Syncing is coming along

Thankfully, it seems Blogger fixed the problem they introduced when they rolled out their new beta services recently and MacJournal can now safely post to Blogger via Atom again. That crisis averted, I spent most of the weekend working on .mac syncing. I don’t have any prior experience with SyncServices against which to judge this, but I think things are almost there. I have it doing a round trip with data on the same computer. The next step is actually syncing between two computers and working out whatever problems pop up there. After that, another beta can be released with this functionality turned on (finally). I’m looking forward to having it working soon!

Problems with Blogger

Blogger (aka Google) rolled out some new services a few days ago and it seems to have changed the way existing applications can send data, which is charming. I suspect it's the authentication, but I will look into it some more. I wasn't planning a 4.0.5 before 4.1, but this might require a change of plans. Of course, it could turn out to just be server problems on their end relating to the new functionality that will be worked out soon. We can hope, at least.

MacJournal 4.1d1

Get it here.

Welcome to the very first test release of MacJournal 4.1! This is quite a large release with some new features and a lot of enhanced functionality. Before we proceed with what is new, a quick word about version schemes. This release is labeled, 4.1d1, where the 'd' stands for "development" or "delta" (no one is really sure, but "diggity" is my favorite guess). That is a stage that comes before "alpha." Alpha is when all the features of a release are more or less included. After that comes "beta," where most of the bugs have been fixed and the user interface changes have all been made and locked down. After that comes the final release to the public. But 4.1d1 is before all that because it is still missing some key functionality that I want it to have. Keeping that in mind, let us continue on to what is actually in this release:

Big Items
- Recording has been completely rewritten to use QuickTime. This should provide a more stable platform going forward and allow for a lot more configurability. It also means iSights are usable.
- You can now send multiple entries to a blog at once. They must all go to the same place though.
- Exporting has been much improved. You can specify a text encoding for plain text files. More of your metadata is saved along with the file so if you export an entry and the re-import it, things like labels and edit-ability will be preserved. You can also specify what metadata you want included in the text of the file (instead of date+time or nothing).
- I gave up waiting for Apple to fix their bug in tables and worked around it. Tables should now be useful, even after you relaunch the app.

Little Enhancements
- Creating a new journal may insert the journal into another journal, depending on where you are in the app.
- New "Highlight" toolbar icon (it looks better)
- "Lock journals after idle" will now use the time that MacJournal itself has been idle, instead of the whole system.
- Attachments in the text will display their filename, Mail-style.
- You can now specify whether or not you want to enable comments on a Movable Type post.
- You can now specify the key equivalent for Full Screen mode right in the (real) prefs.

There are loads more changes that are too numerous to mention, including some bug fixes. You should check out the Version History for the full details.

Not Included
- .mac syncing. More work needs to go into this. Probably quite a bit. I wanted to get all the other changes into people's hands before I devoted my time to that though.


About the last public release:

MacJournal 4.0 brings major new features and large improvements to existing features. Every single part of MacJournal has been improved in some way. For bloggers, the blogging support in MacJournal is all-new. MacJournal now supports more kinds of blogs and it is easier than ever to use them. Each journal can have a different blog and the entries will remember their settings so they can be updated on the server later.

MacJournal 4.0 also has a lot of other new features:

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

This is just the list of big features. If you want to see the full list of all the changes in the included Version History.

MacJournal requires Mac OS X 10.3.5 (Panther).


Reporting Bugs

If you see any problems in this release please let me know about it by using the "Report a Bug" menu item in the "Help" menu to send me email.

What's going on lately?

Here's what I'm working on nowadays:

1. First development release of 4.1 should happen next week sometime. I think I've got everything worked out for the things that are in there so far, and there will be more to come. No, .mac syncing does not make its debut in this release, but that is coming.
2. Universal build of TimeCard, which I forgot to do earlier this year. It should be out in the same timeframe as 4.1d1.

More about 4.1d1 when it comes out next week.

