Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

The WhizFolders 6.1 (beta) released on January 23rd has been pretty stable. The only problem worth mentioning is that the Editor option to “also pick up para format” by the Pick Format button was not working. This has been fixed in the newer beta version 6.1.2 now available in the paid user support area. A link there also points to the list of minor fixes in this version. If you are already using the Beta, you need to decide whether you need this update depending on the fixes mentioned there. If those bugs do not really affect you, you may as well decide to continue using beta 6.1 till the final release.

As given in the previous news item, we just released WhizFolders 6.1 (beta) for both Pro and Deluxe editions. The new trial version will only be available after the final release expected in a few weeks.

The last big leap was from version 5.6 to version 6. It took considerable effort due to new Windows Vista compatibility issues not only in WhizFolders but in some other software that we are using for the development.

We moved to Delphi 2007 with version 6.1: After the last official release 6.0.8 in July, 2007, we had hoped to release a new version every quarter. However, we came to know that a major new release of Delphi (our development tool) was available. We have been using Delphi for developing WhizFolders. Version 6.0.8 of WhizFolders was developed with Delphi 7. The new Delphi 2007 itself was a big leap over its predecessor. So we decided to move on to Delphi 2007 so that we can get all the great benefits this has to offer in future. Moving to Delphi 2007 took considerable effort because this also meant that in addition to WhizFolders features, all the third party components were to be updated and thoroughly tested to confirm that they worked properly. We also had to change our licensing software for better Vista compatibility.

Finally we made it to beta 6.1. While WhizFolders 6.1 works quite the same or better, internally it is using new features and components of Delphi 2007. Naturally, Delphi 2007 is more productive, and we hope to release newer versions and fixes for WhizFolders frequently. We sincerely want to thank all the customers for their patience and for sending us valuable suggestions, bug reports, articles and encouraging comments from time to time.

We are happy to announce the release of next WhizFolders 6.1 Beta in the support area at: support.whizfolders.com. If you are a paid user of Pro or Deluxe edition, you can login there and get the Beta version download. Note that it requires new license codes which are given to you in the same email message that sends the download location.

Version 6.1 has many new features both in Pro and Deluxe editions. Deluxe edition has some extra features. Here is a list of the new features.

New features in WhizFolders 6.1:

• The new View menu (Deluxe Edition): There is a new View menu on the top before the Tools menu. The View menu also appears below the Topic List. It has the following operations:
  1. Hoist, Hide Selected Items, Unhide All: Hoisting is a great new feature. It means concentrating on only a few topic trees and hiding the rest. If you select one or more top level topics and click on View–Hoist, it will hide all other topics so that you can work on the outline of only the topics that you selected. Afterwards, you can click on View–Unhide All to restore the full list of topics. There is also a different operation available to Hide Selected Topics instead of hoisting (that hides all but selected).
  2. View outline: This operation opens a popup window where you can see a list along with outlined text contents in the same list. You can not do any editing or changes in this list but you can print an indented outline from there.
      
• Thesaurus: WhizFolders now includes an English Thesaurus that you can use in the editor. Just put cursor on a word and click on the menu “Tools–Look up Thesaurus.”
• Portable WhizFolders: Now you can copy WhizFolders to a portable drive and use it from there on any computer. The operation “Copy WhizFolders to a Portable drive” is available on the Tools menu of the main window. This is not a simple copy but involves many other features that the Portable version detects and uses. For example, its main list can handle the documents on the portable disk even if the drive letter changes.
• Desktop shortcut to a particular note: Now you can create a shortcut to open the document at a particular note by selecting that note and using the menu "Tools–Create Shortcut for the Selected Topic."
• Live Spelling Check and Live Correction: On the editor, you can now turn on "Live Spelling Check" option as described in “Spelling Checker Options” in the help file. This puts red underlines on the words with spelling errors. You can correct such errors by right-clicking on them. Similarly if Live Correction is on, any word you type is automatically replaced with its auto correction if it is found in the auto correction dictionaries. To put words in auto correct dictionary, you just need to right-click and select the operation “Auto correct” once and then WhizFolders remembers it. This way, you can even quickly type long phrases by assigning them to custom mnemonics in the auto correction dictionaries.
• Popup links: This is an exciting new feature for advanced users only who understand that JUMP type statements can be constructed by typing too. You can change a JUMP or JUMPSHOWTEXT statement to a REF statement by typing over to make that change in the editor. To place the editing cursor in the link you can press Ctrl key when clicking otherwise the link will activate. Once you change a JUMP link to a REF statement, the link works like a popup link so that the target topic opens in a popup window.
• Office Look & Feel: This option was removed for Windows Vista. Now it is available on the General Options–Desktop page. You can switch it on to get an office like blue theme for WhizFolders.
• EWhizBook: The operation to make a self-running EXE eBook on the Tools menu is completely revamped. It is now called an EWhizBook that you create. Also, it no longer uses the public freeware WhizFolder Viewer product. Instead, WhizFolders uses its own internal module to make it and it looks quite different now. See “Distributing your documents” for more details.
• Keywords improvement in Deluxe edition: You can now select more than one keywords in the Keywords Index to look up topics associated to them.
   
• New general options:
  1. Startup with Windows option: You will find this new option to start WhizFolders with Windows on the Taskbar page of the General Options.
  2. No popup hints on Topics List: If you don’t want the popup hints on the list of topics, you can switch on this option on the "Miscellaneous 2" page of the general options. The purpose of the hints is to show the topic name when it is wider than the list and is not fully visible.
  3. Always show resize picture wizard: This option is now moved to Editor page of General Options.
  4. Advanced options page of general options is now called “Miscellaneous options.”
      

Happy Holidays! We have released WhizFolders Deluxe Pre-release 6.0.3 in the support area. The existing paid users with a valid subscription can login to the support area to get the product.

The formal release is planned in early January, 2007. The price of the Deluxe Edition is going to be much higher than the Pro version. Till then, if you buy WhizFolders Organizer Pro, the Deluxe Edition is a free upgrade for you.

In WhizFolders, after starting the quick editor, you can drag the Editor toolbar out of the viewer area as shown in the following picture.

This clears up more editing area in the quick editor. As always, you can remain in the edit mode while adding or editing more topics. The editor toolbar goes away only when you stop the editor. Also, WhizFolders remembers the position of the moved toolbar so next time, you don’t have to move it. With this feature, we have addressed the needs of those users who wanted to remain in edit mode for longer time without restricting the area available for editing.

We have released WhizFolders Deluxe beta (6.0.2) in the support area. WhizFolder Viewer is also updated to 6.0. We also released some additional language dictionaries in the support area. Please let us know if you need any other dictionary.

The beta is proceeding well. We are working on fixing the spelling-checker to work with more dictionaries. With the next version, we will make these dictionaries available as separate downloads: Dutch, French, German and Spanish. If you are a beta user and want another language dictionary not in the above list, please let us know.

Access violations: We have had reports of some access violations in RICHED20.DLL or MSFTEDIT.DLL when closing the documents. We are working on it. We just discovered that this problem comes at the time of closing a document only if you have used the Indent feature in the editor. However, it doesn’t cause any data loss. We have already fixed this problem in the next version going to be released on Monday, November 19th.

We are happy to announce a new product, WhizFolders Deluxe. It has many new exciting features as compared to the Pro version. Currently the product is in beta. For complete details, please see the beta page.