My Cantina

Surfulater Version 3.20.0.0 is now available and includes some great new features to end another great year of Surfulater development.

Our new Screen Clipper lets you capture any area of your screen and save it as an image in a Knowledge Base. You can create a new article which includes the screen clip or append screen clips to fields in existing articles.

The Screen Clipper complements Surfulater’s Web content and Clipboard capture capabilities enabling any source of information to be captured and saved in Surfulater.

For me having screen shot clipping adds the missing piece of the content capture puzzle and I am very pleased with how it has turned out. I’ve also been putting it to good use.

And this is what the screen clipper user interface looks like:

Screen Clipper is accessed from the Edit menu, Toolbar and various context menus. For more information see the Screen Clipper topic in the Surfulater Help.

The other great update in this release is an enhancement to Surfulater’s Clipboard Hotkeys, which enable you to capture content from any Windows application. You now only need to select the content and press the Hotkey. No more having to copy the selection to the Windows Clipboard first. It is surprising just how much quicker and easier it is to capture content now.

We’ve also released Screen Clipper today, a free stand-alone screen shot capture program that requires no installation and can be used from a USB stick. See my previous blog post and www.screenclipper.com for details.

We are offering Screen Clipper users a special discount as an incentive to purchase Surfulater, so please tell your friends and colleagues about it, and Surfulater and help everyone out.

We will soon be trialling some cross promotions as a way to get some new exposure for Surfulater and hopefully sales, and to also provide you with some special offers on other software products that may be of interest. If you opted out of being sent E-Mails when you purchased Surfulater then of course you won’t receive these offers. And if you didn’t, you will be able to easily opt out at any time by clicking a link on the e-mails we send. Your feedback on this is welcome.

Thanks to everyone for their ongoing support this year and to all the new users who have come on board. Surfulater continues to evolve and become an even more indispensable tool in our Internet research toolbox (as Shelton Oliver said in an E-mail this morning). And we can all look forward to more of the same in the new year.

On that note may you and yours all have a very merry xmas and a happy new year.

Oh and the download is in its usual place here and don’t forget to read the V3 Release Notes in the Surfulater Help.

All the best for 2010, Neville

The very short answer to this even shorter blog post is for you to go and have a look at this New Web site I’ve just finished the first cut of and the answer should reveal itself.

After that if you are interested in a sneak peak of a pre-release of Screen Clipper, let me know. You might also want to sign up to be notified when it is released. And if you have friends or colleagues who could be interested in Surfulater, tell them to sign up and take advantage of the special Surfulater discount we currently have on offer.

This is the main new capability coming in the next release, but there is more which we’ll let you know about in due course.

I was contacted by a long time ED for Windows customer yesterday who had visited our Surfulater Web site and commented on the quotes we have there, adding his own “Hope is not a plan”. I’d not heard this before and it took me aback thinking how appropriate it was in terms of Surfulater and more broadly anyone who uses a PC.

Most everyone with a PC spends time on the Internet, sometimes just stumbling almost randomly from site to site, but often searching for specific information to solve a particular problem. It could be researching the purchase of a new TV, Camera, Car etc. or trying to gather information on a medical condition, plan a family holiday, get help with a school assignment and on it goes.

We all know the Internet is an addiction and that we can and do spend countless hours trying to wheedle out every last piece of relevant information we can. But what happens with all this hard won information? For most people, not much. They’ll read as much as they can and do their best to absorb it. They may also set a bookmark in the hope they can find the page and content again, so they can research some more.

But “Hope is not a plan”; can you find the bookmark, if not, are you prepared to put the time and effort into trying to find the web page all over again. And if you do just happen to find it, will the content you think you saw before still be there now! Worse still the entire site may no longer exist.

The internet has the potential to greatly enrich our lives by presenting us with a wealth of incredibly useful information. Wise readers will plan to copy and keep this information, not hope that they may be lucky enough to find it again in the future. And there is a good chance they’ll use Surfulater to do just that.

“Hope is not a plan” is a truism that applies everywhere. People hope that the hard drive in their PC never dies, if it does they hope they have a “good” and recent backup to recover their many, many important documents, financial records, family pictures etc. They hope that if a fire comes racing through their house they will survive.

So the takeaway from all this is make plans, test the plans and work the plans, because “Hope is not a plan”.

Not a lot to say other than this release fixes a particularly nasty crash that has been in Surfulater since Tagging was added in Version 3.0. Thanks to Nick Kneen this finally came to light a week and a bit back and has now been fixed. This release also gets Ctrl+V, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+X etc. working again when editing items in the Knowledge Tree. They broke in V3.16.0.0 as recently reported by Alexandros Deligiannis in our support forums. Other than that please see the Release Notes in the Surfulater Help when you install this new release. The download is available in the usual places on our Home and Download pages.