Status update

4.0.4 was posted a little while ago; everyone should see it in their Update panel. There were a few releases in a row to fix a few small problems and get everything squared away before 4.1. There will be a little while before 4.1 comes out, but I plan to start offering test releases in the middle or end of this month. I'll post more about the release and what is done already when we get there. .mac syncing is indeed back on the schedule for this release, although it may not make the first test release.

MacJournal 4.0.1

Download it from Mariner.

This is a small release to fix a few issues in 4.0. Blogging support has been enhanced and a few crashers have been fixed.

- Fixed sending line breaks and tabs to Atom blogs
- Fixed sending dates to MetaWeblog and Movable Type blogs.
- Fixed sending images to MetaWeblog servers.
- Improved downloading entries from MetaWeblog and Movable Type blogs.
- Fixed problem saving entered text in blog configuration window.
- Fixed a crash clicking "macjournal" links in other applications.
- Updated Danish, Japanese, and French localizations.
- Improved click accuracy of Full Screen cursor.
- Fixed rare crash when searching.

MacJournal 4.0 brings major new features and large improvements to existing features. Every single part of MacJournal has been improved in some way. For bloggers, the blogging support in MacJournal is all-new. MacJournal now supports more kinds of blogs and it is easier than ever to use them. Each journal can have a different blog and the entries will remember their settings so they can be updated on the server later.

MacJournal 4.0 also has a lot of other new features:

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

This is just the list of big features. If you want to see the full list of all the changes in the included Version History.

MacJournal requires Mac OS X 10.3.5 (Panther).


Reporting Bugs

If you see any problems in this release please let me know about it by using the "Report a Bug" menu item in the "Help" menu to send me email.

MacJournal 4.0.1b1

4.0.1b1 is a beta release to fix a few bugs in 4.0 before the final release of 4.0.1 (which will be very soon). Please try it out if you are having trouble with the release and let me know if it fixes what you were seeing and if it causes any new problems. Here's what is going on:

- Fixed sending line breaks and tabs to Atom blogs
- Fixed sending dates to MetaWeblog and Movable Type blogs.
- Fixed problem saving entered text in blog configuration window.
- Fixed a crash clicking "macjournal" links in other applications.
- Updated Danish and Japanese localizations.
- Improved click accuracy of Full Screen cursor.
- Fixed rare crash when searching.
- Added some basic error reporting for FTP uploads.

Download it here.

MacJournal 4.0

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

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

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

Onwards and upwards!

MacJournal 4.0b4

Get it here.

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

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

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

Keep in mind that this is still developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

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

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar.


Reporting Bugs

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

MacJournal 4.0b3

Get it here.

This release adds a few more localizations and fixes a few bugs from the previous betas. I’m also enabling some new licensing code in this release. You will be prompted for your serial number but the 3.0 serials will still work. I want to shake out any bugs in this new code before the final release.

Changes in this release:
- Added Italian and Korean localizations.
- Fixed a crash sending entries to Atom servers (like Blogger.com)
- Added new toolbar icons and recording bar appearance.
- Made it harder to accidentally type next to a link and extend the link.
- Hopefully made the Template window a little more accepting of font and color changes, even if the topic field is selected.
- A few other small bugs were fixed with an eye toward finally releasing the version.

Keep in mind that this is still developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

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

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar.


Reporting Bugs

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

MacJournal 4.0b2

Get it here.

This is the second beta release. This release adds a few localizations and fixes a few bugs from the first beta.

Changes in this release:
- Added Danish, German, and Taiwanese localizations.
- Fixed a problem saving and restoring blog server information.
- Fixed a problem retrieving entry text in AppleScript.
- Added ability to edit and delete license information in the about box.
- Fixed a problem posting links with ampersands to Atom blogs
- Fixed crash reporting.
- Fixed a crash changing entries when an empty search is active.
- Fixed a problem in the Entry Template window that would not use the default text attributes of a journal if there was no text.
- Downloading entries from Atom blogs will use the default styling of that journal.
- The keywords field in the Inspector will now auto-complete as you type.

