Wednesday, November 30, 2005

NoteMaster 1.3.4

Finally, 3 weeks late, I can present NoteMaster Beta 1.3.4 to you. You can get it right now on the Downloads page.

What's new?
Plenty. Of course, there are lots of bugfixes - including one that fixes a severe lag that occured while typing and selecting text - but there's new functionality as well. That includes the customizable hotkey system and an all-new scripting system which now does not only support VBScript and JScript, but also offers a well-documented and logical object model to scripts. Also, the much-requested "force single instance" and "notify on external changes" options have been included. Take a look at the Changelog for an overview.

Why didn't you upload it until now?
I know, I told you in the last post I'd have put it online by November 13. I'm sorry. I actually had it ready that Sunday, but I found a bug while testing in the last minute, and decided against releasing NoteMaster on time.

I installed NoteMaster 1.3.4 and now, when I try to launch it, it just crashes with an error message.
That actually is the bug I mentioned above. It occurs extremely seldom and I also believe it does so only on Win9x systems (not on 2000 and XP). Try to delete the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VB and VBA Program Settings\NoteMaster branch using regedit and it should work (which will delete all of your personal NoteMaster settings, unfortunately).
I will take effort to fix this for the final release.

I found this bug and this doesn't work and I think it'd be better to implement that and wouldn't it be nice to have feature X. Can I tell you about that?
Yes, please! I really need your feedback on NoteMaster and it does indeed help. In NoteMaster 1.3.3 and 1.3.4, there were many features and bugfixes that were actually requested by NoteMaster users.
NoteMaster has a feedback feature found in the Help menu. You can use that or just send an E-mail to notemaster@computrax.com.

Did you incorporate everything you wanted into this version?
No ;-) There's always that one feature you wanted but then have to dismiss to release on time. For example, I wanted to overhaul the project management, but just didn't have time. I hope I'll have done it in the final 1.3.5 (or 1.4), though.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

NoteMaster 1.3.4 Teaser

First off, I'm sorry for staying away from blogging for so long, I've been really busy. But in case you're wondering whether that means that NoteMaster has been neglected - it so doesn't.

There's a lot new in NoteMaster, not numerically, but regarding functionality:
  • Fully customizable hotkeys
    NoteMaster allows you to customize your hotkeys to fit your needs through a new Options page.

  • Much improved scriptability
    The totally overhauled scripting feature has been integrated into the main editing interface and now allows you to use JScript besides VBScript. In addition, a new and well-documented scripting object model makes scripting easier than ever.

  • "Force single instance" and "Notify on external changes" options
    Finally, you can have NoteMaster use only a single instance and notify you when external applications make changes to a file opened in NoteMaster.
Apart from that, there are bugfixes: command line parsing issues have been fixed and scripts executed through the Tools/Scripts menu finally always work (certainly that's been one of the more embarassing bugs...).

Expect the final version somewhen next week. Also, note that this will most likely be the last beta version, and 1.3.5 (or maybe 1.4) will be the first final version, so I need your feedback more than ever (you can still E-mail me at notemaster@computtrax.com, or use NoteMaster's built-in feedback feature).