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New Year – New Release

The first release for 2008, Version 2.52 Build 10.0 is now available for download. This is primarily a maintenance update to address some issues with the new Web KB Publishing capability. It also includes two new, user contributed, article templates, “Texts and Authors” by Edwin Relf and “Quotation” by Ed Taylor. Full release notes are in the Help and online.

Looking ahead the plan is to immediately commence work on implementing Tags, as I mentioned in my last blog post and to incorporate a new SQL Database Engine. Tags will be the first use of the new database, with other areas to follow.

Tags and the move to SQL are both very interesting new developments for Surfulater, which I’m sure will hold us in good stead for important and impressive new releases during 2008. Thanks to everyone for your continued great support and I look forward to working with you all to continue to evolve Surfulater in the year ahead.

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10 slick and cool IE Extensions and Tags

What a great way to start 2008 with Surfulater included in 10 slick and cool IE extensions by By John Fontana, Network World, 01/04/08. We certainly are in good company along side Microsoft Silverlight. Click on Next in the article to get to slide 2 and you’ll see:

Surfulater

What it is: Sure there’s lots of information on the Web, but sometimes you just want to keep those little nuggets you find on your system for safe keeping. Surfulater lets you permanently save selected text, images, and complete Web pages, then edit, annotate, cross-reference, organize, and search for information in your offline personal and portable knowledge base.     

Why you should use it: Ever find a dead link in your Favorites folder? Or discover a piece of information has been moved onto the “subscription only” part of a Web site?

Where to get it: www.surfulater.com

Surfulater is indeed a great addition to IE, but of course it also works with Firefox and does much more than just make it easy to capture web content. But you most likely already know this.

I hope everyone had a safe and happy Xmas + New year break, we certainly did. I’m back at work in earnest now, after cutting back to a support only role over the break.

Tagging. Right now it looks like the next big new feature for Surfulater will be tagging. I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and have locked down an initial design over the past week or so, which looks good, at least on paper.

I’ve re-read everyones posts on the forums, gone over the notes I’ve been taking for some time now and digested and distilled these into the initial design specification.

In order to deliver the proposed tagging system as well as other future capabilities, it looks like I’ll be replacing the fairly simple database engine Surfulater has successfully used to date with a far more powerful SQL Database engine. This will require code to convert your existing KB’s to the new database, as well as the new code for the tagging system, so it may turn into an even more substantial task than I had expected. That said the end result will be well worth it and put things firmly in place for even more interesting future developments.

As soon as I’ve got something to show you and talk more about I’ll post here on the blog.

PS. Thanks for all the great comments re. Web KB’s in my last blog post.