Keep in mind that this is still developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

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

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar.


Reporting Bugs

This is a beta release so things are pretty much locked down. If you see any problems in this build please let me know about it so I can fix it before the final is released. Some new icons are temporary and will be replaced later.

MacJournal 4.0b1

Here comes the first beta release. MacJournal 4 is feature complete for this release. .mac syncing is still being worked out and won't be ready for the final 4.0. Too much is at stake if something goes wrong and I want 4.0 to be as solid as possible. Syncing will hopefully follow 4.0 by not too long.

Changes in this release:
- You can remove keywords in the sheet again.
- Fixed the search type menu in the Search toolbar item.
- Fixed custom background colors around checkboxes.
- Command-W will now close the current tab if there is more than one tab open.
- Added the modification date above the topic field if you click on it.
- Fixed the "Escape Non-ASCII characters" setting for blog servers and applied it to the topics as well.
- Fixed printing of white text.
- Restored Panther compatibility

Keep in mind that this is still developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

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

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther that will be weeded out later.


Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some new icons are temporary and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the release though.

MacJournal 4.0a2

Welcome to MacJournal 4! This is the second alpha release. MacJournal 4 is for the most part feature complete. There is a chance that .mac syncing will make an appearance soon. I am working on it right now. Progress is being made, but there is a lot of danger inherent this sort of thing. There is still the possibility of only including it on a provisional standing in 4.0 and fully supporting it in 4.1. The goal is to get MacJournal 4 out in March and we need to get to localization soon. Between now and beta there will be a lot of small tweaks to get things ready to be locked down for the release.

Changes in this release:
- Added the ability to specify a journal in which to create a new entry and fixed a crash there.
- Added a warning when replacing the previous audio recording.
- Added toolbar items for Recording, Insert Table, and Text Color
- Text completion in the Font Name toolbar item is now case insensitive and added a hidden pref for only showing Roman fonts.
- Changed the default filename of the .Mac sheet to be based off the content.
- Upgraded date formatting to behave better with different locales.
- Reworked Drawer preferences.
- Added a PDF export option.
- Added a warning when using Text Cleanup menu items on multiple selections in the drawers.
- Fixed Typepad blogging support and fixed a crash with Friendster blogs.
- Added automatic crash log checking: if the crash log changes in between launches, MacJournal will offer to email the log to me.
- URL discovery is now a little more lenient about things like periods, commas, or a close parenthesis after a URL.
- Restore the pref for disabling automatic list discovery that accidentally got left out of a reorganization.
- Redid the Keywords sheet to show all keywords in the app with checkboxes next to the active ones.
- The Quick Note window should be movable and saved across launches.
- Added Insert->Safari Address menu item.
- Fixed a problem with Text Zoom not saving across launches.

Keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- All-new blogging architecture
- New per-item attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
• blog server
- A real implementation of tabs
- Audio recording
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support
- Improved Full Screen mode

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther that will be weeded out later.


Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some new icons are temporary and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the release though.

MacJournal 4.0a1

Download here

Welcome to MacJournal 4! This is the first alpha release. MacJournal 4 is now feature complete. All the features that are planned for release are now included in some fashion (although they may be changed a bit before beta). The goal is to get MacJournal 4 out in March and we need to get to localization started in February. Between now and beta there will be a lot of small tweaks to get things ready to be locked down for the release. I doubt I'll be able to resist a few small additions but nothing is for sure.

This release brings a full implementation for audio recording. It seems to only work on Tiger right now but I'm hoping to get it working on Panther before the final release. There is also a new "Quick Note" feature: set a key equivalent in the preferences and then use it in any application to make a quick note in any existing entry or create a new one.

