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!