I’m pleased to say the Surfulater V1.98 pre-release went off without a hitch. V1.98.3.0 packages up everything in V1.98.0.0, tidies up a few bits and pieces and prepares the way for the next important release.
The main enhancements in this release include the ability to use ‘Send To’ to E-Mail or Export all articles in a folder, new options to hide or show various elements in the content window, such as hiding item labels, the pencil column or empty fields (see below), the ability to expand and collapse all articles in the content window, updates to the layout in the content window to tighten it up, further improvements to Surfulater’s Unicode support, the ability to start minimized, plus lots more which you can see in the Release Notes.
There are also some important under-the-hood changes which you can’t see just yet, but will very soon. These relate to issues raised by a several people about delays when Surfulater displays all articles in a folder, and the articles happen to be reasonably large. The good news is these delays will shortly be a thing of the past, as the content window code has been re-written to enable the display to be updated in a background thread. The difference is quite dramatic, as you’ll be able to see in a blog post which I’ll publish shortly.
I’ll also be making it easier for you to use your own article templates and I’ll be writing an article which guide you through the process.  Expect to see this in the next few weeks. A new Surfulater user, Joseph Pinzone sent me some interesting article layout mock-ups earlier this week and I’m looking forward to putting some templates together to follow Joseph’s suggestions. And Judy Rich is interested in a Recipe template. Judy has sent me a mock-up which I’ll use in my aforementioned guide. I added a Citation field to the Web template for Mitchell L. Silverman recently, which is also worthy of including in the guide.
To wrap up this post I’ve put together a short movie that shows the new Content Elements feature in this release. This also demonstrates the flexibility Surfulater is capable of, when displaying content.
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(You need to use IE to see the movie. For some reason it doesn’t appear in Firefox!)Â
The Surfulater Download is in the usual places here and here. Â
Rock on,thank you and keep up the good work.
Thanks nevf for continuing to make major advances in Surfulater. You know I’ve always been a big fan of the Surfulater engine and all the potential it holds, and you always come up with new, innovative features. I love the minimalist-friendly features, such as the pencil-removal, and the hiding of unused fields with the content filter.
Aram, thanks for the comment. I’m steadily building on and improving the functionality at the core of Surfulater. Each new release gets us all a bit closer to where we want to be.
I have to say I’m excited about some of the things currently in the pipeline.