The current version of PageFour implements a standard Search feature common to all word processors. Searching for text across folders and Notebooks however is not possible, making it necessary to perform either a Page by Page search within PageFour, or to use the awkward Windows Search.

The new Search feature gives you the option of selecting where to look for text, pages or folders. You choose from the currently open Page (the default), the current Notebook, or all Notebooks and Pages. Results from the more extensive searches are then displayed in a list, making it a simple process to find the exact Page you are looking for. Double clicking any item in the list immediately opens the Page and highlights the first occurrence of the specified text. It is then simply a case of using the Find Next (F3) option to jump to each successive occurrence on the Page.

As the new Search may lead to a long list of results, the old Search dialog has been abandoned in favour of incorporating the Search directly into PageFour’s main Window. The interface initially appears similar to the Find feature in the Firefox browser, popping up at the bottom of the window when Find or Ctrl+F is selected.

The results list appears below the search options as the detailed search is being carried out. If all you are doing is searching within the current page, no list is displayed and only a small amount of screen space used.

When you begin an extensive search across Notebooks, you may be asked to enter your password. This will only occur if a password protected Page lies within the scope of the search. Choosing not to enter your password will not cancel the search, it simply means that any protected Pages will be bypassed during the search.

The old ‘Find Folder or Pages‘ option has been changed to work in a similar way to text searching across Notebooks. Where the old version uses icons in the Notebooks list to highlight Notebooks that contain the specified Page or folder, the new version displays a list and allows you to immediately double click on the Page or folder you are searching for. Double clicking on a Page opens the Page, whereas double clicking on a folder opens the relevant Notebook and selects the folder in the display.

Use of shortcut keys make the new Search simple and easy to use. The Search menu remains, with Find (Ctrl+F), Find Folder or Page (Ctrl+G), and Replace (Ctrl+H) each opening a different window in the Search bar. The Find Next (F3) option now only works for text searches in the currently open Page, as the list make it unnecessary when searching for Pages or folders. The Close Search option closes the search bar, as does the Escape shortcut key.

Opening a page from the list is simply a case of double clicking or pressing the Enter key on a selected item. The list itself can be enlarged - making it easier to browse a long set of results - by dragging the splitter above the search bar upwards.

Results of extensive searches are NOT lost when the search bar is closed or if you do another search in a single Page. They are only overwritten when another extensive Notebook search is performed. This makes it possible to do a search and carry out work on the resulting Pages without ever needing to rerun the initial search.

While working on these new features, there was a temptation to add an almost identical feature for the Replace All option, which would carry out a global replace of text across all Notebooks. Though not difficult to implement, I decided that this feature would simply be too dangerous. Performing an obvious replace such as “Gandalf” to “Dumbledore” across all pages may be very useful, but allowing this would also mean allowing someone to change “the” to “for“, or “a” to “e“, which would destroy or seriously damage every Page in every Notebook. At the moment, the Replace All works only within the currently open Page. I’d be interested in feedback on this particular issue.

Suggestions and comments on the new Search are very welcome. Either leave a comment, or drop me an .

It’s been some time now since the last major update of PageFour, but work IS ongoing on the next version. Though a final release is still some time away, a series of betas will be available over the coming weeks as features are completed. This should allow plenty of time for feedback and any changes or corrections that may become necessary.

The first beta will be released later on today or early tomorrow, and will contain the new Search feature. The inability to search for text across folders and Notebooks has been one of the weakest areas of PageFour since day one. Implementing this feature has also allowed me to integrate the search and replace more fully with the main PageFour window, eliminating the floating search dialog in the process.

I welcome all feedback on the new features, especially while they are still in beta, as this is the point at which changes can most easily be made.

A full description of the new Search capability, along with a download link will be posted shortly.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone running PageFour - whether the Free Edition or the licensed version - under Windows Vista. There are a couple of known bugs when running with Vista, but most users should not encounter them as they only manifest under unusual circumstances.

The issues all relate to changing the Location of Notebook Pages to a folder where you do not have full write access - one of the areas that Vista has ‘improved‘ on XP.

I never thought I’d be looking back on XP as a model Operating System, but there you go. Halcyon days, and all that.

So, if you are experiencing any issues running PageFour under Vista, or even if it’s running perfectly well for you, I’d appreciate an . I’m trying to get a picture of the proportion of Vista users who are having issues, and if they are for the same reasons.

A common question from PageFour users is how to go about moving PageFour and all their Notebooks and Pages to another PC. It’s a relatively straight forward process, though there are a few steps that need to be followed.

