28th Oct - LEE'S DAILY UPDATE

Hi Beta Users,

We are still struggling to get through the huge number of emails and forum posts currently. We are trying our best and take considerable time to properly review each post. At the same time we are working very hard to start fixing issues where we can, some are incredibly complex such as the: import issues, changing fonts, vanishing and re-appearing text. All I can tell you is that we are doing our best and really do want to make a comment on every post. I would particularly like to thank all those individuals who posted samples - this has help us move forward in solving some of these issues. Also to many of you who are assisting others with you own experiences and guidance - you are not going unrecognised.

Liasing with so many writers is inspirational. I can see that I’m made the right choice two years ago in deciding to take a huge risk and pursue my passion for writing and software development. Thank you Scrivener community :slight_smile:

Okay, a general update on today:

Windows XP Failure to Run Scrivener
This one is taking a long time to find the root cause. We’re very close to solving this and will certainly provide a fix as soon as we have one. However, it has nothing to do with .NET - Scrivener is built using a cross platform C++ framework called Qt (pronounced ‘cute’). The Windows 2008 C++ Redistributable package looks like it’s definitely required on these older operating systems(they are there by default on newer operating systems); however, we’re just trying to ensure we don’t miss anything others. As soon as we know you’ll know and I package a completely new installer to take care of these issues.

Performance
We have made good progress in identifying many areas where we can significantly improve the performance of Scrivener. Now it’s just a matter of getting to serious fixing mode as these will take a little time. So, that’s good news.

Corkboard
Context menus in Index Cards have been fixed. Also, we’ve added a Mac 2.0 feature with the ability to drag and drop folders onto each other in the Corkboard the same way you can in the binder and outliner. By default you can’t drag onto Corkboard items, but you can now change a setting in the options to allow this. This was never on the ‘Cards’ so to speak; however, it was reasonably simple to implement - so we did.

Editor
Highlighting large amounts of text then changing the font color caused Scrivener to crash. We’ve fixed this.

Spaces after paragraphs
We’ve also looked at the space after paragraphs bug. The long and short of it is that MS Word uses non-standard html when it exports so we are looking to augments our RTF parser to cater for this. So, it’s not fixed yet but will be soon. Thank for all the detailed posts on this and samples:)

Missing Text
We’re still having issues duplicating this; it’s not an XP font thing as we first thought - a Win7 users quickly put an end to that when they reported it too. We thinking it could have something to do with the ‘Split at Selection’ feature. An easy way to test this with missing test would be to perform a split at selection, then quit Scrivener, restart, and see if you can see any missing sections. If not, then it suggests it is split at selection (and we have a fix). If so, it means that it’s something else since the split-at-selection behaviour couldn’t survive a save and reload.

Outliner
The “total word count” column wasn’t functional. It has now been fixed.

There’s a bunch of other smaller fixes which I’ll report on tomorrow, but on the whole we are making great progress.

Lee

:mrgreen: :mrgreen:

One day closer and one step closer to the eventual release!

Thanks for the update Lee!

Helps keep fresh what are known issues etc.

Also - I just find it interesting too :slight_smile:

Great work!

For what it’s worth, I didn’t use the split at selection menu item to get the missing text bug. :frowning:

BTW: Is there a daily version of scrivener.exe or did I get something wrong. Should I use the link from yesterday to get it?

Thanks in advance,

Markus

What happened to the new .exe link that was posted yesterday? A friend wants to update hers and I can’t find the link?

Thanks for all your help!

Rebeca

It seems to have disappeared. I can testify, since I would like it too, assuming that the installer on the scrivenerforwindows.com page has not been updated.

I didn’t use the split at selection either - although I did use a horizontal split. Also, while the document in question was created in Win 7 and started being problematic on win 7, before I had the problem it was edited on an XP computer without any problems… something I obviously should have mentioned earlier. As a non-techie it didn’t even occur to me until I read your post sighs I’m an idiot and I apologise profusely!

That narrows it down then. Thank you.

Lee

Don’t know if it helps, but I can always get the missing text back, if I show invisibles then hide them. If I compile to PDF with the text missing, it’s in the compiled version.

Lee, thanks for the update.

You’re doing a great job chasing bugs. I’ve been involved in software development in the past and appreciate how challenging the bug chase can be. I’m very impressed at the effectiveness and speed with which you and the rest of the L&L team are ploughing through these bug reports and working on the fixes.

Scrivener for WIndows is looking great, and I’m so pleased to see it coming to Windows.

Thanks to you and everyone else involved in bringing this to the Windows writing community!

Vanessa

From where can we get the Scrivener.exe file you had in your update yesterday?

Edit: I was looking for it for someone else, and ended up justing copying mine from my computer via thumb drive.

I uploaded the updated file from 27th to my webspace and you can (inofficially) download it here:

outdated

(If i am not supposed to offer the 27th download anymore please say it and i will delete it immediately!)

Opps, sorry I missed this. Just about to upload a fresh Scrivener.exe in about 5 mins in the daily update for 29 Oct 2010.

Lee

Lee you and the whole team are incredible,

I would never have expected to get a new beta every day. I prepared to get two or three updates until the first release to fix the really grave bugs. Thanks a million times!

Best Regards,

Markus

There’s nothing more to say than that!