We’ve had some great feedback on the new Knowledge Tree filters introduced in the last release and I am very pleased that it has been so enthusiastically received. A comment we did get from a few people is they wanted the expand/collapse state of the filter pane to be retained across sessions, which is the main update in this release. Some folks also reported random crashes in V3.16.0.0 which turned out to be caused where Internet Explorer Version 6 was still being used. We have resolved this as well, however we would urge people who have yet to upgrade to IE7 or IE8 to do so as soon as possible, as there may well now be other problems related to IE6 that we are not aware of.

I have also updated the Knowledge Tree Filter to maintain independent settings for the Normal tree view and Folders Only tree view, fixed some bugs related to the new filter code and addressed some other recently reported issues.

The complete release notes are in the Surfulater Help and the download is on the Surfulater Download page.

My last blog post was about the new Surfulater Knowledge Tree feature that allows items in the tree to display text in bold, and italic and use background and foreground colors, so tree items can have a greater visual impact. I also hinted at an ulterior motive behind this, which I can now tell you is related to the big new feature in today’s Version 3.16.0.0 release, which is Knowledge Tree Filters.

Knowledge Tree Filters enable you to choose specific items and only those items to display in the tree. This lets you quickly drill down and locate a set of items of interest and then work with them, while everything else remains hidden out of your way. You can filter by Folder name, Article title or Tag name. For example you can elect to display only articles whose title includes “energy”. I have been using this constantly while developing and refining it, for well over a month now and I have to say I am finding it very, very useful indeed.

Let me start by showing you the new Knowledge Tree Filter user interface panel which lives at the top of the Knowledge Tree bar.

As you can see it is quite simple and hopefully self-explanatory. You pick whether you want to filter by Folder Titles, Article Titles or both and then type the text to filter on. Filtering occurs as you type with the results displayed in the Knowledge Tree.

This is a screen shot of the enhanced Knowledge Tree for the sample MyKnowledge database without any filtering applied.

Now the same tree filtered by Folder or Article Titles which contain the text “energy”.

Notice that the tree items that match the filter term “energy” have the matching text highlighted, in the same way search matches are highlighted in articles in the content window.

Only articles that include “energy” in their title are displayed. The ‘Folder-Article’ counts displayed in gray are the total number of articles in the folder, not the count of filtered matches. So the folder “Solar Power” has 4 articles, but only two match the filter and are thus visible.

Two folders “Solar Power” and “Pending Reading” do not include “energy” in their title and therefore do not match the filter as such. However they do contain articles that match and because ‘Search in: Articles’ is checked, these matching articles and thus their folders are shown. All other folders and articles are excluded or filtered out.

In the screen shot above ‘Search in: Articles’ is not checked and the filter is therefore only applied to Folder Titles. You can see that only two folders match and these are highlighted. Furthermore because the Articles filter is off no checks are performed on article titles and all articles in the matching folders are included in the results.

Knowledge Tree Filters can be used with all of the Tree views, not just the Folder (normal) view. These final two screen shots show the Chronological view filtered by “march” and the Tags view filtered by “power”.

  

Each Knowledge Tree view retains its own independent filter settings and filter status.

The button turns the filter on and off and the button collapses and expands the Filter panel. See the Surfulater Help topic: Power Features | Knowledge Tree Filters for more information.

As I mentioned at the start I’m finding Knowledge Filtering a most welcome new feature that lets me quickly locate and see a specific set of articles. I hope you find it as useful as I do.

Other updates in this release include support for Windows 7, several Vista specific issues fixed, an update to the Firefox Extension, updates to use new versions of third party libraries, another reduction in the Surfulater.EXE size, some more performance improvements and various bug fixes. Full details are in the Surfulater Help | V3 Release Notes topic.

This sparkling new release can be downloaded from the Surfulater Home page or Download page. We look forward to your feedback and suggestions on this new release.

I’m nearing the end of development for the next major Surfulater release which includes two important new features and I want to preview the first one for you now.

An enhancement that people have been asking for is to improve the visual characteristics of items displayed in the Knowledge Tree so that for example bold or italic text could be displayed, making specific tree items stand out from the crowd and therefore be easier to locate when scrolling or paging up and down.

I’ve actually taken this a step further and have enabled tree items to display HTML so that what you see in the content window, is what you now see in the tree. This means text foreground and background colors along with bold and italics now appear in the Knowledge Tree.

This screen shot shows an article with its Title highlighted using background and foreground colors as well as bold and italic text and its corresponding item in the Knowledge Tree with the same visual markup applied.

I’ve also highlighted some folders and other articles. One other thing to note is the article counts to the right of each folder are now displayed in Grey instead of Black, making them a bit more subtle.

You have always been able to set the images displayed for each tree item and now with the ability to set the appearance of the text, you get full visual control of tree items. Further it lets Surfulater highlight items of specific interest, as the need arises.

Apart from our users wanting this, it was needed for the other even more important new feature coming in this release, which you will hear all about soon.

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.

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