big rewrite of the Prefs window
- Journals created in the Journals drawer will end up at the top-level in more cases, which is usually what you want. You can always drag them around.

There are plenty more fixes; be sure to read the Version History.

Some of the larger changes and/or additions in 2.7 as a whole:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

Beta 1 later tonight or tomorrow

Expect 2.7b1 to come out either late tonight or tomorrow evening. Things are going well and it's in late testing. Localization is the concern here as all of the localization files will be sent out after beta 1 is finalized. It should be a great release though. Full Screen and Text Zoom are the big winners for this release.

MacJournal 2.7a1 is released

Welcome to the first alpha release of MacJournal 2.7! This release will (and already does) have a metric boatload of new features and changes. Some of the smaller fixes will be rolled into a smaller 2.6.1 release. Please please read through the Version History file to see what has changed. I know it's long but it's good to know what has changed if you're going to use an alpha release. For this release, this is how the different milestones will look:

Alpha: all features are in and functional. No known crashers. No features will be added afterwards.
Beta: all UI is frozen and localizations will begin to be updated. No known bugs.

This is an alpha release which means there might still be bugs lurking. A backup of your data will be made automatically, but whenever you use pre-release software (from any source) it's good to back up your important data.

Here are some of the larger changes and/or additions in 2.7a1:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

Alpha soon

I promise: alpha soon. I'm really behind in my e-mail, which always makes me feel bad. Plus Thanksgiving is coming up. I'll try to get it out before then so I can work on it over the break. It really is a solid release (it's actually beta or even final candidate quality), but all of the other things are getting in the way right now.

Scheduling comes more into focus

The scheduling for the next update to MacJournal is starting to work itself out and I just wanted to let y'all know about it. But first, a word about 2.6.1: there will indeed be a MacJournal 2.6.1. The primary driver for this is a problem with "Multiple Spaces to Space" in the Clean Up menu. It can cause things to go a little wacky if used over large areas of text. So there's a few small things that will be fixed as well. No new features, just some good fixes. 2.6 was a fantastic release in terms of total amount of changes vs. bugs found after shipping. 2.6.1 should be out within two weeks; I have all the bugs fixed in 2.7 so it's just a matter of bringing those changes over to the 2.6 code base and integrating them in there.

Before we get to 2.7, I want to mention printing though. 2.6 corrected some printing appearance issues that people had been complaining about, but it appears to have to changed some other things. To me, it seems like you want the printed output to match the screen exactly and anything different is a bug. But apparently TextEdit prints stuff to A4 differently than I would have expected. It's kind of shrunken, except I don't know why or to what degree. So I'm kind of in a quandary here: I don't know what's really correct for the different paper sizes.

But anyway, back to the issue at hand. The first alpha of 2.7 should be finished this week. 2.7 has a much shorter schedule than 2.6, so the milestones will be defined a little bit differently this time around. The alpha milestone will represent "feature complete" in the traditional sense: all the expected features will be present and at least functional (if a little incorrect and/or buggy at times). This is what alpha typically means and this time I'll stick to it. There just isn't time in the schedule to keep adding things like I have in the past post-alpha. The good news is that there already has been a metric boatload of changes and 2.7 won't be lacking for good stuff. There are some things on the questionable side that may have to get cut (page numbering is the prime example there). There may only be one alpha depending on how it goes and beta might hit come start of December. Beta will mean that all the features are in and all bugs are squashed for the most part. It will mostly be for localization purposes; they will all need to get updated again (however it should be lighter than 2.6). Then hopefully 2.7 will get out the door before the end of the year. That's the plan anyway.

