V3 development started

A lot of people who are enthusiastic users of The Guide asked for new features and bug solving. After a period of silence  the development of a new version has started. Mahadevan, the original author of The Guide, found a new contributor in the person of Maurice B (Me).

At the moment the first code of V3 is shared in the development team :-) . The codebase has been prepared for new changes and the Windows Installer (NSIS) is used to create the first development version.

As we build the application on the Qt framework, we can install V3 no only on Windows, but Linux and Mac as well. The first two have our active attention, for Mac there is a vacancy.

Next steps are creating a product backlog, a request for features has been issued to the users group. Good responses are coming. Great, it’s always good to see it’s alive. In the mean time we’ll work on stabilizing the development process.

Further support

At the moment the development team is small, excellent for the time being as we’re just starting. Never the less I’m looking for further support for people who want to help use with:

• Testing development versions, dirty job but somebody has to do it. Don’t expect to get an early version you can use for production guides! It’s just a way to see where the available version as weak spots and to get some user feedback.
• Translations.
• Apple development. Mainly verify the build process and functionality on the Mac.

v2.0 Released.

The long journey of v2.0 comes to a conclusion today, with it's release. It's mostly the same as v2.0beta1, with a few bug fixes. Thanks to all for the encouraging words and the patience.

Wish you all happy holidays; enjoy The Guide!

2.0 Beta 1

2.0 beta 1 was released today. It fixes a couple of minor bugs since 2.0dev4, but otherwise there are no major changes. No major changes are expected further for 2.0 also -- only fixes for newly-found bugs will be included.

The 2.0 line should be fairly stable by now. 2.0dev4 has had 1100+ downloads from sourceforge alone, and no serious bugs have been reported.

Do let me know any bugs that you come across, and it can be fixed before 2.0 release. Unless there are any major troubles, the next release would be 2.0 final, probably in a couple of weeks time.

This release also ensures that the application picks up all the UI text from resource files, so that localization is possible. If you're interested in translating The Guide to your native language (or any language!) do let me know.

Thanks are due to the patient users of The Guide, for encouraging the development and spreading the word -- Thank You!

Your Checkboxes Are Here

Here come the checkboxes!

You can have icons, checkboxes, neither or both, as decorations on the tree:

Sounds good?

Icons, icons, icons!

Node icons has been a long-requested (and long pending!) feature. It will finally appear in the next release. Here is a preview:

There are forty icons (well, one is the default, so that's 39 actually) for you to play with. The icons themselves are from the "silk icon set" from Mark James.

I replaced the regular book/page icons also with nicer-looking true color icons from the silk icon set.

So, as usual, do let me know your thoughts. Oh, and the set of icons will be fixed (at least for now), so if there are any suggestions for new icons, do let me know before v2.0!

Development Release 3 of v2.0

2.0dev3 is out.

The main feature in this release is the portable mode support. When in the portable mode, Guide will save (and load) preferences to a .ini file (that lives alongside guide.exe). To use the portable mode, either enable it from the preferences dialog:

-OR- open up guide.ini (this is just a text file) from the same directory as guide.exe. You should see something like:

[main]
portable=0

change portable=0 to portable=1 to enable the portable mode.

There are a few other intutive improvements too -- remembering node state, the first visible line per node, search dialog improvements, better east asian language support etc.

So download, have fun, but remember this is an alpha release! Enjoy!

Links: 20dev page, download page.

Development Release 2 of v2.0

Ah, it's been a while, but 2.0dev2 is here.

The main feature in this release is the full hyperlink support. The hyperlinks in v1.x of The Guide were constrained by the limitations of the older version of the rich edit control. Having switched to the new control, however, gives us the flexibility to support "normal" hyperlinks; the way one would assume hyperlinks to work.

Here are some screenshots. The first one shows the "Edit Hyperlink" dialog, invoked from the menu/right mouse button. You can choose a node as the link target. (Click to enlarge image).

Here's having a URL as the link target instead:

Or an email address:

Files and directories can also be selected. The "File" and "Dir" buttons popup standards Windows dialogs to locate the file or directory you want as the link target. Files open up with the applications they are associated with (similar to what happens you double-click the file in Windows explorer).

The link targets also appear in the status bar, ala Internet Explorer. (However, it does so only if the focus is on the right view, and for nodes they might be.. ah.. cryptic! ;-) Here is the link on the statusbar:

This snap also shows off the multilingual support that was added 2.0dev1. Here's another one, that shows the changing of node colors:

The package can be downloaded from sourceforge. Do play with it, and tell me what you think. But don't forget that this is an alpha release, and the file format is not yet stable, so be sure not to use it with valuable data!