My Cantina

Hot on the heals of the V3.15.0.0 release this update addresses an issue in Surfulater V3.15.0.0 and some other older issues which have just been reported. I’ve also put the DBGHelp.DLL back into the Install package so people still using Windows 2000 won’t have a hiccup.

See the Release Notes in the Surfulater Help for more information. This new release of Surfulater is available from our Download Web page.

Finally thanks to everyone for their blog comments, e-mails etc. on the Version 3.15.0.0 release. Now that the major code update has been completed you will start to see more frequent releases again. Don’t forget to keep the conversations going about what you would like to see in future releases. The Suggestion Box in our support forums is always a good place for this.

The Surfulater evolution continues with the release of Version 3.15.0.0. This is another milestone release with major changes to the Surfulater code base to bring it in line with the latest Microsoft Development tools, in particular MS Visual Studio 2008 and the latest C++ Compiler. This makes Surfulater more robust and enables us to use the latest Microsoft technologies as we move forward.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to make substantial changes to the way the Surfulater code is packaged. In particular seven DLL’s have been completely removed and two more have been taken out of the Installation package. This code refactoring and repackaging removes problems caused by wrong versions of DLL’s and moves us closer to the possibility of a single .EXE file, potentially without any need for an Installer. Further it helps pave the way for a Portable USB Stick version of Surfulater. And finally it reduces the size of the Installer download file from 7.79MB to 5.67MB and the installed code footprint from 16.347MB down to 12.68MB. Substantial effort has gone into this, taking up much of our development time since the last release.

That is all below the surface, but there are good things happening above ground as well.

The most visual change in this release is how Tags are displayed in articles.

They don’t just look a lot better, but they perform better as well, in that you can now click on Tag to jump to it, in the Tags Knowledge Tree and then see and work with all the articles with that tag.

The next enhancement is the ability to change the color of text using Set Text Color, which is in addition to setting its background color.

  

Clicking on the button or choosing the right click context menu item changes the color of the selected text to the current color.

Clicking on the down arrow opens the color selection palette, which enables you to change the current color. Note that the current color is displayed below the A image. Restore to default is also new in this release and sets the current color back to its default value. This is also included on the Highlight Text color palette.

Another new feature is Set Title to selection which enables you to set the Title of the current article to the selected text. This is available on the right click context menu, when used on selected text.

There are times when an Article Title is not what you want and this provides a quick convenient way to change it.

If you are observant you will have noticed Web Search on the menu screen shot above.

This new feature enables you to perform a Google search using the currently selected text. Another handy time saver.

A subtle change we’ve begun in this release is the ability to make more changes to selected text without having to be in edit mode. For example the Add a Link and Remove this Link commands can now be used when not in content editing mode. As can the new Set Text Color.

Of course there is more; drag & drop can now be used during content editing to move text and images, and Copy and Paste as reciprocal ‘See also’ links can now be used in the Tags and Chronological Knowledge Tree views.

As always all of the new features and bug fixes are documented in the V3 Release Notes in the Help as well as in new and updated Help topics. Make sure you at least read the release notes.

The latest release of Surfulater is available from our Download Web page.

We’ve recently completed a major overhaul of the Surfulater home page and I hope it does a better job of conveying to people what Surfulater does and how useful it can be. Feedback welcome.

I’d like to dedicate this release to our friend and golfing buddy Neil Oram who sadly and unexpectedly passed away last Monday 20 Apr 2009. Neil was always a pleasure to be around and had many great games of golf left to play. He will be fondly remembered and greatly missed.

After writing Too much of a good thing I contacted the therein mentioned customer (Mr. T.) informing him of the blog post. To my surprise he wrote a lengthy rebuttal and with his permission here it is in full, along with another reply of mine and more from him. I hope you find this as interesting a read as I did.

(more…)

A new Surfulater customer e-mailed over the weekend wanting to know how to get Surfulater to automatically save each and every Web page he visited in his Web Browser. He commented that disk space is cheap and a 1TB drive only costs $150, so there is no reason not to do this. Well Surfulater doesn’t have this capability and it isn’t even one I’d considered, nor do I think has ever been suggested. I have to wonder is this wanting “too much of a good thing”?