Progress Marches On

Yes dear friends, work on MacJournal 2.7 has begun in earnest. If you've noticed the recent changes that have gone in you can see a lot of nifty features have been added. As I've said in e-mail many a time, a lot of this was done in the 2.6 timeframe but was disabled for testing reasons. I just couldn't make sure everything was satisfactory for 2.6, so I postponed it. That was when I thought I was going to release 2.6 in July or August, but oh well. Nested journals, lists, Wiki links; it's all good now. A lot of hidden preferences have been "promoted" into the real preferences. In fact, I took the time to completely rewrite the Preferences window on Sunday. It's a lot more flexible now, which has allow me to integrate the Hidden Preferences window directly into it as a pane right alongside the others (but will still only show up if you have the hidden preference set for it).

Talking about the Hidden Preferences window, I discovered that a whole portion of it is busted in 2.6. The Drawers group in the "Syntax" tab wasn't hooked up at all to anything. So anything you do there won't matter at all. It's not a big deal; you can apply the same preferences from the Terminal (instructions here), but it's just unfortunate that the pleasant UI doesn't work. If I do a 2.6.1 I'll fix that, but at this point it's looking like that won't be needed. 2.7 will be out a lot quicker that 2.6 was, so it'll be okay.

Tonight I'll probably work on allowing journals to be empty. Right now you have to have at least one entry (or journal) in a journal at all times, but it would be nice to be able to have a completely empty journal. It's kind of expected, since you can have empty mailboxes in Mail. There are about a thousand other examples of empty containers in other applications too. I don't really remember why I did it in the first place. ☺

(By the way, the little smiley faces that you've seen in my posts over the last few weeks actually come from MacJournal. I'm writing this inside MacJournal right now and will post from inside the app. There is a hidden preference in 2.6 to discover smiley and frowny faces and convert them to the Unicode characters you see above. This is now a standard feature in 2.7.)

Keyboard Navigation in 2.6

One of the things I tried to address in MacJournal 2.6 is better keyboard navigation. For those of us with laptops, keeping our hands on the keyboards as long as possible is very advantageous and programs that make every attempt to facilitate this prove a lot more usable than those that don't. To that end, you can do just about everything you want in MacJournal from just the keyboard. The biggest sticking point is getting the window focus where you need it easily. To do that, you can now use the F-keys to move around the window. F1 puts the focus in the main text view, F2 for the topic field, F3 for the last drawer opened, and F4 for the search field. You can also use the Tab key to move between the first three things listed (as an aside, it's not really possible to tab out of a toolbar item right now, but this is a limitation of the operating system itself). Obviously pressing tab in the main text view will give you a regular text tab, but you can use Shift-Tab to get back to the topic field (Shift-Tab is like reverse-tab). If you have multiple drawers open, you can press F3 multiple times to cycle through them, and pressing tab inside the drawer should get you out of it.

With a little help from Full Keyboard Navigation in Panther you can access all of the menu items and toolbar items to access all of the sheets (some have keyboard equivalents too). I'd like to bring the Keywords sheet up specifically, as that used to be impossible to navigate with the keyboard. Now when the sheet drops down the focus should be on the table view. From here you can tab down to the "+" button to add a keyword, or you can just start typing. If the focus is on the table view you can just start typing and your keystrokes will get added to a new keyword. I wish more tables worked like this. ☺

Talking about things I wish more tables did, all of the tables in the drawers now support type-selecting. This means that you can start typing the first few letters and the app will look through any visible items and select whatever matches. It's important to note that it only searches the visible items. This means that entries inside journals that are not expanded will not get taken into account (but items that are just not on the screen but would be visible if you scrolled down are). This is to reduce the "noise" that might make it hard to find exactly what you want.

It was impossible in 2.5 to use the arrow keys in the journals drawer in 2.5. This was because you couldn't select journals so you couldn't move past any journal. This restriction has been removed and you can now move about the journals like you would any hierarchical view in the OS. Use the Right arrow key on a journal to expand it (will unlock if necessary). And, special to MacJournal, you can use Command-Up to move up a level in the hierarchy (from an entry to its parent journal). Command-Down also works as expected. This will become very helpful when nested journals arrive. And, just because there isn't a better place to mention it, press Option-D to cycle through the view modes for that table (Date, Topic, Text, Combined).