Changes in this release:
- Added Movable Type as a real protocol type. If you have a MT blog, you'll want to reconfigure your blog settings.
- Added a special appearance for checkboxes in Full Screen mode
- Fixed a problem copying an entry URL to someplace only plain text is accepted.
- Added new recording UI, including meters.
- Added exporting of recordings in a journal to a podcast.
- Added importing of existing podcasts into a journal.
- Hold the Option key when clicking a checkbox to entry a "mixed" state.
- Tabbing with the insertion point next to a list item will take that list item with the tab.
- Fixed a bug with time zones when sending an entry to an Atom blog.
- iPod Notes export (essentially just text exporting but with internal links handled in the iPod Notes format)

Keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- All-new blogging architecture
- New per-item attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
• blog server
- A real implementation of tabs
- Audio recording
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support
- Improved Full Screen mode

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther that will be weeded out later.


Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some new icons are temporary and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the release though.



(By the way, the change-made-at-the-last-minute prize this time goes to "drag and drop in the recording bar." Congrats!)

MWSF

MacWorld San Francisco begins tomorrow. I'll be up in the exhibition hall in Mariner's booth on Friday if you'd like to stop by and say hi. We'll be demoing the latest builds of 4.0 and taking feedback. So come by if you can because I'd love to hear what you have to say and talk about it with you!

MacJournal 4.0d5

Welcome to the fifth developmental release of MacJournal 4! There are a few new features and a fair amount of cleanup in a lot of areas. The last release's new blogging architecture will probably trump anything new this time around, but it's a good release nonetheless. Probably the biggest addition is the support for audio recording. It's not pretty, it's not configurable, and it's not even entirely functional, but it works well enough to try for now. Just in case, audio recordings won't stick around between launches. This is to ensure the final solution won't conflict with the current one.

There is also a change to searching so the results are presented in a flat list instead of a hierarchical one in the Journals drawer. This one might be controversial, so please let me know what you think.

In the realm of smaller changes, there are more drag and drop improvements, tied in with Services improvements as well. This releases also marks the departure of the venerable Blogger and LiveJournal sheets. Farewell, old friends! We knew you well.

Changes in this release:
- Audio Recording is partially implemented. Get there from the View menu. Recordings will not be saved across launches until things mature a bit.
- Search for entries will now show a flat list of results in the Journals drawer instead of the normal hierarchical result.
- You can drag entries onto other entries to append the text.
- You can drag text/entries onto the dock icon to append it to an entry or create a new entry with it.
- You can now selectively strip styles out of incoming text from Services
- Exporting journals to HTML as one-file-per-entry will now convert the internal MacJournal links to relative links to the other entry's exported file (if that entry is being exported).
- In addition to FTP, an iDisk (yours or someone else's) is now a possible location for attachments when sending to a blog.
- The character count is shown alongside the word count now.
- Improved handling of slow data locations, like putting your data file on an iDisk. The app should not hang while it is saving to disk anymore.
- I also added a way to show the font previews in the font toolbar item (which is hidden and disabled by default).
- Added "Copy URL to Entry" to Edit menu
- Hitting return on an empty list line will end the list (like Word)
- Added a search category for Labels in the Search toolbar item.
- Fixed a variety of crashes, quirks, and behavioral oddities in a number of places.

Keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- All-new blogging architecture
- New per-item attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
• blog server
- A real implementation of tabs
- Audio recording
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support
- Improved Full Screen mode

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther that will be weeded out later.


Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some new icons are temporary and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the release though.

Whither dee-five?

What's the deal with the next development version of MacJournal? I was hoping to have it out today (the 22nd) before the weekend Holidays. But then I got sick as all get-out and my mobility was... limited. And by "limited" I mean non-existent. So it didn't happen today. It will likely happen at some point next week now. I was planning on attacking more audio recording things next week so the release might include that (although it may not be enabled).

See you next week and a Happy Holidays to everyone!