I see several issues. First up out of all the pages one visits how many are of any real value - not many. Every time you do a Google search, do you really want the Search Results pages saved, and out of all the pages you visit from these Search Results, how many are of interest; when you are watching a Video on YouTube do you want that page saved, and on on it goes. Then there are issues of security! Do you want pages saved when you are doing your On-line Banking, or purchasing some goods with your credit card number shown - I don’t think so.

Yes disk space is cheap, no doubt about it. But if all these pages are so important, then backups must be just as important. We all know disk drives die, usually the day before you go and put a backup system in place! So you need a 1TB External Backup drive; no big deal and reasonably cheap as well. But this alone isn’t enough, well not for me, and would have to be complemented with a secure, reliable off-site backup. Ok now we are set with backups. But how long will it take to back up all these web pages, and how often will you perform the backups? And what about disk clutter, are these pages splattered all over the place as lots of individual files, or stored in a database. And what overhead is there in actually capturing them all in the first place.

This leads on to findability. There is little point storing large amounts information if you can’t quickly and easily find the specific gems of interest again and again. The more information you store the more difficult it becomes finding those needles in the haystack. If say 60% of the saved information was never of interest in the first place, then you’ve just made findability all that much harder. Computer people have a saying “garbage in - garbage out” and that is what we have here.

Organizational capabilities, such as Tagging, placement into Folders and adding Cross-Reference links along with the ability to add Notes and edit Captured content all aid greatly in findability, but I find it difficult to believe anyone would undertake such tasks for each and every web page that popped up in their Web Browser. And everyone that uses Surfulater knows just how important organizing content is, in aiding findability.

Now I doubt any of this will make any difference to the aforementioned customer and others like him and that’s fine as we can and should be able to use our computers in whatever way we feel works best for us. This simply seems like a bad idea to me, or for me. I want to be in control, saving the information I consider to be of real value and not cluttering my world with lots of useless crap I need to weed through.

Let me finish on something which is a good thing and that is the next release of Surfulater should be out this week.

Articles displayed in the Search Results folder have always been a little troublesome because you had no idea what folder(s) they actually lived in, and there are times when that meta-information is important. We’ve tossed around various possible solutions to this, but have never been happy with any until just recently. During yet another brain-storming session the penny dropped that yes Search Results articles are the main problem here, but wouldn’t it be nice to know all the folders any article is in, besides the current one of course.

For those new to Surfulater you may not be aware that an article can be in as many different folders as you like, with there only ever being one real instance of any given article. This solves the age old problem of picking just “one best” folder for an article.

So after this thought sunk in, some more lateral thinking bore fruit with the end result being to add a new “In Folders” breadcrumb row to each of the article templates, as shown here.

This shows that this article is located in the Knowledge Base | Alternative Energy | Solar Power folder. Each of these three sub-folders is a clickable link which take you directly to the respective folder.

When an article is in more than one folder, each one of the locations is displayed:

In addition a link named Article is included for each folder, other than the current one. Clicking on this takes you to the article in its associated folder. This new feature lets you not only see each of the folders an article is in, but also to jump to each copy of it.

Furthermore these new “In Folders” breadcrumbs are displayed for all of Knowledge Tree views. This means that when you are viewing articles in the Tags or Chronological trees, you can now see what folders they are located in, and instantly jump to them in the Normal Folder tree view. This builds on the right click context menu item “Go to Article in Normal View” in the Tags and Chronological tree views and “Go to Article” in the Search Results folder. Each of these goes to the first article found in the Normal Tree view, whereas the new “In Folders” breadcrumbs enable you to go to any article, when it is located in multiple folders.

The final enhancement here is the update to the display of collapsed folders in the content window to match  the Articles new “In Folders” row as shown here:

Like all Article rows, the “In Folders” row can be moved up and down using Edit | Enable Template Editing. See the Help Topic: Power Features | Editing Article Templates for further information on this.
I am sure you will find these enhancements let you move around and locate specific copies of articles quicker and easier than ever before.

