The new release of PageFour has just gone live. Thanks to all the beta testers who caught those last few annoying bugs that always seem to creep in no matter how much pre-beta testing takes place.

The Smart-Edit feature is looking good, and there haven’t been too many disparaging comments - no doubt that will come later - so overall I’m happy with the result. Most of my own testing of the new feature was done using downloaded copies of Jane Austen novels from The Gutenberg Library, and a few other downloads via Kazaa that I have no intention of naming due to questions over copyright, that if I came clean I would have to admit are not really questions at all. All I have to say after looking at the results is that Jane Austen really is a superior writer to many of the cheap and cheerful Sci Fi scribblers currently on the best seller lists, and let’s leave it at that.

I spent about an hour one evening last week over a bottle of wine scanning the results for her crutch words in Pride & Prejudice and Emma, and the best I could come up with was two uses of ‘obtruded’ and an over fondness for the word ‘mortification.’ The contemporary novels I ran the same tests on … well, let’s just say the report card would read something along the lines of: ‘Needs work, must try harder.‘

Anyway, version 1.5 is live, so check it out - all 30 Day trial restrictions have been removed, so there really are no excuses!

The next version of PageFour is complete and ready for testing. Having said that, the release of the beta will have to wait until my new telephone is installed and my internet connection back up and running - next week hopefully.

In each release of PageFour, I’ve tried not to add any extra complexity to the product, preferring to leave out little changes that may benefit small numbers of people, if they make the product as a whole more difficult to understand. I’m a firm believer in the ‘less is more‘ and the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) schools of thought when it comes to software design, and my aim has always been to keep PageFour firmly grounded in simplicity and not get carried away designing features for the sake of it.

Changes and enhancements in the upcoming release include:

1. Smart-Edit. This is a built in tool to scan pages for common phrases and words, and is my first attempt at incorporating editing features into PageFour. I’m still unsure as to the wisdom of even making the attempt, and I’ll expand on the functionality later. All opinions will be more than welcome.
2. Improvements to the Auto-Archiving feature. Having used PageFour for a year now, I’m working with fifteen Notebooks and about a thousand pages. Backing up this number of files is time consuming, so the Auto-Archiving has been changed to allow the user to select which Notebooks should be auto-archived. This does not impact archives made by the user, which will continue to backup all Notebooks.
3. Changes to the word counter. This little change gave me a big headache! Originally, the intention was to have a rolling word count on the status bar, incrementing as you typed, but this proved overly ambitious. Though possible, such a feature would have used far too much memory, turning PageFour into a cripplingly slow application like many Norton products. The solution was to approach the problem similarly to MS Word, with a little dialog sitting on top, out of the way, and easily refreshable when you want a word count update.
4. New feature to allow top level folders and pages to be added from the Notebook list. This is necessary when a Notebook has so many pages and folders that no free space can be found in the tree, preventing new pages from been added directly to the Notebook.
5. Superscript option added to text formatting.

Minor changes include:

1. When importing and rolling back Notebooks or pages, only the relevant Notebooks are automatically backed up before the changes are applied. This makes a big difference when you have a large number of Notebooks and pages.
2. Corrections to scrolling and display problems in the main Notebook tree under certain Operating Systems.
3. Multi select enabled for Notebook roll back.
4. Correction to indentation issues in numbered lists.

As I said earlier, if all goes well with Eircom (yeah, right!) I hope to have a beta version available for download next week, which I’d love people to try out. I’ll be giving a fuller description of the Smart-Edit feature shortly, and again, feedback will be a big help. Even though the work is complete, I’m still of two minds as to whether I should even release it.

Finally, I’m contemplating changes to the way the trial version of the product works, in the hopes that more downloads can be turned into dedicated users and sales. Again, I’ll write more on this closer to the release date.

I’ve been out of touch with the wider world for some time now, but it’s not because I’m turning into some sort of recluse. Any thoughts I may have had of abandoning civilisation and living a life of contemplation up in the mountains were abandoned years ago, when I stopped reading all those silly Herman Hesse novels at university.

The blame for my infrequent communications lies with the local telecommunications company here in Ireland. After five weeks, they’re only just getting around to connecting the telephone in my new home. Fingers crossed, it should all be up and running next week, complete with the necessary high speed connection.

Let this be a lesson to anyone contemplating a move to the slower paced life of Ireland - six weeks for a telephone connection is not that unusual. Of course, as soon as the connection comes through, I’ll be ditching Eircom in favour of one of their many competitors - incompetence has a price guys!

Despite my sheltered life over the past month, work has continued on the next version of PageFour - details to follow.