Surfulater V1.98, B4.0 released – Being more responsive

I’m very pleased that we are keeping up the pace of frequent new releases. So often in the software world this isn’t the case, with new releases being few and far between and the poor old customers becoming more and more dissatisfied. Of course you have to be wary of putting out new releases just for the sake of it, as some do. And some companies put out new releases without even telling you what’s in them! This must be a trick to make people think they are doing something, when they really aren’t.

The major enhancement in this release was to make the content window display update far more responsive when displaying all articles in a folder. With lots of large articles this used to be quite sluggish to say the least, but not any more. For example previously you may have had to wait 20 seconds after clicking on a folder in the Knowledge Tree before you could do anything else. Now that’s more likely less than a second. I’ve covered this in detail in Improving performance with Multi-threading 

I’m also in the midst of making changes to enable you to use different article templates for each template category. For example you could choose from a selection of three different templates for displaying content captured from the Web. These templates could have different, or more or less fields, and completely different layouts. Surfulater has been designed to separate presentation of information from the actual stored information. This means you can display the exact same information in different ways, which is where the new templates come into play. This is part of ongoing work to make templates more useful and easier to create and change. See my last article Content styling and templates for more on this. These new template capabilities are more involved than I’d envisaged and are taking a bit longer to finalize than planned. The focus is to get this wrapped up for the next release.

The Release Notes in the Surfulater Help and in the Support Forums cover the other changes in this release. I’m particularly hopeful that I’ve fixed a problem with Search that a user was having, but am unable to reproduce myself.

Finally for the folks who’ve been asking about Synchronizing Knowledge Bases across different PC’s, possibly in different locations, I can tell you that I’m quietly working on this as well and making very good progress. In fact I’m quiet excited about this new capability and very much looking forward to using it myself.