Keyboard navigation is one of the areas that improved by leaps and bounds in 2.6. There may be a few other things that I'm not thinking of right now, but those are the large areas.

MacJournal 2.6 Post-Mortem

MacJournal 2.6 has finally been released and so far the reaction is fantastic. I've gotten a lot of good e-mails and no serious bugs so far (or non-serious bugs, for that matter). This release is a big success. I'd like to thank everyone that helped out during the development process, such as localizers and anyone that used the beta versions and sent in bug reports. Your help is appreciated and I couldn't have done it without you.

I'm currently trying to get the word out to a few different Mac news sites. I sent a press release-y thing to MacNN (I'm not good at writing those), and I'm trying to do the same for MacCentral. I don't know whether or not I'll post stuff in forums about it; it might look a little cheesy if the developer starts a thread in a forum to talk about his own product. But I'm just trying to let people know that this is a final, released version and that it is safe to use (in fact, safer than any previous version). Tell all of your friends! :-)

In terms of the future, I will now branch the sources and start working on 2.7. I always planned to do a 2.6.1 release, but so far I don't have a very compelling reason to do so. If any bugs get reported that warrant a dot-dot release like that (even if they aren't that serious) then I'll pull it together. Another potential reason for 2.6.1 will be to pick up additional localizations, especially those that didn't make it into 2.6 (Dutch and Icelandic were in 2.5 but are not in 2.6). As for 2.7, I'm shooting for a January release for that. I'm going to aim for the MacWorld Expo as a target date, partly because just having a concrete and immobile date helps in the planning. No plans yet for any pre-releases (alphas or betas), but that doesn't mean there will never be; I just haven't gotten there yet.

So here's a cool tip about 2.6: the Hidden Preferences window! That's right, all of those crazy hidden preferences have their own window now in the final version of 2.6. The Hidden Preferences page has the details, but essentially you need to set the key "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" to "YES" in the Terminal. When next you launch MacJournal there will be a new menu item for the Hidden Preferences. Enjoy!

MacJournal 2.6 has been released!

Download it here (1.6 MB), or English only (640 KB).

Welcome to MacJournal 2.6! This release is a followup to MacJournal 2.5.2, which came out late last year. 2.6 features a lot of improvements, both in stability and in new features. Here is an outline of the new features in 2.6:

• Enhanced Exporting:
  • export any set of entries or journals
  • export journals with one file per entry
  • export entry to Word documents (Panther only)
  • HTML exporting now supports more styles and colors
  • checkboxes can be exported to any format
• Improved Importing too:
  • Import or drag folders of files in to create entries with those files
  • New Service to append selected text in any application to any entry in MacJournal
• LiveJournal enhancements:
  • iTunes button to get the currently playing song in iTunes
  • Change who can view the entry as you upload it
• Performance and stability enhancements, especially for large data sets
• Interface improvements
  • Greatly enhanced contextual menus for both drawers
  • Mail-style "Add" and "Action" buttons
  • Use Combined view in the Journals drawer (previously only seen in the Entries drawer)
  • Lots of small improvements to enhance user experience
• More workflow options
  • Preferences to automatically close journals that you aren't working in
  • Hold down the Option key to bypass most warnings on a case-by-case basis
  • Copy a style in some text and then select some entries in a drawer and use Paste Font to paste that style onto the selected entries
  • Spring-loaded Entries: Drag text onto an entry and that entry will become current into which to drop the text
• Improved Keywords sheet
• Improved Undo functionality
• Improved options for setting the default text and topic for entries (including font and color)
• You can set a background picture (as well as randomizing through a whole folder)

There are many more small improvements. The included Version History file has all the details on all of the changes that have been made. That and this Release Note are always available from the Help menu.

Donations

While MacJournal is freeware, donations are accepted and appreciated at http://danschimpf.com/. Thank you for supporting the development of MacJournal!

