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!

Development Release 1 of v2.0

The upcoming version, v2.0, is slated to be a big one. I plan to make a few work-in-progress releases for this version, so that there is more time for feedback (and bug hunting!). Releases will be made as and when a few features have been added, and the build is usably stable. These releases are strictly non-production-use. DO NOT use them with real data! While the builds itself may be stable the file formats may not, and you might end up with a .gde file that cannot be read by the final 2.0 software.

The first of these releases (named 2.0dev1) is ready. The application has been ported to Unicode, and the latest version of the rich edit control is used. The file format is changed. The existing format .gde files can be read, of course; the newly saved files will be in the new format. Changing the foreground and background color of a node in the tree pane is now supported (via the context menu only as of now). The node colors are also used during print, preview and export as well. The search dialog is resizable.

The files are available on sourceforge as winguide-2.0dev1.

If you have some time to spare, do have a look! The best way is to just get the binaries zip file, unpack it somewhere and run the guide.exe from there.

Update [26-Jun 14:17 GMT]: The files on sourceforge were somehow corrupt, I've updated them. Thanks for the tip from an anonymous user!