Author: nevf

Let me start by wishing everyone a very merry xmas and a prosperous and healthy 2008. I’d also like to thank everyone for the great support you’ve given to Surfulater and myself this past year. Your e-mails and forum posts praising Surfulater and also being critical, from time to time, are always very well received and help keep us on course. We have lots more to do with Surfulater in the coming year. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed as the new releases continue to deliver more capabilities as well as enhanced functionality, while hopefully remaining true to our goal of ease of use.

Actions speak louder than words, so let me show you the big new feature in this release; click here*.

If you’ve been reading the blog, this won’t come as a surprise. If you haven’t, then what you are seeing is the sample Surfulater Knowledge Base displayed in your Web Browser. What does this mean? Well it enables you to Publish your Knowledge Base files and view them in a Web Browser, without any need to have Surfulater present.

Various uses quickly come to mind.

• You can carry your KB’s around on a USB Stick and view them on any PC, which has a Web Browser. No other software is needed.
• You can Publish them to a PC on your Network (LAN) for others on the Network to access.
• And as you’ve just witnessed you can put them on a Web Site, for anyone with Internet access to see.

This new Web Publishing capability makes it easy to share your content with friends and colleagues and paves the way for even more interesting new ways of working with knowledge bases in the future. You can think of it as setting your content free.

It is clear from the comments in my previous blog post, that this is a very important step in Surfulater’s evolution.

For more information see View Surfulater KB’s in any Web Browser, wherever you are, read the Help file topic Power Features|Publish to a Web KB and read the Release Notes in the Help or here.

Well that’s it for now and probably for 2007. Have a great Xmas and do let me know what you think of the new Web KB publishing capability.

Neville

* To view Web KB’s Javascript must be enabled in your Web Browser. To view Web KB’s on a Local Drive, IE users need to either enable: Tools|Internet Options…|Advanced|Allow active content to run in files on My Computer or select ‘Allow Blocked Content’ from the context menu when prompted.

The first big new feature in this release is the ability to link from other application documents directly to Surfulater articles. For example you can add an article link to a Microsoft Word Document and then click on that link and open the article in Surfulater, as shown in this picture.

 

‘See Also’ links have always been invaluable in creating webs of related information within Surfulater, and this new external linking capability extends that to enable using links from other applications. This important new capability opens up your Surfulater content, making it quick and easy to access from other applications.

To create an External link right click on the Surfulater article and select Copy As from the context menu.

 

For this example we choose Plain External Link as that’s what we need for the MS Word document. This copies the link to the Windows Clipboard.

The next step is select the text in our Word document which we want to add the link to and press Ctrl+K or use the Hyperlink toolbar button or menu option. Then paste the link into the dialog as shown here and press OK.

 

The result is a link we can click on to open the referenced article in Surfulater, as shown in the first image above. Note that Surfulater doesn’t need to be running for external links to work.

These external links to Surfulater articles can be used in any applications that let you use Hyperlinks. They can also be used from a Windows Command Prompt and on the Surfulater command line. For more information on External Links see the Surfulater Help topic: Power Features|External Links.

The next important new feature in this release is the ability to use ‘See Also’ links to connect articles in different knowledge bases to each other. This extends the existing ‘See Also’ links, making them even more useful.

 

This screen shot shows a ‘See Also’ link in the Hardware knowledge base which accesses an article in the Home knowledge base and vice-versa. Clicking on either link opens the referenced knowledge base, if it isn’t already open and then displays the linked article.

‘See Also’ links across knowledge bases are created in the same way as links within a knowledge base, using “Copy” and then “Paste as reciprocal ‘See also’ links”. See the Surfulater Help topic: Power Features|Creating Cross Reference links.

Also updated in this release is the use of Cut, Copy and Paste, including their use on the Edit menu and Toolbar buttons, along with with the Ctrl+X, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keyboard shortcuts. All methods of issuing Cut & Copy are now available both in the Knowledge Tree and in the Content window, with the action they perform based on which window has focus and whether there is any text and/or images selected in the content window. These changes improve the availability and uniform use of Cut & Copy.

The final new feature to point out is Copy Image and Cut Image, which enable images to be copied to the clipboard, without having to first select them.