For details on the other updates in this release see the “V3 Release Notes” topic in the Surfulater Help. The Download is in the usual place.

Surfulater Version 3 has been officially released following review by our early access release testers. I provided a summary of the new features and enhancements in the last blog post and won’t repeat that here. Instead I’ll briefly cover some of the main new capabilities. Remember that the V3 Release Notes in the Surfulater Help go into detail.

Tagging is  the number one new feature in Version 3. This enables you to classify articles using single or multiple word tags and instantly locate them again. For example you could add the tag ‘Solar Energy’ to all articles related to solar energy and then access these in the new Tags Tree.

Adding Tags to articles is assisted by auto-suggest. Just type the first letter or two and a pick list will display all appropriate matches.

Select the tag you want from the list using the arrow keys and press Tab or Enter to use it. Or just click on it.

To add a new tag to the tags database simply enter it into the Article Tags field or use New Tag from the right click context menu in the Tags Tree.

Tags can be renamed, merged and deleted to build the set of tags you find works best over time. And tag maintenance tasks like rename happen instantly, unlike some other products.

You can also add tags to a set of articles in one go, and similarly remove tags from them using the new Tags… dialog.

Tags provide an alternate view into your knowledge base to the hierarchical folder tree. Taking an analogy with a Book, you can think of Folders as the Table of Contents and Tags as the Index. Well that is an epiphany I had recently.

See Tags and Tagging Articles in the Surfulater Help for a complete reference. You will also find several posts here on blog about tagging, along with some of the design decisions that were made.

The next big new feature in Version 3 is the ability to rearrange article layouts to best suit your needs. Out of the box a Web Template article has this layout:

But what if you would prefer to have say the Tags and Comments fields moved up below the Title. This is where Template Editing comes into play. Click on Edit on the main menu and you will see a new menu item:

Choosing Enable Template Editing puts Surfulater into a special mode that enables you to change the order of article rows by simply dragging them to the location you want and then dropping them, as shown in this screen shot.

When you have finished rearranging the rows click on the [x] on the Information Bar at the top of the content window to exit template editing.

This is a precursor to more advanced template editing and creation to come.

See Editing Article Templates in the Surfulater Help for a complete reference.

For full details about what’s new in Version 3 do read the V3 Release Notes in the Surfulater Help.

Surfulater Version 3 has been a while in the making and has broken with our regular steady stream of new releases, however there are very good reasons for this, of which you will hear about soon. Now that V3 and other tasks are behind us, you can expect to see more frequent releases again. In fact I’m already hard at work on the next release. And I’d really like to get blogging a bit more often again.

Neville

Surfulater Version 3 is finished and an early access release is being tested by small group of customers. It has been out for almost a week and no issues have been reported so far, which is good news.

We are working on updates to the Surfulater Web site and Web Shop and these are currently holding back the full public release of Surfulater V3.

This summary of new features and enhancements will give you glimpse of what you will see in V3.0.

• The ability to Tag Articles using multi-word tags and auto-suggest.
• A new Tags Tree to access articles by tags and manage tags.
• The ability to Tag multiple articles at once and remove tags from multiple articles.
• Template editing lets you rearrange article rows in the order that best suits your needs.
• A new Firefox Extension which communicates directly with Surfulater.
• Full Windows Vista IE7 Protected Mode support.
• The Firefox Extension automatically is installed and updated by Surfulater.
• Greatly improved Web page capture.
• New Note Article template added.
• Better performance when displaying all articles in a folder.
• Migration to an SQL Database commenced.
• Expanded context menus.
• Web Knowledge Base publishing issues fixed.
• All selected Knowledge Tree articles are now displayed in the content window.
• Thirty six new images have been added to the Knowledge Tree image selection pallette.
• The in-built Web Server has been extensively updated and enhanced.

Further all known issues in the V2.9x pre-releases have been resolved.

