3.0beta2 Release Notes

It would be appreciated if you took a few minutes to fill out the Internote3 prerelease survey once you have used Internote3.

Previous Version - 3.0Beta1 Release Notes

About Internote3beta2

The 3.0beta2 release fixes bugs, polishes the user interface, and cleans up the internals of beta1.

There will be a 3.0beta3 release in the near future to fix a few minor issues, which will probably be the final release before 3.0.

Internote should now work on Windows, Mac and Linux. However, please note that running Internote on Firefox4 betas on Linux will probably not display notes correctly. Linux users should stick to Firefox3.6 or earlier.

New Features Beta1 → Beta2

• There is now a "Use as Default Colors" option on the context (right-click) menu of a note's color picker (flip side).
• There is now a new "Report Bug" menu option to let you easily do the first part of reporting a bug.
• Manager search now works more like a search engine, so you can include spaces between multiple search terms, which may be matched in different places in a note's text.

Bug Fixes Beta1 → Beta2

• Note scrollbars should now display correctly when flipping.
• The mouse wheel will now scroll the note when using the Internote scrollbar.
• The warning about off-screen notes when the page loads now should not appear if you have seen the notes during loading but no longer do.
• Notes should no longer jump around when the current URL is just an image zoomed to full size, instead of a HTML page.
• The note should now raise when using the TAB key to move between notes.
• When a note is restored from being minimized, it should now be automatically focused.
• Selection and scrollbar position should now be preserved when flipping the note to choose new colors.
• The scrollbar should now be updated properly when the font size preference is changed.
• Right-clicking should no longer be able to accidentally move or resize the note in addition to displaying the context menu.
• Linux: A new way of displaying notes should have resolved the showstopper bugs.
• Mac: Moving notes should now result in minimal flickering.
• Mac: You may now use the TAB key to go between notes.
• URL normalization has been improved so that many similar but different URLs should no longer prevent notes appearing.
• Manage Notes Dialog:
  • The right panel should now be enabled if and only if a single note is selected.
  • Actions should now be enabled if and only if you have at least one note or category selected.
  • Actions should now be applied to all notes in a category when you have a category selected.
  • The splitter between the two panels should no longer move when you change selection from one note to another. (It still opens and closes, by design.)
  • Entering a blank URL should no longer prevent the dialog from starting up properly.
  • Search will now accept text instead of a regular expression, and invalid regular expressions will be treated as normal text.

Interface Changes Beta1 → Beta2

• Clarity for New Users:
  • Note buttons now have tooltips.
  • The note icons now also appear in the context (right-click) menu.
  • Some menu items have been renamed. Also, most menu items now start with verbs - eg Internote Manager has become Manage All Notes.
• Some menus have been reorganized, including having separate context menus for front side and flip side.
• There is now a warning when you restore a note to an off-screen position.
• The note interface now has effects for when you press or hover over buttons or the Internote scrollbar.
• The preferences dialog has been made wider and shorter to better fit onto lower resolution displays.
• You can now cancel a scroll operation by moving the mouse away perpendicularly (in addition to the ESC key).
• Manage Notes Dialog:
  • You can now use the DELETE key to delete notes/categories and Ctrl-A to select all notes/categories.
  • The left tree is now styled to make the categories clearer.
  • Regular expressions are now always in different categories.
  • There are now separated categories for Invalid URLs, Blank URLs, Invalid Regular Expressions and Blank Regular Expressions.
  • The minimized checkbox has been moved in order to maximize the space available for the text area.
• The Import Notes results dialog and some startup dialogs have been been replaced with less intrusive drop-down notifications.
• Balloon messages now form a queue so there can be several in a row if necessary.
• You will now be offered an option to report a bug when an internal problem prevents creating a note.
• When pressing the repeating buttons on the scrollbar, repeating should now stop if you move off the button.

Performance Improvements Beta1 → Beta2

• Internote now uses a JAR archive for most of its files, which should improve startup time (which was already reasonably fast).

