Monday, June 20, 2005

1.3.3: Expect the integral browser to support Mozilla

When I take a look at my site stats, it shows something rather interesting: more than half of all visitors use a browser different than IE (mostly Firefox). And actually, there're quite a lot of reasons for doing so.

I don't want to get started with Internet Explorer's lack of functions, but rather with its lack of standards support: Especially for professional web developers, it surely is a good idea to use a more standards-compliant browser for previewing pages.

So, I have now nearly finished implementing a Mozilla/IE engine switcher for the integral browser. Of course, this doesn't only work for previewing pages, but also for browsing documentation, looking up search terms etc. Mozilla support will be in 1.3.3.

Also to expect is a more sophisticated window management allowing you to use the Open Documents panel to arrange only selected windows and thereby make real use out of NoteMaster's hidden full MDI functionality (by the way, you can still restore and minimise document windows by using the appropriate commands in the Window menu). Certain bugs will also undergo some revision: For instance, at the moment, the automatic recovery will just overwrite copies of files with the same filename without asking. This means that if you have two open documents C:\Text.txt and C:\Folder\Text.txt, you will be able to recover only one of these both files after a crash.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

NoteMaster 1.3.2: Now it's official

I just announced NoteMaster 1.3.2 on its homepage.

With the release of NoteMaster 1.3.2, I also decided to make a new home page for the NoteMaster site. It aims at giving visitors more incentive to download NoteMaster with a quick feature overview.

Enjoy the new release! As always, to report bugs or suggest features please E-mail me or use NoteMaster's built-in bug report feature (Help Menu -> Send Bug Report).

Friday, June 17, 2005

NoteMaster 1.3.2 is here

Today I uploaded the new NoteMaster 1.3.2.

The bad news first: It doesn't include an automatic updater as I originally planned. But I have taken care that the installer smoothly overrides an already existing version of NoteMaster, so upgrading shouldn't be a problem at all.

Also, I've added the missing English license agreement and the comdlg32.ocx.

Concerning the program itself, I've fixed quite a lot of bugs and added a bunch of useful new features. For example, the files in the Navigator panel now properly open on double-clicking and the infamous crash-on-exit bug is gone.
Try the new Open Document panel - I could have named it "Window List" as well - to keep track on all opened documents, see their save states and switch between them. Also, the Auto Complete feature has undergone significant improvements: It now allows you to choose whether you want to display all words in the current document or the current syntax scheme's keywords.
And now there is tabbed browsing, you can define your own homepage for the integral browser, there is a greatly improved Recent Files and Folders menu, ...

The new release is not yet announced on NoteMaster's home page, but you can already download NoteMaster 1.3.2. Read the Changelog for an overview on things that have changed in this release.

Monday, June 13, 2005

NoteMaster's Mysterious Crash on Exiting

You surely already have encountered this: When you exit NoteMaster, you will receive one of those Windows crash reports telling you that NoteMaster unexpectedly terminated.

Of course I know about that error. But I don't have the faintest idea of what to do about it. This error is obviously nothing I have control over in the code. NoteMaster's code smoothly handles the exiting process, and while I'm in the IDE I cannot reproduce the crash. So, apparently it's got something to do with the VB runtime again, which is - er - quite buggy.

The crash isn't acceptable, so I'll try whether I can find an ugly workaround for this problem. Wish me luck.

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

NoteMaster rejected on Tucows

I got an E-mail today telling me that Tucows has just rejected NoteMaster. This is because the reviewer found a German license agreement during setup even when he/she had selected English as the installer language.

This is a bit irritating, because this doesn't have something to do with the program itself. However, I do see their point - I wouldn't install software that only shows me a license agreement in a language I don't understand, I wouldn't have a clue of what I agree to.

I've got a new German as well as English license agreement here which is likely to make it into 1.3.2.

Saturday, June 04, 2005

NoteMaster won't start after a fresh install

If you download NoteMaster, install it and then disappointingly find that it doesn't even run, you're probably lacking the comdlg32.ocx file in your System directory. NoteMaster is dependent on this library; if it is missing, NoteMaster will silently fail to load.

This is, of course, an issue with the installer, and the next installer (which I plan to make available for download alongside with NoteMaster 1.3.2 next week) will address it. As for now, if you know a bit about Windows, you could add the file yourself (but please only if you do know something about Windows).

If you want to do so, download the OCX you find on the first Google result for "comdlg32.ocx". You should save it in your System directory (on XP this is probably C:\Windows\System32). Then right-click the file and choose to specify a program to open OCX files with. Browse to your System directory and choose the regsvr32 program. Finally, just double click the file and Windows will register it for you.

That's it! NoteMaster should properly run now. Of course, this is a bit complicated for average users (although NoteMaster is a code editor). As I said, I'll fix it next week.

The Blog, reloaded

While this blog hasn't had any new posts since January, I am now reviving it after recognising how important it is for spreading the word of NoteMaster. A blog is a very useful way of informing a large audience all at once, and RSS - as well as Atom - is becoming more and more important. Since I recently bought a Mac, I already enjoyed Safari RSS, which will certainly help in further spreading RSS.

About a month ago I already cleaned up the blog a bit in the hope of being able to offer two different language versions - English and German -, but this will probably not happen. Instead, I'll switch over to write English most of the time, and if I sometimes can't manage to deny myself from holding forth about German politics (which will certainly happen seldom), I hope you'll understand I'll use German then. So, I'm holding this two language problem very much like the Glazblog.

New NoteMaster is being worked on

Now after a month's break, I'm working on a new NoteMaster version again. Most importantly, this will fix several bugs, like the toolbar resizing or the MRU menu.

I also plan to introduce an automatic update check; NoteMaster will be updated based on user feedback quite a lot these times, and I really want to save the user from having to visit computtrax.com, downloading the setup file, uninstalling the old version and installing the new one every time. So, this feature will certainly be a progress.

Additionally, several usability improvements are being made, like an improved menu item order and access to more MRU files and even quick access to recently used folders. I always developed NoteMaster with usability in mind, as a text editor should speed up your work and not slow it down.

The new NoteMaster will be available here in the near future.