Putting a new release out is always a high pressure time, so many things to do and check and then worry about whether you’ve got everything right. It typically comes at the end of long days of coding, getting everything you want to get into a release, in place and tested. The biggest concern is always whether you’ve slipped up somewhere and the release has got a problem which will cause your users some grief. The first 24-48 hours of a new release are usually my most restless and even though I’ve been doing this for a long time, the trepidation is ever present.
I’m pleased to say that most releases go without a hitch, which is just how it should be. The last release V1.96.0.0 fell a bit short though, with two quite serious problems being revealed. The first was that keys like Enter and Del didn’t work during article editing, if you started editing via. the slow click method. Fortunately if you started editing by clicking the pencil or any of the other methods, everything worked properly, so there was a straightforward workaround. This problem occurred because of the changes (improvements) I’d made to the HTML editing code, and it simply didn’t show up in my testing.
The second problem was of greater concern, and it turned out had been around forever. As you probably know you can add content to Surfulater while it is hidden away in the Windows System Tray. When you work this way a small notification window appears above the System Tray and informs you that content has been saved and where, then after 5 seconds it disappears.
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I’d had a few reports saying the notification window would stay around for a minute or so instead of 5 seconds, however I’d never been able to reproduce this. To make things more difficult it seemed to only occur when certain other unknown software was running. This all changed with the V1.96.0.0 release when Dan Lucas reported a related problem where his web Browser was loosing focus when the notification window appeared. I wasn’t able to replicate this problem either, however I did finally get to see the problem with the window not closing and content not being captured, which I have to say I was pleased to see.
It turned out that the fix for the window not closing took all of a few minutes to implement, but Dan’s problem of the Browser loosing focus took another whole day. I had a fair idea why this might happen, but I was working in the dark because I couldn’t see it for myself. Dan was a fantastic help and let me send him some pre-release versions, to verify I had indeed resolved the issue.
Long story short, new releases are always a trying time for us software developers. These days the Internet is a huge boon though, as we can quckly turn around a new release and get it in your hands.
So this release is, as I said in the release notes, primarily to fix a few pesky problems in the V1.96.0.0 release. I also took this as an opportunity to squeeze in a few other things that I wanted to get into the last release, but had run our of time, plus some bits and pieces. See the release notes here and in the Help for full details.
My clock tells me it is now 26 and a bit hours since V1.96.2.0 was released and so far it has been smooth sailing. Hopefully the release seas will remain calm for a time.
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