For more information on Cut/Copy & Paste and Cut/Copy Image see the new Help topic: The Basics|Cut, Copy, Paste & Cut/Copy Image.

That’s all for now, I hope you like the new features in this release. As always your Comments are most welcome.

Version 2.30.10.0 will be available shortly from our Download page.

Of all the Surfulater feedback we receive, a few really standout. One in particular has been the request to edit all fields in an article at once, instead of having to do this for each individual field. Product design is full of decisions and trade-offs, both under the surface (which you don’t see) and right in your face (stuff you see and touch all the time). The latter can dramatically improve, or hinder, product usability. The decision to implement editing on a field by field basis, was in hindsight, clearly not what our users wanted. The problem was, this was a bit too entrenched in the design and as much as folks wanted it changed I couldn’t see a clear path that would allow it, without considerable upheaval. A Forum post by Jai Kasturi was the last straw, time to stop procrastinating and take action. Sometimes that’s what we need and when you do indeed act, things can fall into place and the worries about upheaval are swept aside. Fortunately this was a time when it wasn’t as difficult to rework the code as I had expected. It took a fair chunk of time, but in the end came together nicely.

Jai’s Forum post touched on a number of issues related to creating new articles and editing articles, amongst other things. In fact he wasn’t using Surfulater to capture and save Web content, but as a Note Taker/Information Manager where he was entering content himself. Jai is not alone in this type of use, but he pushed the envelope more than anyone else I’ve heard from, writing over 2,000 articles at the time of his forum post.

Jai’s post made it clear that the process of writing new articles within Surfulater was far from ideal, which I also took on board for this release. Instead of right click, menu select, sub-menu select to create a new article then pencil click to commence editing you can now simply press Ctrl+F2, which creates a new article and commences editing in one keystroke. More on this below.

Editing an article now looks like this.

As you can see all fields are in edit mode. Tab and Back+Tab move to the next or previous field and no longer end editing. A new key, Ctrl+S saves changes and ends editing, as does Shift+Enter which has always been available. And Escape optionally cancels editing, as before.

Commencing editing has also been enhanced. Shift+F2 edits the article or folder currently selected in the Knowledge Tree, as does the new Edit|Edit current Article/Folder menu item and matching toolbar button .

F2 now commences editing on the first field of an article, if no field has focus (dashed outline). This assumes the content window is active, not the Knowledge Tree. And mouse click to commence editing, can now be completely turned off in View|Preferences.

A new main menu, Edit has been added which brings Surfulater more in line with other Windows programs.

The Edit menu includes some items previously on the Article menu as well as new items.

Both the Knowledge Tree and Content window context menus have been updated to include Edit this Article, New Article and New Article from Clipboard menu items, delivering a more consistent and accessible user interface.

 

I mentioned earlier that adding new Articles has been streamlined. To begin with a New Article toolbar button and drop-down menu has been added.

 

When you click on the drop-down arrow, the article templates menu is displayed. You’ll notice that each article template now has an underlined shortcut key, so pressing M for example creates a new Music catalogue article.This means you can now use the keyboard to select the type of article you want to create, as requested by Jai and others. 

Once an article template has been chosen from either the New Article toolbar button menu or Edit|New Article menu, you can use Ctrl+F2 or click on the New Article toolbar button (left of the drop-down arrow), to create more articles of the same type. This lets you create new articles with just one keystroke or mouse click.

Alt+F2 is another new key in this release. It  drops down the New Article toolbar button menu. ie. It behaves as if you’d clicked the buttons drop down arrow. By using Alt+F2 plus the new template menu shortcut keys, you can quickly create any article type. ex. Alt+F2 T creates a To Do List article.

The final enhancement for new article creation is that Surfulater now goes straight into edit mode on the new article. Combine this with editing of all article fields at once, along with the other updates in this release and I’d like to think we have some very happy people out there.

As always the full release notes are in the Surfulater Help and in the support Forum. And the latest release is always available on the Download web page.

As a final take away make sure we know your thoughts, otherwise don’t expect them to ever come to fruition. Our Forums are the best place for this.