About Internote3

This rewrite of the Internote extension was created by Matthew Tuck, based on Tim Horton's Internote2, over the space of a year.

It is released free of charge, and licensed under the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License) which gives you the right to use, modify and redistribute the software. See the license and your favourite friendly neighbourhood copyright lawyer for more details.

Thank you to all testers, and hopefully we can get this software ready for wider release quickly.

Please note the following before installing this software:

• Beware, mortal! This is beta-level software that has received limited testing. Given this, it's theoretically possible that it may destroy your data, as well as eat your hard drive, scare your cat so much its hair falls out, and summon space aliens from the dimension X-43 to invade the Earth.
• It may well not work at all for some configurations. If you're unable to get it working, please let me know, I'll need your help in order to fix it!
• Internote is provided free of charge. Under its license, it is provided without warranty.
• At this stage, it is not recommended that you use this software to store data that is important to you. However, if you choose to do so, standard warnings about backing up all important files apply especially to this beta version, in particular:
  • If you were an Internote2 user, please back up your old notes file, stickies.
  • Please regularly back up your Internote3 storage file, named internote-storage.xml.
• This extension has been designed for Firefox. Using it within other Mozilla or Mozilla-based software may have random results, but you are welcome to edit the install.rdf file and try.
• This extension has been tested primarily on Firefox3.6. It has received some testing on Firefox 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0beta1/2, but some problems may be present with these versions.
• This extension definitely will not work under versions of Firefox before 3.0. This is unlikely to change as this is required for internal features that are critical to the Internote3 rewrite.
• This extension has been primarily tested on Windows. Some testing has been done for Mac and Linux - they should be operational, although some small cosmetic issues will be present. I would like to hear any experiences with other operating systems.

A Note on Translations

Internote3 is now ready to translate, and changes to the list of entities and properties is now highly unlikely.

Due to a major redesign, all translations other than US English have been removed, until they are updated by the translators.

Translators may obtain the old translations from Internote2 in order to update them.

Reporting Bugs, Limitations, Regressions and Experiences

Please email all experiences with the beta version to matty_is_a_geek AT fastmail DOT fm.

Please check the known bug and limitation lists (below) before reporting.

If you're submitting a bug, there is a way to quickly and easily obtain important information that can help diagnose the problem. First cause the problem to occur, as this may cause Internote to internally record useful messages. Then go to Tools/Add-ons, from the Add-ons dialog right-click on the Internote entry and choose About Internote from the menu. Then click the Copy Information button and paste that into an email.

Please provide detailed and clear explanations of bugs and limitations, as this will help me to quickly improve the product for you. If you wish to learn more about writing good bug reports that help get the problem solved, check out this page.

Of Particular Interest to Test

While I appreciate all areas of testing, and am interested in hearing about all experiences with this software, I am particularly interested in the following:

• Did you attempt to import notes from the old stickies format? Did it work? Did you try the manual import in Manage Notes dialog, or did they automatically import by being in your profile directory?
• Other than the bugs mentioned below, do your notes ever go to incorrect positions more than momentarily? In particular, does maximizing, minimizing and dragging the window partially off-screen work satisfactorily?
• Other than the limitations mentioned below, are there any features missing that were in Internote2? Or are any features not working as well?
• Do you receive a message when you load a page with off-viewport notes? Is it useful? Annoying?
• Do the animations work well on your computer? The frame rate should automatically reduce for slower computers, eliminating the need for an animations off preference. Do you find them annoying?
• Have you found any situations where you could drag notes onto the page's scrollbars, or couldn't drag them onto the bottom or right of the viewport? Please record any such URLs.