MacJournal 4.0d4

Welcome to MacJournal 4! This is the fourth developmental release. The biggest thing going on here is the all-new blogging system. The old stuff has been thrown out (or will be eventually) in favor of a much more integrated approach. Now you can configure many different blog servers of all different kinds and associate them with journals (or even entries) to which to send entries automatically. There is now support for the MetaWeblog and Atom protocols. MetaWeblog is great for talking to WordPress and Movable Type, and Atom is great for talking to Blogger. LiveJournal support has been rewritten as well. The configuration process should be fairly easy: all you need is the URL to your blog, not the URL to some obscure XML-RPC endpoint. MacJournal will do all it can to figure out the details for you based on the front page URL. Please let me know of any failures in this area and be sure to include the URL that you tried. In addition, the entries will remember details about how it was sent to the server and will only update the entry the next time you send it there, instead of creating a new post. There is now support for sending images to an FTP server and including those images in the blog entry. There is also limited support for downloading entries from the server. Some of the protocols do this better than others though. It turns out Atom- and LiveJournal-based servers handle the best. The Blogger and MetaWeblog API don’t really have facilities for this (MetaWeblog descends from Blogger). Keep in mind though that Blogger.com blogs are now handled by the Atom protocol, so this isn’t a problem there. Also, there is also support for creating entries based on an Atom feed found at the site (regular RSS might be added in the future).

Note: This blogging stuff is still very new and can change a lot as I improve it. For this reason you not should expect that blog configurations will carry through to the final release, or even to the next developmental release.

Other changes in this release:
- Performance improvements for the Individual Files backup
- Cleanup option for e-mail quotes
- Appearance tweaks to Full Screen mode: the cursor is larger to make it easier to see and selected text will look better.
- Added a new Full Screen preference to disable editing if you just want to read it.
- Full Screen mode also now has a Find panel. Use Command-F to get at it.
- The Full Screen prefs now have controls for the margins.
- You can now auto-complete keywords in the Inspector as you type them
- Ordered and unordered lists in HTML form in imported text files are now converted (along with bolds and italics as before).
- You can now import text clippings.
- The list in the drawer will now have a soft background color if a search is in progress (this is a little experimental).
- Click and hold the Browse toolbar item to show a history of entries that you've been to.
- A few crash fixes and a few other behavioral fixes.

Keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- New per-object attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
- All-new blogging architecture
- A real implementation of tabs
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support
- Improved Full Screen mode

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther that will be weeded out later.


Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some new icons are temporary and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the release though.

3.2.2b1 now, 4.0b4 soon

I put out a small beta for 3.2.2 just now; it's at http://danschimpf.com/dev.html. If you're not on Jaguar and/or a non-English localization, it may not do much for you right now. I will add a few other small bug fixes for everyone if I can pin them down.

4.0d4 should be out this month with all new blogging support. I'm getting the final pieces in now, although a lot of things might change after this release depending on how everything looks. I'm pleased with the way it's going though; it's a lot more powerful than it used to be.

Avoiding work with more work that I was avoiding so I can avoid yet more work

I had originally intended to tackle audio recording for 4.0d4. I decided on that because I was avoiding the new blogging architecture, like I had been doing fairly successfully for much of 4.0 so far. I just hadn’t wrapped my head around it yet. But then I looked at audio recording and CoreAudio. CoreAudio is a deceivingly small API but there are loads upon loads of things that you have to do that aren’t readily apparent, which is annoying on several levels. In a happy world, the CoreAudio folks would provide a nice wrapper to do simple operations (like what I want to do) as sample code that I could compile right into MacJournal and we’d all be shiny. I guess this sort of exists, but it’s written in C++, which I dislike more than nonintuitive C APIs. So that’s out the window. I will probably end up using this third-party wrapper framework that I found on the interweb instead. So I’m avoiding that for now.

