iDailyDiary Professional 3.80 BETA Released

[support]

We are pleased to announce that iDailyDiary 3.80 BETA is available for testing, for registered users only. There are several minor new features and improvements. Full list is here:

New: Tables - vertical alignment to align text to top, middle or bottom of cell
New: Inactivity timer preference option, automatically minimize iDD if inactive for x minutes
New: Paragraph/Text markers can be displayed by pressing toolbar button
New: Tools - Activity Logfile, displays recent system activity such as backup, failed login
Impr: Large images automatically resized to fit diary page on insert
Impr: Calendar Bar, color indications clearer, and event hints displayed
Impr: New Sticky Tab appears to the right of selected tab, not at far right of all tabs
Impr: Tools - Text Statisics, more information included with Word Count
Impr: Insert Hyperlink to a File can include a '.' at start to indicate relative path
Impr: Search dialog includes a Stop Search buttom to stop long searches
Impr: Automatic backup will also occur at midnight if diary not active
Impr: Diary will automatically advance to next day at midnight
Fixed: Inserted Files sometimes removed from database when icon moved inside diary entry
Fixed: Inserted files - filename that wraps to two lines now displays correctly
Fixed: Other minor bug fixes and improvements

Please note this update is still in BETA testing and should not be used in production critical environments. This update does not change the underlying database structure, so you can roll back to the previous version at any time without affecting your data.

If you would like to test the latest BETA then please login to the registered users area from the link below, once logged in click the link to download the file. If you install over an existing installation then your license number is picked up automatically (recommended), for a clean install you will need to re-enter your license number:

http://www.splinterware.com/registered/login.php

Please report any problems or bugs to support@splinterware.com, remember to mention you are using the BETA version.

[BEDO]

Coward that I am, I will see if any braver souls try it first. I see it can be rolled back to the old version, but how?

[rwakeford]

Just downloaded and installed. full confidence in the team!

Works a treat so far and love the minimise after x minutes and reopen with password feature. Not tried tables or many of the other new changes. The activity log will be useful and I like the new Calendar Bar.

The best diary programme anywhere just gets better and better. Thanks very much.

[acanthis]

Unfortunately Norton 360 has decided that this beta contains a virus and will not allow it to be installed.

It reports the virus "WS.Reputation.1" and signals it as a maximum severity threat, automatically deleting the executable.

I don't doubt that this is yet another Symantec False Alarm but obviously it does make the beta uninstallable for anyone running Norton!

Shame. Those new features look good.

[support]

Yes we've had a few reports of Norton flagging the file in the "reputation" category. We've reported the false positive to Symantec... see if they can get it sorted out!

[rwakeford]

We are pleased to announce that iDailyDiary 3.80 BETA is available for testing, for registered users only. There are several minor new features and improvements.

In Preferences/Settings/Other settings it's possible to have a default text wrapping for imported pictures. It wold be great to be able to set the spacing round pictures too. For instance I always have a spacing of 7, just my preference, but it'd be lovely to have it done with the text wrapping automatically each time a picture is imported.

[Sn3akyP3t3]

The timeout security feature is most welcome! I haven't found any features yet to date with 3.71 that didn't work on Ubuntu through Wine. I'll see if the same is true for 3.8 Beta during daily use.

I do enjoy this application for use both at work and home! It keeps me sane since I lack good memory

[Sn3akyP3t3]

After installing the Beta upgrade I noticed that the option for "check spelling of words as you type" was disabled. I had this previously enabled prior to installation. May be worth preserving this setting for the user's sake.

Nothing else noticed that needs improvement at this time.

[neheyen]

Just noticed the Align Cell Contents labels and icons aren't synced. It looks like the labels are right but the align middle and align bottom icons are reversed.

Norman

[support]

@Norman, thanks for spotting the incorrect icons!

@Sn3akyP3t3, we're looking into that spelling problem, not been able to reproduce it yet.

Thanks

[Sn3akyP3t3]

Keep in mind that I'm running 3.8 Beta on Ubuntu via Wine. I expect to run into problems now and then and every now and then I do, but not like this. Thankfully I use Dropbox and can recover different versions of the database if it were to become corrupt or some data save event fails.

I believe I saved my work the prior day and then must have shut down the Ubuntu machine without closing the still open iDailyDiary executable. I confirmed this by looking at the even log file. The last 3 entries for yesterday were for 14:39, 15:09, and 16:24 all listed as "Edit Record". No ExitiDD record was found at the time I shutdown the OS.

Upon startup of iDD I was greeted with the usual current date "page 1". However, I immediately noticed I wasn't prompted for a password. Yikes! I tabbed to look at yesterday's notes and was greeted with an error popup, "tblDiary5: cannot perform this operation on an empty dataset". There was no data found for yesterday. I immediately stopped any further work and closed the diary. I proceeded to perform a repair diary operation which reported successful. I again opened the diary and was not prompted for password. I checked yesterday's entry and it was no longer giving an error, but was blank still. I entered preferences which also did not prompt me for password which it should have since I had this set previously. I applied the database and administrator password once again, saved, exited, and tested to verify changes were indeed taking effect. The password was prompted for both at diary startup and when entering preferences. I believe that all other settings were not affected to the best of my knowledge.

I restored my data by downloading yesterday's last known save from Dropbox, performing a repair, opening, and then just copying yesterday's missing info. Note that I was prompted for password when opening the yesterday's version and no error was encountered there.

I've stepped up my local backup to daily just to avoid the need to download in the rare event this could happen again.

I've had to do merging of multiple diaries before in the past and found the process to be quite strange. If someone could explain the purpose of each file I would be appreciative. This is what I think a few files are for.
.iDD = config file
.iDX = unknown
.DAT = unknown
.BLB = the actual data of the diary. The database file I suppose.

Thanks.

[support]

Thanks for reporting this. I think we'll struggle to reproduce the problem as we don't run iDD on unbuntu and wine. Normally with Windows when iDD detects a signal that the computer is shutting down it will close the database - this should prevent any database corruptions. The database must have been in an odd state when the computer went down to cause a problem like that.

However we'll do some re-testing just to make sure iDD is behaving as expected with computer shutdowns/crashes - just in case there is something different in the latest BETA.

File information: For each diary you need all four files, the four files are a database and work together to form a complete data set. The bulk of the data is stored in the .BLB (binary data) file, however that file is useless without it's associated .DAT (database records and structures) and .IDX (indexes) files. The iDD file contains preference settings specific to that diary.

[neheyen]

Just curious how big this log file will grow. I don't see a setting for size or number of days to save so hope there is a way this is limited. I've had iDD running since March 2005 and can't imagine how large the log file would be for all that activity.

Great program, use it all the time.
Norman

[support]

The log is limited to 30 days.

[neheyen]

I don't use tables a lot but really handy to have them when I need them, so just noticed something.

Previous to the BETA, I could size a table to be less than the page width. Just makes the table a bit easier to read if I've only got a couple of narrow columns. I could resize the table to be less than the entire page width.

But after going to the BETA release, the tables now seem to not be able to resized. The column widths can be adjusted but the total width grows/shrinks to fill the entire page width. And the columns and table resize if the page width is changed.

I suspect this wasn't intentional but if it was, please return to what it was previously. This is really annoying.

Sorry for getting this in so late in the review cycle but just noticed it.

I'm running on Windows 7 64-bit if that helps.

Norman