What's New in Internote3

Internally Internote3 is a complete rewrite which should be easier to fix and extend. The rewrite includes, but isn't limited to, the following:

• Notes can now be minimized (shaded) individually or en masse to the bottom of the viewport.
• Various animations when actions are done to notes.
• Changes in one window (including the Manage Notes dialog) should immediately take effect in any other windows displaying the affected notes.
• Moving and resizing notes can now be aborted with the ESC key.
• Translucency is now real so notes under notes should show.
• Internote will now sometimes give helpful pop-up balloons, including when there are notes on the page that are off-screen.
• Internote now uses a new storage format for notes, named internote-storage.xml. This is an XML file that should appear in your storage directory. Your old notes (in the stickies file) should be automatically imported, if present.
• Backups should also be made before every write in case of crash, and Internote should recover automatically if a crash occurs.
• There is a new Internote scrollbar which fits into the interface look & feel.
• Manage Notes Dialog Improvements:
  • You can now specify in the manager what set of pages the notes appears on, through regular expressions, URL prefixes, sites, site suffixes, etc.
  • Actions have been redesigned to be clearer and more functional. You can now export, print, etc only selected notes.
  • Create/modification dates for notes are now displayed, though modification dates can't be available for notes created in Internote2.
• You can now right-click on notes to get a context menu.
• You can specify what set of pages the note appears on.
• Many bugfixes over Internote2.
• Vastly reduced potential for conflicts with other extensions.

Known Bugs in the Current Version

• Internote sometimes sees a randomly-occurring major failure in the underlying Firefox platform (Firefox bug #580570), that may lead to ongoing failures and a need to restart the browser. In current versions, this will probably only happen when you open a new browser window after Firefox failure.
• Linux:
  • Note translucency will not work, regardless of the preference to turn it on, due to Linux Firefox limitations. A future version of Internote will probably reintroduce the old "fake translucency" feature for Linux.
  • Due to the absence of translucency, the fade in/out animations present on the other operating systems will not work on Linux.
  • Notes will probably fail to display on Firefox4 Linux betas.
  • Flip animations used to choose new colors are jerky.
• Windows/Mac: Due to unfortunate limitations in Firefox3 and onwards, the following minor and usually brief cosmetic issues may be present. It is unlikely that many such issues will be fixed in the near future:
  • When the window is against the right-hand side of the screen, a small amount of a note may be cut off if it is against the right-hand side of the window, in the absence of a window scrollbar. This is due to an unfortunate workaround for a more serious issue.
  • When moving or scrolling the window, note positions may lag behind the window slightly.
  • When resizing the window, notes may appear improperly truncated for a short time.
  • When the window is moved offscreen, the notes may temporarily jump to an inappropriate position.
  • Notes may sometimes flicker, including when the delete confirmation dialog appears.
  • During continuous scrolling note positions may not always update until scrolling stops.
  • When the window straddles multiple monitors, unanticipated behaviour may result.
  • When the browser window is partially off the screen of a second monitor, the notes may be misplaced.
  • When the first note appears on a page in a window in the background, the window jumps to the front. This is uncommon, but can happen due to having the same page open in two windows or having the page open while changing URL settings in the Manage Notes dialog.
• Mac: Due to more unfortunate limitations, these additional display issues will occur:
  • Scrolling when notes are overlapping may result briefly in the wrong note being on top.
  • Clicking on a note in a separate window may not correctly focus the new window.
• Zoom bugs:
  • Upon changing the zoom factor, no attempt is made to adjust the position or size of notes.
  • May throw off other things, such as the off-screen note message and scrollbar detection.
• Bug reporting and about dialog info will not be correctly collected on Firefox4 betas.
• The order of URLs and notes in the Manage Notes dialog is often random.
• When the cursor is moved outside of the note's text area, or the selection is dragged below the note, the text area will not scroll properly.

Known Limitations in the Current Version

• The Report Bug dialog cannot yet automatically send a bug report, they must currently be emailed.
• Due a new system where Manage Notes dialog changes take effect immediately on other windows, it is no longer possible to cancel these changes. It is anticipated that a future version after the first stable release will include an undo system that will provide a more general and useful option.

••••• That's all folks! •••••