Instead, I went back to blogging (because I’m really avoiding .Mac syncing) and actually got quite a lot done. The groundwork is all there and rough UI is in place now. This will allow for one-click upload of an entry to a blog (properly configured). This also brings MetaWeblog and Atom support. The latter makes WordPress and TypePad a lot happier, while the former works well with Blogger right now (better than the antiquated API that bears their name could do, paradoxically enough). However, I’d like to minimize the importance of the protocols as much as possible though, if only for the reason that the Blogger API will no longer be the best one to use with Blogger. Over the weekend I put in some automatic configuration so you can just put the URL of your weblog and MacJournal will figure out all the surrounding details to best of its ability. There are loads of different blogging software packages out there, but I’m focusing on six for this release: Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, and Blojsom. Blojsom makes it on the list just because Tiger Server installs it as the weblog software, so it makes sense to try and make that work as best as possible. Others will work just as well once you have them set up, but it will all depend on how nice the software is. The nice blogging sites have little tags that help offline clients like MacJournal to figure out what to do. In fact, of the six, WordPress is the only one that includes no such information. Boo for that. However, there are other ways I can figure out it is WordPress so it’s not such a big deal. It was a little disappointing though, given the fact that WordPress is the most popular right now.

If you’re in for a laugh, check out Xanga. That is some of the worst HTML I have ever seen. There are two body tags! Can someone explain this to me? Yowzers.

The problem is going to be testing all of these sites. I only have capabilities to test uploading to a few different kinds of blogs right now (Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress), so I will need to work out some way to test the others before I can really feel comfortable that the auto-configuration is making the right decisions.

In terms of the next pre-release, I’m still deciding how much of this I want to be done before the next release. I will probably fall on the side of having a more complete implementation that’s closer to the final product rather than putting something out now. Depending on how things go the next release will probably be mid- to late-November.

Maybe then I’ll get back to audio recording. ☺

MacJournal 4.0d3

Go here to download.

This is the third developmental release. This release provides a mix of new features and bug fixes from d2. An error dialog that some people were seeing while editing text should be fixed. In the realm of new features, new UI has been added for when you click on a journal, locked or otherwise. It should be a lot faster to come up for large journals and provides some new functionality (and looks pretty nifty in my opinion). You can now control encryption on the journal level: each journal can be told to encrypt its data when locked or not at all independent of the app-wide pref. You can also manually encrypt a locked journal independent of any persistent setting.

Changes in this release:
- Fixed some problems dragging around entries.
- Added toolbar item for viewing the current entry in a new window
- Added fancy new appearance for what you see when you click a locked journal, or when a journal is empty due to a search, or when you click an expanded journal.
- Added a per-journal setting for encryption and a way to manually encrypt any locked journal apart from persistent settings.
- Worked around a possible exception in AppKit (a.k.a. the OS) when editing text.
- Creating a new tab will create a new entry to put in that tab.
- Fixed the day names in the calendar for date formats like Hebrew.
- Added hidden pref StripFileExtensionWhenImportingFiles.
- Importing pictures will now respect the "Store attachments externally" preference.
- The calendar will no longer change selection when you activate the app by clicking on it. This matches table behavior and used to work but at some point it broke.
- When selecting a journal in the table, more of the inappropriate controls in the Inspector will be disabled (like annotation). More menu items will be disabled as well.
- Dragging an entry or journal onto a range of selected text will add a link to that item for that range.
- Added in-app viewing of the PDF help file thanks to PDFKit on TIger. Panther users will have to use Preview as before.

Keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- New per-object attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
- A real implementation of tabs
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther.

Special Note for Blogging: the blogging areas of the app are next on the list to be overhauled. Lots of functionality will be added, but for now they might work a little differently than in 3.2.

Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some icons are temporary (such as non-editable entries) and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the changes though.

Time for MacJournal 4.0d2

Head here to download.

This is the second developmental release. I fixed up a lot of bugs from the first developmental release and added a few new features. The goal here is to provide a little more stability before ripping a bunch of other stuff up. I started a bit on the new blogging features but I'm still working that out mentally so there isn't anything different on the surface right now. A new window has been added for "Advanced Search." This is all done via Spotlight so the window will not be available on Panther. Right now there is only one field that searches everything (like the other search field) but I hope to add more fields for more of the data types (one for the topic, one for text, etc.) to make it truly more "advanced." However, it's pretty nifty already if you always wanted a separate, flat search listing.

