Um, about that feature complete thing in Beta 3 – I might have lied. You see, up to now, this entire development cycle has been spent coding features for other people and, well… frankly, I was feeling left out, so the latest feature in SharpMT is for me! Also, I’ve opted not to re-package Pocket SharpMT for Beta 5 – that code base is stable, as far as I know.
MRU Listing – Seeing as I’ve never gotten used to the “new” multiple draft open dialog, I had to do something new to see a list of the last few drafts I had worked on: enter the MRU. On the file menu, you will find a list of the most recently saved or opened drafts. It won’t crash if it’s blank – it can grow to 8 deep. If you try to open more than 8 at a time, the 8 most recent will get onto the list and the rest are ignored. Closing drafts has no impact on the list: it’s only changed for opens and saves. Also, it will only show the draft file name if the file is stored in the “Draft directory”. If the draft was opened from another directory or from a network path, the entire path will be shown.
Now it’s feature complete!
Download: SharpMT 2.1 Beta 5 (Release Candidate 1)
Read: SharpMT FAQ
oooh. Spellcheck nice!
Will donate next paycheque — which may be a while, but will come some day.
p.
Keep up a good work!
I am starting to test this one.
@p – cheers! No hurry – I understand what it’s like, having to wait for a check; more than you can imagine!
@Jukka-Pekka – Cool & thanks!
I’d like to test this one right away, but my server just changed and I’m waiting for the nameservers to get updated… *sigh*
Reading the comments on the previous betas though and had a simple idea (for what may be a complicated problem though?) regarding the multiple blog issue. Wouldn’t it be easy to just have an ‘Add New Blog’ dialog, and save all the info to an .xml file/registry/whatever then let the user select the blog he wants to edit from a simple droplist? All the user/server info, as well as bloglinks, text filters, etc. can all be saved in the file, and updated at the user’s liesure (or perhaps automatically when that blog is selected?). A similar method to the way most FTP or SSH clients save the various server info… #MT would be saving *more* info, what with the bloglinks, etc., but shouldn’t be too bad.
That’s there now – that’s not a problem: When you refresh an MT server, it stores the list of blogs and offers them in a drop down.
The problem is all of the settings tied to more than just the blog, as they would be in an FTP client: the blog settings also tie to the Blog Links, Categories, Text Filters, and… there was something else, I forget what. So when you change a blog ID, everything else has to change with it. If it’s not there, you can’t select categories/text filters, etc. – even if the settings are local, what does that do to any open or saved drafts? Cat 1 can be one thing for one blog and something different for another blog – when I post, I’d either have to ask which blog to upload to (which is ugly) or close my eyes and hope it goes to the right server. It’s too choppy a process for me to built an application towards, especially when the majority of authors have one blog. I get complaints now that if you change a blog and the text filters change, that the wrong one *might* be selected in the defaults dialog, nevermind what might happens when someone changed a blog while offline.
Nope – I’m keeping the multi-blog support as it is now (almost unsupported) in the hopes that somehow MT3 might offer a better scheme.
Along with the MRU can we have an extra selection at the bottom (with a line separator) to Clear the MRU? Perhaps an editor option whether or not to even save the MRU? So far I like it, but I do appreciate having the option on some other apps I use.
The “containted” typo is still in beta 5 also. It starts as “enclosing tag” but as soon as I type anything there, it switches back to “containted” again. Also – I think I attempted to post this awhile back when the custom tags were first introduced but a server error killed it – can a regex filter be added so we can make tags with attributes but the closing tag is correct? ie. I’d like to have a acronym title=”” but closing with /acronym or take your pick of other tags/attributes…
I’ll think about the MRU… hadn’t thought about a clear or “get rid of” option.
I must have missed the containted typo report (one of the reasons why I like it when bugs come through in email – I usually don’t miss them then) but I don’t understand the rest of that. If you check “enclosing” box, it will close it with a tag – it doesn’t expect there to be attributes to the tag, however. That sorta goes beyond what I expect it to be used for – I was thinking things like br, p, strike, etc… if this is what caused the server issue, then it makes sense – if you used a non-attribute tag and it still kicked it out, lemme know.
Here’s something interesting…
Since SharpMT stores all of it’s settings (both XML and Registry based) in per-user settings, there IS an option for people that want multiple blog support, provided you are willing to have more than one user account on your machine…
On the SharpMT shortcut, open the Properties and click the Advanced button on the Shortcut tab. There select “Run with different credentials”. When you click the shortcut, you can select a user to run the app as… the settings you set for this user will be different than your other settings – you can have one different configuration per user, this way.
At least it looks this way – I ran a version as a different user and it had all of the “look I’m a new user” defaults showing, so it should be fine.
Just an FYI.
Great to see you in such an energetic development cycle!
A few Questions:
– I’ve always installed over my previous #MT installation, without ever uninstalling. Is this OK? It’s never been a problem, but if at some point an uninstall is needed before an install of a new version, you’d tell us, right?
– Would you consider putting links to the #MT FAQ/Download on your sidebar so it is always visible? Currently they exist in your “Official Release” post, but might be hard to find for others.
Some praise:
– I love the shrink control for the Extended Entry area. I still hope you will consider a “show/hide” option for it, but if not, this is a nice option.
– Spellcheck is really nice, the red squiggly on incorrect words is a great feature.
– MRU is an excellent addition, glad you decided to add that for yourself (and us too).
I just started using this new release, so no real feedback on it as of yet. Just a thanks, for sharing your project with us!
@promo – For the most part, it should be fine – I usually install over, and it’s OK. the only time a problem could have happened was the jump from 1.x to 2.x – otherwise, unless ya see a problem, installing over should be OK.
Actually, the best way to all the FAQs is through the menu item in the product, but I guess I should have it in an easy place too… maybe I’ll add it to the software page, too.
As to show/hide – I think the “shrink to minimum” is close to that as I’ll get… one of the entries screens had to be shown and the other two are minimize-capable, but I’ll leave it on the “to-do someday” list. Hope everything continues to work for ya :)
My first two posts seemed to go fine, though I pinged an entry here (when I worte about #MT) but it didn’t seem to show up here. I need to look into that more though.
All is well on the shrink extended, since it remembers that position each time I re-open #MT, then I won’t even see it.
But in a future release, I am hoping for the add URL function to be able to have an “always” option for the target window. Mine are always “_blank” so it would be nice for it to remember for me.
Wonder how long that “To Do” list of yours is?
Pings… pings are a pain in my ass because they’re completely inconsistent. I send the code the same exact way for this (and have since before the first version 2.0) – sometimes it’s fine, sometimes it’s ignored, sometimes it returns an error. Of course I have no control what-so-ever so whenever I find one of my trackbacks go no where, I go to the MT panel and attempt it there; half the time they fail from THERE too, so it’s pretty much “iffy” at best.
I thought I added a default for that? I must be slipping. I’ll see about sneaking that in for Beta 6 (which I’m hoping is the last beta).
By now, the To Do list is small, actually – most of what ppl asked for (with the exception of multi-blog support) have made it into this beta… even a couple of things that haven’t been asked for like sorting the Blog Links lists and the MRU. And although new features breed new feature requests, I think I’m ahead of everyone this time :)