The next release of Surfulater, Version 2..20.0.0, is just about finished. To be precise coding has finished, and a reasonable amount of testing has been done. What’s left is to polish up the Release notes, update the Help and do some more testing. Plus write a blog post about the changes and additions in this release. I’ve been remiss in my blog writing of late and hope to do some catchup once this release is out the door.

I guess you’d like a glimpse of what’s new. Well the one big thing which will make many of our users happy, is that I’ve reworked the article editing code so that all fields go into edit mode, not just the chosen one. Adding Asrticles from within Surfulater has also been streamlined. These along with various other enhancements make article editing and adding new articles much easier and quicker. These have been real sticking points for many of you, so expect to find some big improvements in this release.

Surfulater V2.00.30.10 is the second of two releases in quick succession. With the V2.00.10.0 upgrade to enable multiple articles to be selected in the Knowledge Tree, Surfulater came out the other end a little worse for wear. I always knew that implementing multiple selection was going to be reasonably complex and impact on quite a number of areas, but I’m a bit annoyed with myself that two quite serious issues slipped through testing. The fact that they took a while to surface is some small conciliation, however it would of course been far better for everyone if they hadn’t existed in the first place. The most serious problem was fixed in V2.00.30.0 which has been out for almost a week now and the folks that had reported the problem have not had it reoccur so far.

The main new feature in the .30 release is that the Chronological Tree view has been updated with two new ways to group articles in the tree: By Week and By Month. These are in addition to the original Day/Week/Month view.  The “Show Articles in Chronological order” toolbar button, which is above the Knowledge Tree, now includes a drop-down arrow which enables you to select from one of the three available article groupings as follows:

And the resulting trees look like:

By Month

 

By Week

 

By Day/Week/Month

These new groupings follow on from feedback for the V2.00.20.0 release which enabled you to change the Date Created for articles. They will be of particular interest to people using Surfulater as a Journal or Diary. See the Help topic ‘Knowledge Tree Views’ for more information.

The final thing thing I’d like to show is how easy it is to create links between articles (See Also links) by dragging an article from the Knowledge Tree and dropping it on the ‘See Also’ field of the target article. See the Help topic ‘Creating Cross Reference links’ for further information.

(You need to use IE to see the movie. For some reason it doesn’t appear in Firefox!)

The Surfulater Download is in the usual places here and here.

Developing a product of any sort revolves around many different inputs and ideas. One that is all important is listening carefully to customer feedback and doing your best to meet your customers needs. Balance is also important, you simply can’t go and add every feature that everyone suggests or you’d finish up with a product that no one would want to use and you’d probably be broke because you’d put way too many resources into its development. I mention this because the latest Surfulater release, V2.00.20.0 is all about meeting customer needs.

As products evolve and more people start using them, they may be put to use performing tasks the product designers hadn’t ever considered. This is certainly true of Surfulater. In fact I’m sure I don’t know the half of what people are using Surfulater for. This isn’t too good from my point of view, but it speaks well of Surfulater that so many people find it, not only capable, but well suited to handle a variety of tasks above and beyond its core competencies.

The prime enhancements in this release revolve around the ability to reorder content in the Knowledge Tree using a new Advanced Article Sort, along with the ability to change the Date Created for Articles. Advanced sort enables you to sort the entire Knowledge Tree, or a Folder and optionally its sub-folders. Sorting can be done by Article Title or Date Created, in either ascending or descending order.

To access Advanced Sort right click on a Folder in the Knowledge Tree and select it from the context menu as shown here.

  

Select from the various Sort options and then click Sort.

To change the Date Created for an Article right click on it and choose Set Date created from the menu.

Choose the new date from the date picker window or click on Today or None, the latter leaving the date as is. When the current date is selected the time is set to the current time, otherwise it is set to 12:00AM.

These new capabilities are useful when you use Surfulater as a Journal or simply wish to move articles in time.

While we are talking dates one thing I’ve personally wanted in Surfulater is to be able to set Reminder or Follow Up dates in articles. Sometimes when I capture content I know I don’t have the time to read it then and there. The ability to pop-up a reminder in a week or so would be very handy here. Alas no one else has requested this yet, so it sits on the sidelines awaiting.

For the other changes and bug fixes in this release see the Release Notes in the Help or on the Forum.