Problem with the Palm Conduit

I inadvertently left some debug code in the Palm conduit included with 4.1.2b1, which is causing a crash. I will post a new beta of the conduit here tonight or tomorrow.

Some Status Updates

There are a lot of things in the works right now; how are all of them going?

4.1.2 is the localization release and I have two localizations back so far. I'm going to release a beta of it this weekend that contains those localizations and several bug fixes, including better Typepad support.

Palm Syncing is just about done. I'm putting the final touches on it and will release a beta of that along with 4.1.2. The final version will requirer 4.1.2.

The Quicksilver plug-in got a bit of a back seat to the Palm conduit, but is essentially done. It just needs to find its way into the Quicksilver plug-in system, about which I know nothing.

I'm also planning and prototyping things for the future, so let me know if there's anything you'd like to see in the next big version!

4.1 aftermath and .Mac syncing

4.1 came out this week and things are largely okay, save for one major issue for those of you trying to use the .Mac data syncing. Some old measures put in place in order to not break the 4.0.x releases (during which the syncing effort was already underway) kicked in when 4.1 was built as a "final" release and disabled the registration as a syncing-enabled application. So all the tools are there, but MacJournal just isn't asking to be a part of the syncing party. Unfortunately, this requires a new release to fix the problem. I've fixed the oversight and rolled in a few other bug fixes and released 4.1.1b1 at http://danschimpf.com/. That release should allow normal usage of the syncing. Please let me know of any problems with this release.

MacJournal 4.1

Download it from Mariner.

Welcome to MacJournal 4.1! This release adds some new features onto 4.0 and fixes some bugs that were identified.

New Features in 4.1
⁃ Improved Recording:
• Record more audio to append onto existing recordings.
• Panther compatibility.
• New Preferences panel for configuration of recording devices and levels.
• Record audio from an iSight
⁃ Improved Blogging:
• New Blogger+Google support
• Transactions with blogs can be cancelled in the Activity window.
• Improved compatibility with other blog types.
⁃ .Mac Data Syncing (see special note below)
⁃ Growl support
⁃ Improved Services functionality

There are a lot more changes since 4.0.5. You can check out the included Version History for the full details.

Special note about .Mac Syncing: While MacJournal 4.1 provides data syncing over .Mac, the current implementation in OS X for syncing seems more optimized for small data sets, like bookmarks or contacts. Trying to push tens or even hundreds of megabytes of data through syncing may not work as well as you might want due to limitations in Mac OS X at this time.

Features from 4.0

- 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 an email.

Cusping

I wanted to update everyone on the status of things here at MacJournal HQ (which, at this exact moment, is a coffee shop). 4.1 virtually done and will be released to coincide with MacWorld. It won't be terribly different than 4.1d6 (plus the changes mentioned in the Version History page) if you've already been using that.

On a separate track from the application release, I've also got some other releases planned in the short term. I worked on a Quicksilver plug-in over my Christmas vacation. If you're not familiar with it, Quicksilver is an application launcher like LaunchBar or even Spotlight. The plug-in lets you get at your MacJournal entries from within Quicksilver. It works, but there are a few procedural issues to work out. They have their own plug-in delivery system, so I need to talk with them to make it available and make sure I have the correct information set up to allow for future updates.

The other big release is Palm syncing. I've started working on a plug-in for Markspace's MissingSync application to allow you to sync your entries with your Palm notes. It's a battle because it's a whole new system I have to learn, and it's an old one at that, so there are always difficulties with the really old APIs. But I hope to get that done and in people's hands by the end of the month. It operates outside of the MacJournal application, so it will probably just be out when it's out and not really tied to an app release.

The other thing I want to mention is forums. There is a MacJournal 4 discussion forum set up by Mariner that you can use to ask questions and discuss things in addition to the comments here. There is a MacJournal 3 forum as well there.

