Clibu

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.

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.

 

 

 

(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.  

In an e-mail exchange with Stephane Grenier last week, he made a side comment that I hadn’t written anything on my blog in a bit. All I can say is “my how time flies”. Well in fact I can say a lot more, but that pretty much sums up this past month.

I’ve been an ever elusive day or two away from the next Surfulater release for almost two weeks now. The reason for this is that I’ve made quite few changes under the hood and these have rippled through into various areas, which in turn needed to be updated. All for the better mind you.

If I count the bullet points in the V1.98.0.0 Release Notes, then this looks like the biggest release ever. Mind you I’ve not gone back and counted up all the previous releases, but I think this is a fairly accurate statement.

A few things to look forward to include: The ability to use ‘Send To’ to e-mail etc. all articles in a folder, new options to hide or show various components in the content window, such has hiding item labels, the pencil column or empty fields, the ability to expand and collapse all articles in the content window, updates to the layout in the content window to tighten it up, external access to the style sheet used in the content window so you can control how text is displayed etc., further improvements to Surfulater’s Unicode support, the ability to start minimized, plus lots more.

Even though I’ve been too quiet here, the Forums are as active as ever, especially the Surfulater Customer Forums with over 1,100 posts now. If you’ve purchased Surfulater and haven’t registered on the forums yet, then why don’t you go and do it right now.

I really am closing in on a release wrap now and if all goes according to plan it will be out today. Because of the number of updates and their nature, this release will initially only be available to our Surfulater customers. You will be able to download it from this Surfulater Downloads forum area. 

This release has taken a bit longer than I’d planned, but I have to say I’m very pleased with the end result and hope you are too.

Update: The V1.98.0.0 pre-release is now available. See this forum post for details. 

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.

 

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.

 

It’s here, and just in time for Easter. As I mentioned in my last blog post the latest Surfulater release somehow got away from me, delaying its release more than I like. I try to get a new release out about every 4-6 weeks and have been reasonably successful at that so far.

There are several reasons why this release took longer. First researching the requirements to import bookmarks from seven different sources was time consuming, as was testing. Next we’ve had some great new users come on board these past few months and this resulted in higher levels of forum activity and direct communications. All great stuff, but there are only so many hours in the day, so something has to give. Then there has been other diversions such as the great Tucows review and OnFolio being purchased by Microsoft, leaving some users contemplating its future, worrying about their data, and looking at alternatives like Surfulater. And finally the list of things I wanted to do for this release kept on growing, as you’ll see by the over 40 items in the release notes. The good news is that it is out and I can breath a sigh of relief and have a bit of an easter break.

But before I do, I’ll run through some of the new features in this release.

The ability to import bookmarks has been on the todo list for a quite some time. Many of you will have read of my reluctance to clutter Surfulater with hundreds or even thousands of bookmarks (one person told me he has over 10,000), but as you will see I finally relented. This is the new File|Import sub-menu:

From here you can import bookmarks from Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and any application that can Export bookmarks in either Netscape or XBEL Bookmark formats. For the latter I’ve specifically included support for Compass, Linkman and Powermarks programs. See the Help topic Power Features | Importing Bookmarks for more information.

The Web Browser context menu includes a new item to enable you to Bookmark web pages in Surfulater as shown here:

 

 

Next I spent quite a chunk of time improving the user interface for content editing and fixing related problems as reported by Mark Vincenzes and others.  Improvements include a dotted outline around the field that has focus as shown here:

When an article field has focus you can press F2 or left click to edit the field. If you left clicked to give the field focus in the first place, you need to wait about .5 of a second before clicking a second time. The behaviour of Tab and BackTab (Shift+Tab) have also been improved. They now move the focus to the next or previous field within an article. Finally if you’ve made editing changes and press Escape you are now given options to save the changes, discard them or continue editing. Further improvements are also slated. See the Release Notes for full details.

Briefly moving back to Bookmarks, you will see that they include a new Rating field. As you hover your mouse over the rating stars, they change color to indicate their potential new setting. The selected rating is also displayed in a popup tip and on the status bar.

To lock a rating in, click on a star and the colors of the selected stars change again to indicate their final setting.

I’ve only added the Rating field to the new Bookmark article template, however it is easily added to any template. You’ll be able to search Ratings when Advanced Search is implemented. 

The Bookmark template also includes Modified and Visited fields which can also be used in other templates. Also note that the collapsed Bookmark layout in the content window differs to the other article templates in that it includes the Web address and doesn’t allow editing. There is also a new Note article template with its own characteristics. All of this highlights the flexibility inherent in Surfulater’s design.

I want to touch on two final updates before I call it a day.

First approximately 40 new images have been added to the Knowledge Tree image selection palette. I’ve also updated a number of images with complimentary, but better looking images. Again see the release notes for full details.

 

And last but not least the XML Clipboard Format that Surfulater uses to capture content from other applications has been updated to enable better integration with applications other than Web Browsers. This is the result of lengthy Forum and private discussions between Perry Mowbray and myself. I intend to write a Blog post detailing the updated format in the next few days.

I’ve only covered the main updates in V1.96.0.0 here, so ensure you read the release notes in the Help (and in the Forums) to get the complete picture.

Happy Easter to all.

PS. Hi Kate if you are reading. :)