1. Download and install the latest version of PageFour to your new PC.
2. If you are running a licensed version, open the License dialog from the Help menu and enter the product key you were given when you purchased. This will have been sent to you via email, but if it has been lost or misplaced, contact us with the name you used when making the purchase, and we’ll track it down for you.
3. Did you set a PageFour password on your old PC? If the answer is yes, open the Password dialog on your new PC by selecting the ‘Tools | Change Password’ menu, and set the password so that it corresponds to the one on your old PC.
4. On your new PC, open the Options dialog from the ‘Tools | Options’ menu, click on the Miscellaneous button, and make sure the Location of Notebook Pages value is the same as your old PC. (This step is not critical, but it will make the moving process less prone to human error)
5. Close PageFour.
6. Locate your PageFour files folder on your old PC. An earlier blog post outlines how to go about finding this folder, which may or may not be named ‘PageFour’.
7. Copy this folder in its entirety from your old machine to the same location on your new machine. When prompted by Windows, simply agree to overwrite any existing files or folders with the same name.
8. Reopen PageFour on your new PC. All your old Notebooks and Pages will appear, and all customised dictionaries and archives will be in place.
9. Two default Notebooks, ‘First Novel’ and ‘My Notebook’ will have been created when PageFour was installed on your new PC. These can be deleted at any time.

If you still cannot see your PageFour Notebooks, the problem will almost certainly lie in the Location of Notebook Pages. This should be checked again to ensure that you copied the PageFour folder to the correct location, as it is very easy to inadvertently drop or copy into the wrong folder.

The above image demonstrates the correct structure of your PageFour folder.

The most frequently asked question by PageFour users is “Where are my files?” And the usual reason for asking is that they want to back up their data to CD or thumb drive. Though PageFour does archive your files automatically, this does not help you in the event of a hard drive failure, or your house burning down.

When you run PageFour for the first time, all your Notebooks and Pages, archives, and customised dictionaries are written to your own user-specific Windows Application Data folder. This location can be changed by you at any time. To identify the exact location of your files, open the Options dialog from the Tools menu, and click on the Miscellaneous button. The value stored under Location of Notebook Pages is where all your files are stored.

In the above example, my files are stored in the “C:\Documents and Settings\Darren\Application Data\IMBT\PageFour” folder.

On machines running Windows Vista or Windows 7, the default location will be “C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\IMBT\PageFour\”

If there are many user accounts on your PC - say one for yourself, another for your husband, and children etc. - and each of you runs PageFour, there will be multiple PageFour folders, all in each user’s Application Data folder.

Depending on your Windows file settings, this folder may not always be visible when browsing. If this is the case, open Windows Explorer, go to the Tools menu, select Folder Options, open the View tab, and make sure the Hidden Files and Folders setting is set to “Show hidden Files and Folders“.

Your Notebook Pages should NEVER be stored in the “Program Files” folder of your PC. This location is normally used by software as it installs itself, and often contains files that are needed to run the software. PageFour will by default install into this folder, and many of the files it writes here are used when setting up new PageFour users, so this folder should be left untouched and does NOT need to be backed up.

So which folders and files should I back up?

That depends on how often you back up. There are four separate folders, along with many sub-folders within your PageFour folder - Archive, Data, Dictionaries, and Temp.

The “Archive” folder contains ALL your existing archives, in some cases going back as far as a year. If you back up frequently, or to a location without much memory (a thumb drive for example), you may decide not to back up this folder. The Archive folder does not contain your most current work.

The “Data” folder MUST be backed up. This folder contains all your current Notebooks and Pages. In the example above, there are seven Notebooks - Blog, Business Blog, Journal, etc. The best way to back up these Notebooks is simply to copy the entire Data folder.

The “Dictionaries” folder is quite small, and only contains your own customised dictionaries, along with any auto-correct dictionaries you may have updated. This is not a critical folder, and you may choose to back this up only rarely.

The final folder, which may or may not exist depending on which PageFour features you have been using, is called “Temp”. You do NOT need to back this folder up, as its contents are temporary and of no great importance.

Do remember to close PageFour before performing a backup.

Is there a quicker way to back up?

Yes, there is. If all you wish to do is take a copy of your existing Notebooks, the quickest method is to go to the Tools menu and select Export Notebooks. This will copy all your current Notebooks and Pages to a location of your choosing for easy backup. In the case of a thumb drive, it will perform the entire backup for you, whereas if you are backing up to CD, exporting to a recognised backup folder on your local machine may help speed up the process.