If you're going to be at MacWorld next week, you can stop by and say hi if you want. I will be at the Mariner booth on Friday, so please stop by and yell at me if there's something you don't like in the app. :-)

MacJournal 4.1d6

Get it from here.

Welcome to the sixth test release of MacJournal 4.1. This release fixes several bugs from the past few releases in preparation for an ever-approaching final release. While not exactly feature complete yet, this release should be very solid. The final release of 4.1 will regrettably not have any localizations other than English as the release date crept up on me fast, but updated localizations will be included in 4.1.1.

Fixes and Enhancements
⁃ Fixes for downloading entries from Blogger, for the text from the old Blogger and the dates from the new one.
⁃ Fixed a problem printing the first time after you launch.
⁃ Fixed "Check for Updates" on all Intel machines.
⁃ Non-image attachments are written out to disk for an HTML export and a link to that file is included in the HTML.
⁃ Fixed some areas of Panther support, including the Edit Link sheet, exporting, and the window title of the main window.
⁃ Fixed a problem updating entries on MetaWeblog/Movable Type servers.

There are some more changes included in this release. You should check out the Version History for the full details.

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 an email.

MacSanta and 4.1d6

MacJournal is currently featured on http://MacSanta.com/ at 20% off until the 25th!

4.1d6 is almost ready and should hopefully be out later this evening. It’s mostly all bug fixes to improve over the already pretty solid 4.1d5 release heading into the New Year.

MacJournal 4.1d5

Get it from here (look in the Dev page).

This release adds compatibility for the new Blogger Beta section. To use it, auto-configure your blog server based on the front page of your blog's web page and then use your GMail address as the username.

Enhancements
⁃ All blog operations are now cancelable in the Activity panel.
⁃ Removed the Blogger protocol from the Blog Configuration panel.
⁃ Added an "Open in Tab" menu item to the contextual menu when right-clicking on a link to an entry.
⁃ Appending text through Services will add the same header as it does when creating a new entry.
⁃ Added support for authenticating into a web page when automatically configuring it.
⁃ Command-Return will "OK" the Quick Note window.

Other Fixes
⁃ Fixed a crash creating a journal with the "+" button in the drawers.
⁃ Fixed sizing problems with images in entries (most easily visible with multiple images next to each other).
⁃ Fixed titling of some pages when exporting multiple pages to HTML.

There are some more changes included in this release. You should check out the Version History for the full details.

4.1 Status

After fighting with it off and on for several weeks, MacJournal 4.1 can now post to the new Blogger Beta using your Google login. With that in hand, expect a new release soon, probably sometime this weekend. With Blogger moving further and further away from the ancient protocol that bears its own name, I’ve decided to remove it from the protocol list in the blog configuration window. It was rarely the correct choice (if ever) and only server to confuse people trying to post to Blogger. Existing blogs configured with the Blogger protocol will continue to work though.

MacJournal 4.1d4

Check it out here.

This release should fix the crash present in 4.1d2 and d3 once and for all, and add a bunch of new enhancements.

Enhancements
⁃ Appending to existing audio recordings works now
⁃ Added time display to the Recording bar.
⁃ Added new Text Cleanup commands for controlling attachments: "Relocate" to move attachments to a folder on disk, "Consolidate" to move everything into the data file itself. I don't know if I like these names; they may change.
⁃ Switch Atom posting to use the new Atom 1.0 protocol. This should fix posting to Blogger. Unfortunately, Blogger changed the URL for posting entries. For the beta, existing blog servers will be transiently upgraded to the new URL scheme, but the change won't be saved in the database for now. New blogs you configure in the beta will use the new scheme and will therefore not work on 4.0 unless you reconfigure it.
⁃ You can access the menu bar during Full Screen by hitting the top of the screen with the mouse (on the screen, not in real life).

Other Fixes
⁃ Fixed another cause of the crash creating new journals or clicking on existing journals in the drawer.
⁃ Fixed sizing problems with images in entries (most easily visible with multiple images next to each other).

There are some more changes included in this release. You should check out the Version History for the full details.