Changes in this release:
- Added the aforementioned Advanced Search window
- Fixed up tabs a bit to hopefully resolve some of the problems people have been seeing
- Added new UUID links. There is a hidden preference to enable their creation. These links are both ugly and location-independent.
- Drag objects out of the drawers or search window into the entry text to add links to them.
- Select a bunch of items in the drawer and use Paste Ruler (along with previously available Paste Style)
- Added a disclosure triangle in the Stats window to hide the big Word Frequencies table.
- Added an Export button to the Welcome window if your trial period has expired so you can export any data out of the app.
- Added Bigger and Smaller menu items to the Text Zoom submenu.
- Lots of under the hood work, bug fixes, and appearance tweaks to things.

Keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- New per-object attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
- A real implementation of tabs
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther.

Special Note for Blogging: the blogging areas of the app are next on the list to be overhauled. Lots of functionality will be added, but for now they might work a little differently than in 3.2.

Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some icons are temporary (such as non-editable entries) and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the changes though.

Blog spam is fun!

Yeah, I don’t know what is going with all the stupid comments in all of the posts. I imagine this one will collect a few spam comments as well. I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about it either. Stupid Blogger. ☺

On brighter news, 3.2.1 is almost out the door and I should be posting a new developmental build of 4.0 any day now. The focus of that is to fix a lot of the small bugs that blocked usability in d1. I can’t always promise that the 4.0 builds will be usable in an everyday situation until later in the process, but I’d like to get one out now before I tear things up again. Changes are in the normal spot.

On a completely developer-focused note, Objective-C is very fun to work with. That’s all; I just wanted to get that out there.

Back soon.

MacJournal 4.0d1 is here (finally)

Download it from here.

Welcome to MacJournal 4! Or rather what of it there is right now. A lot of stuff works pretty well, some other stuff is missing, and some things are still a little weird. But keep in mind that this is developmental software: there are probably bugs lurking somewhere that could cause crashes and/or data loss. MacJournal 4 has a lot of new data being stored and I can't guarantee the future of that. I may need to change how it is stored and I can't guarantee that everything will work. That being said, it works pretty well for me in normal usage. You should definitely read the Version History to see what is new. Here are the top-tier things:

- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- New per-object attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
- A real implementation of tabs
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support

But that's just the really top stuff; there is a lot of good stuff (not just bug fixes) in the Version History. It will do you well to read it. The Preferences as been reorganized and split up and will continue to change. I added a few new panes and I think there's one too many now. Expect to see lots of change there.

The good news with all the new data types (like labels and background colors) is that the recently released 3.2 supports them insofar as it won't discard them when saving the data. So you can add labels in 4.0, go back to 3.2 for a while, and when you come back to 4.0 the labels will still be there. The exception here is per-journal sorting: this was added after 3.2 was released and will be lost if you save your data with 3.2.

MacJournal no longer supports Jaguar. At this point, it might not support Panther either. Development is being done on Tiger and there might be some lurking bugs on Panther.

Special Note for Blogging: the blogging areas of the app are next on the list to be overhauled. Lots of functionality will be added, but for now they might work a little differently than in 3.2.

Special Special Note (just for the weblog): I'm using the old icon so you can tell it apart from 3.x.

Reporting Bugs

This is a developmental release so things are still very much in flux. For that reason, reporting bugs isn't as important as normal. There are a lot of areas that are still changing a lot and will continue to change for some time. Some icons are temporary (such as non-editable entries) and will be replaced later. I would appreciate comments about the general direction of the changes though.

Onward and Upward

Now that 3.2 is out, what is next? I will start releasing developmental builds of 4.0 very soon. I think everything is in a reasonably stable state right now that it could work. Keep in mind that 4.0 is still pre-alpha, so a lot of things are still in flux. A lot of features remain on the drawing board at this point and some of the existing ones act a little differently because of new stuff that has been added. But I think it's probably a good time to release it now before I rip something else apart to add functionality. I'll release something this week, we'll say. Probably Thursday night; I'll spend the next two nights tying some looses ends down. I'll also have the complete list of changes so far by then.

See you Thursday, space cowboy.

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.