Backing up your PageFour Data folder IS important, as hard drive failures and corruption can occur at any time. How often you decide to backup, is of course, up to you.

Over the past year, there have been a number of enquiries about the possibility of a Mac version of PageFour. My response has always been that the probability of releasing a version for the Mac is very low. I’m a Windows developer, and have been for many years. Despite having a lot of respect for the Mac software community, I have never been tempted to join. My training and working life have been focused primarily on Big Business software - an area that tends to impinge little on Mac users.

Every time someone queries me on the Mac, I point them to Scrivener, a neat piece of software, written - like PageFour - for creative writers. For many months, Scrivener was available as a free beta, as the product was still undergoing development, but version 1.01 of the completed version has just been released.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re a Mac user, as it does share some features with PageFour (the use of Snapshots being the most obvious). You can download it here, or check out the authors blog here.

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.

Last weekend saw another PageFour review on www.download.com, and would you believe it, she got a whopping 5 stars. The download figures may be low, the sales figures lower still, but the feedback from where it really counts is still as positive as ever.

So a special thanks to trystwiththemoon for posting such a favourable impression of PageFour on a public forum. And no, it wasn’t me writing under one of my many aliases. I’d be far too afraid of being found out to pull off something like that, not to mention the negative publicity that would surely follow. But then, they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity…

I backtracked a PageFour referral yesterday to a site called Literature and Latte, home of a new Mac tool for writers named Scrivener. The designer acknowledges PageFour’s influence on one of the key features of the product, citing the Snapshots as inspiration for their implementation of versioning. I’m flattered that my humble offering is having such far reaching influence, but in all fairness I can claim credit only for trying out a few non-standard ideas borrowed from elsewhere.

A little over a year ago I read a book called About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, written by Alan Cooper. It was the thoughts and ideas presented in this book that formed the basis of PageFour’s more unique features. The author questioned much of the established wisdom or ‘way of doing things‘ in User Interface design, using MS Word as a primary example of how not to do things. He demonstrated how many of the features common across software are common not because they are intuitive or even useful approaches, but because they were first implemented at a time when meeting the hardware requirements was more important than satisfying users. Today, with hard drives and memory doubling in size every eighteen months, hardware limitations are almost a thing of the past. Yet despite this, user interfaces still carry the burden of design weaknesses from a bygone era, and many of us have come to accept these flaws as the correct way of doing things.

When you put a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and start typing, the words appear on the page as you work. You don’t have to make a decision ten or twenty minutes later to either keep what you wrote or clear the page. You’ve spent a lot of time thinking carefully about which words to use and how to string them together, so of course you want to hold onto them. Yet this is exactly the sort of decision that software like MS Word expects you to make every day. You type into a blank document, the words appear in front of you, and after you’ve finished your work, you’re asked if you want to ‘Save‘ it. You’re basically asked if you really meant it or were you just playing around for the past twenty minutes?

Software works this way because hardware works this way.

A blank document in a word processor is not the same as a sheet of paper. When you type into MS Word, your work is stored temporarily in one type of memory. When you ‘Save‘ your work (which of course you want to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered to begin with), it’s stored a second time in a more permanent type of memory. This is the ONLY reason software asks you if you want to save your work, and it only asks you because once upon a time memory was scarce and very, very expensive, and if there was even the slightest chance that you really were just playing around, it wouldn’t have to use up that little bit of permanent memory.

And because software worked this way once (out of a kind of necessity), it still works this way today.

Users are expected to understand how the hardware and Operating Systems of their computers work in order to use even the most basic software. They are expected to know what files are, how folders can exist within folders, and why they need to ‘Save‘ their work even though they can see it right there on the screen in front of them. Most people who use software should not need to know any of this - that’s what software is designed for, to control how the user interacts with the rest of their computer and act as a buffer between them and the hardware. Properly designed software is supposed to handle all this for you.

Many of the core elements of PageFour came from ideas presented in the chapters of Alan Cooper’s book, in particular the ‘concealing‘ of files from the user, the quick Snapshot feature to replace the over- and often mis- used ‘Save As‘ option in MS Word, the naming conventions of Pages and Notebooks, the automatic saving of all changes, and the interactive archiving.

These ideas are not my own, I simply tried out different ways of doing things suggested by other people, and in doing so attempted to dump the baggage of decades of ill thought out interface design at the door. The guys over at Literature and Latte are more than welcome to copy or adapt features from PageFour, just as I’ve copied and adapted ideas from Alan Cooper, and hopefully they won’t stop there. Just because things have been done one way for decades, does not mean there are not better ways.