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. New in 2.6: use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

The Mechanics of a Release

So I know I said I'd get 2.6 out this week come Hell or high water, and it still might happen (depending on your definition of "week"). But you can't always predict everything, such as when work is going to blow up and take all of your time. These things happen. However, I do have good news: the code is finalized and ready to go. The final candidate went very well and only minor modifications were needed. So that's all done and ready for release. But unfortunately there's more involved in a release than just code. I'm going through the release notes right now and some of the build scripts. I think I'll make an English-only release available on the website this time as well (it's about 640K vs. the full 1.6MB download). There's also the possibility for some kind of press release to publish on news websites, which I'd have to pull together. And the website needs to be updated, which is probably the biggest hurdle. As I've mentioned before I tend not to give the website a lot of attention as web design is not my forté. A very nice person volunteered an alternate design that's better, but I haven't had the time to work with her yet. I may use the one that I linked to here a while back temporariliy and get the better one online next week at some point so 2.6 can come out sooner rather than later.

Be back soon with more details of the release....

As promised...

You can download the final candidate build of MacJournal 2.6 at this link:

http://danschimpf.com/download/macjournal26fc1.tar.bz2

"Final candidate" means that this could be the final release itself. I have full confidence in it and I think it's a great build (but the normal warnings about pre-release software apply). But I'm providing this build while I do final testing just to make sure everything is sound before the general public gets their hands on it. This won't show up on the main website or in the in-application update mechanism. Please don't inform any version tracking sites about this either as the final version will be out soon enough.

There are a large number of changes from beta 5, but they're all for the better and everything should be good. The issue with typing accented characters has been solved. There is also a new hidden preference to activate a window containing the rest of the hidden preferences for easy access. Please read the included version history for all of the details. Let me know your experiences with this build: whether or not everything went smoothly for you. If you've noticed any problems in the past, check them out again and let me know if they are all fixed now.

I'm looking to release the final version on Friday. I will continue to test until then. This build will expire approximately 2 weeks from now.

Final Candidate tonight

Check back later tonight (or maybe early morning for you East Coasters) for the Final Candidate build of MacJournal 2.6. It will only be posted here; it will not show up in your in-application update mechanism. Along the same lines, please don't post this build anywhere or notify any version tracking sites about it. The final version will be out later this week and that's what I want everyone to hear about and use.

Until tonight then....

Status update

The only thing that will prevent the release of MacJournal 2.6 next week will be my untimely death.

After that will come MacJournal 2.7. I decided that there were enough features that could be implemented rather quickly given the work that went into 2.6 to justify a quick 2.7 release. 2.7 will likely still support Jaguar (although the minimum may be 10.2.8 vs. 2.6's 10.2). 3.0 will not support Jaguar.

Searching Upgrade

The final candidate build of MacJournal 2.6 is still in the any-day-now phase, but in the mean time I had the opportunity this past week to implement one more small feature. When searching for an entry, words are now considered separately. So the order of the words doesn't really matter any more. This also helps when searching for dates, as you can just search for "16 July" to get everything from July 16th. There is one additional feature in there: to group words together into phrases, use quotation marks. To get the previous behavior, enclose the whole string in quotation marks. There won't be any Boolean operator support (AND, OR, or NOT) in 2.6, so don't ask. ☺ Everything is AND for now.

Progress Update

I had intended to have 2.6 out today in a final release, but some external issues forced me to push the release to next week. But I've been testing things for a while now and it is going well. I actually rewrote the part that imports text files and tries to separate out entries (the "Discover entries" button) and it's a lot better for it. I also ran it through a few hoops on Jaguar to make sure it still runs there. Jaguar and MacJournal won't be together for that much longer, but 2.6 will definitely run well enough on it. I'll keep testing things over the weekend and I'm still pondering the possibility of quietly posting a final candidate build for people to try out.