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 an email.

Happy Halloween

If you are running a 4.1 pre-release and generally keep it open for days at a time, it might be worth it to quit and relaunch today. For ... reasons.

MacJournal 4.1d3

This release is meant to clean up the issues in 4.1d2 and flesh out some of the existing features. The biggest addition is an addition to the Recording preference pane to let you specify the format of the recorded audio.

Other Fixes
- Fixed a crash creating new journals.
- Fixed some different crashes associated with .Mac syncing.

There are some more changes included in this release. You should check out the Version History for the full details.

MacJournal 4.1d2

Get it here.

It's been a long time coming, but welcome to the second test release of MacJournal 4.1! This is another large release with more new features and even more enhanced functionality. It is still labeled "developmental" though, because there is still one or two things that I have in mind.

This version includes support for syncing data over .mac. However, if you chose to turn this on, please back up your data before syncing!

Big Items
- The aforementioned .mac syncing. Make sure you read the note about it above.
- MacJournal now uses Growl to notify you of uploads, downloads, and data saves if you have it installed.
- Preference pane for configuring recording
- Labels toolbar item
- MacJournal launches in Panther again (hopefully).

Little Enhancements
- Tab behavior has been tweaked a little bit to be a bit more consistent with other tabbed apps (mainly web browsers). Attempting to open a second tab for an entry already in the tab bar will always select the previous tab now.
- Keyword searching is now case insensitive like the other text searches.
- Downloading entries will always ask for how many entries you want to download.
- Improved HTML export to include text justification.
- Added submenu to "Send entry to other blog" that shows all the configured blog servers.
- Change the journal summary that shows in the middle of the window to include entries in sub-journals.

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

Not Included
- Yet more features!

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 an email.

Moved Permanently

Running in parallel to the syncing efforts are Blogger/Google’s ongoing problems with third-party applications like MacJournal. There were a lot of problems when the new Google/Blogger (Glogger?) beta came out that extended beyond the beta area of the site and well into the “regular” portion that we all know and love. They fixed most of the problems within a week, but a lot of people are still having trouble posting to the Bloogle. It seems to happen all the time for some people, and not at all for others (like me, unfortunately). The error manifests itself as a cryptic message returned from the server: “Moved Permanently.” I don’t think there is nothing I can do on my end to avoid this as it seems it is entirely on the server side. Other third-party application developers are seeing this, according to their own developer mailing list. So I guess the best thing to do right now if you are seeing this problem is to email the folks at Bloogger and let them know your username and the problem you are seeing. Hopefully this will get resolved soon.

It works! Sort of.

This weekend saw the first successful test of MacJournal's .mac syncing support. I pushed the data up to .mac, blew away the local data, and reconstituted it from the server. There are a few issues left to be dealt with however: ordering of entries, and locking of unencrypted journals. The former can probably be solved with some extra knowledge of SyncServices, but the latter might be different. It's not good to just toss the password up to the server in cleartext, so the password itself can't be synchronized automatically. That means that the locked state cannot be synchronized either. This is different than encrypted journals, however. Since that is just a big blob of anonymous data, it's safe to push around. It's only the unencrypted locked journals that will get "out of sync."

Then there's the matter of Palms. There's always been the hope that pushing the data up to .mac would allow Palms to pull it down. However, the more I learn about SyncServices, the less I think that can happen. For Palms to make some sense of the data, it has to be in a format that it can understand. An existing format can be extended to provide new data types. Apple provides three such formats for developers to use and extend. These three formats are Bookmarks, Calendars, and Contacts. Therein lies the problem: there is no basic "Notes" data format for MacJournal to use and extend. Therefore I had to devise my own data format, which is all well and good for the uses of MacJournal, but it means that the data are fundamentally incomprehensible to anyone else by default. Of course, once I publish the data format, any other application can read and extend the data to its own desires, but nothing can happen by default. This is just my theory so far; I've got more questions to ask of SyncServices.

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.