For the latest information on the Version 3 release see Surfulater Version 3 Released

There are some Web pages that don’t capture all that well in Surfulater. All of the page content is captured ok, but the layout can be a mess. I’ve been building a list of such pages (and web sites) as people report them and as I come across them. For example the BBC News web site should look something like this:

But in Surfulater Version 2.52.0.10 it looks like this:

This was one of the more important issues for us to address in the forthcoming Surfulater Version 3 release. It actually turned out to be more complex and difficult to resolve than I’d expected, but the good news is Web page capture is much better now. As proof here is the same page captured in what will be Surfulater Version 3.0.

An observant person may notice one small difference to the first image, but that aside the result is very good indeed. Note that these are all full Web page captures using Surfulater: Add Article plus Page or Surfulater: Attach Page to Article and we are viewing the attached web pages.

A related content capture issue is that some Web sites prevent images from being downloaded. This shows up when capturing selected content for Surfulater articles and when capturing full web pages. This screen shot shows the problem in Version 2.52.0.10

And this screen shot shows the same capture in Surfulater Version 3.0.

This proved to be another difficult issue that I am very pleased has now been resolved.

We continue to make good progress with Surfulater Version 3, with a release planned for September. I am heading up north to the Pacific for a much needed short break and to ever so briefly escape our cold winter. I look forward to wrapping up V3 upon my return, as I’m sure you all do to.

As mentioned a few posts back we have a shiny new Surfulater pre-release available for you to take for spin.

The focus of this release is the new  Tags dialog, which I blogged about in Tags - we need your help. Part 1.  Avi has written several follow on posts: Tags and Whitespace - more feedback requested, Tag Management Part III - adding new tags (I’m not sure what happened to Part II) and Tag Management - Live Example Page

We’ve received a lot of great feedback, which we thank you very much for. And we look forward to more.

After weighing things up we’ve settled on using the combined Add and Remove Tags dialog implementation I presented in Part 1, with a change to the Keep column, making it Remove, as suggested by Craig Prichard.

Avi has put together a sample presenting various alternate combinations (18 I think he said) in his Tag Management - Live Example Page post. Do comment on these.

In case you haven’t been following the recent flurry of recent articles, the new  Add and Remove Tags dialog enables you to quickly add new tags to a group of selected articles and remove tags from them. I don’t want to repeat the earlier discussions here, so please go and read those posts for details.

The Surfulater Help Topic: The Basics | Tags and Tagging Articles has been updated to cover the new Add and Removes Tags dialog and the Release Notes in the Help cover some of the other changes in this release. There is more going on under the cover, but we aren’t quite ready to talk about them yet.

Without further ado you can download the new release here.

Neville.

In response to the great feedback we have received, we felt it was worthwhile to put up a live sample page of Tag Management. It can be accessed here:

http://www.surfulater.com/tagsamples/TagMgmt.html

When you get to the page, you have options on the left as to how the Tag Management form will behave on the right. Here are the options and behaviours.

• Whitespace Handling: Separator means whitespace acts as a separator, so “cat dog” will become two separate tags. Allowed means whitespace is just another character and part of a tag, so “cat dog” will become just one tag. Auto-Convert means whitespace is not allowed at all, and will automatically convert to an underbar ‘_’.
• Remove/Keep Column: Keep means that the checkbox determines which tags to keep, with unchecked ones being removed. Remove means that the checkbox determines which tags to removed, with unchecked ones left as they are. 3-way means that the checkbox for each tags has three states: checked (keep on or apply to all selected articles); unchecked (remove from all selected articles); dash-checked or semi-checked (currently applies to some of but not all the articles).
• New Tag Add: Text Only means that new tags in the “New tags” textfield are not shown as new tags in the rows below, but stay in the textfield until you click “Save.” Add to Rows means that as soon as you hit enter from within the “New tags” textfield, the new tags are immediately added to the rows below.

Set your options on the left, click the “Update” button, and try out the features in the Tag Management form on the right.

We look forward to more of your great feedback.

Avi