Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

We have released a new version 6.1 of WhizFolder Viewer. The instructions to distribute the new viewer with your documents are included in the new tutorial of the viewer.

WhizFolder Viewer is no longer used for creating self-running exe ebooks of your documents. That feature has been integrated in WhizFolders itself, starting from version 6.1 (not available in trial edition).

We have worked hard to release the new trial edition of version 6.1. For the same reason, we could not update this Blog regularly. Now that the trial is out, we can work on new features and demos to help the users.

In the past, we have had problems with the trial where it used to expire if the user changed the system date or clock for any reason. Then, it was a problem to issue an extension and so forth. In the new Trial Edition, there is a built-in extension feature to deal with these problems even on the newer Windows Vista systems.

Here are some tips on using the trial edition effectively:

1. Trial period: The trial period runs for 15 days. When it expires, you can probably get one extension. The Deluxe Edition features are not included in the trial but we are adding flash demos to show them in the demos section of whizfolders.com. If you were using an old version 5.6.3 or 6.0 trial, note that this trial edition gives you a fresh 15 days trial period.
2. Purchasing: If you decide to purchase WhizFolders, please always do that from the Buy Now button that you see in the first trial screen. This gives us a chance to show you any promotional offers or give credit to the web site or affiliate who introduced you to WhizFolders.
3. The Tutorial: When you start the trial for the first time, a tutorial document comes up with some helpful hints. Both are important. You can start the hints or tutorials again from the help menu any time. Please go through the tutorial thoroughly as it demonstrates many features. If something is not clear, please take a look at the demos and this blog and finally the help file.
4. The flash demo movies: You should also go through the demos on whizfolders.com web site. Start with the introductory demos and then work your way through the more advanced ones.
5. This Blog: You will also find many useful articles on this blog. You can search the blog by using the search box on the right.

   If you still have some question unanswered, please feel free to write to us by email. We usually reply within a business day.

We have released a new paid version 6.1.4.2 that fixes a problem in the earlier version 6.1.4. The problem caused corruption of Jump links in certain cases. Paid version users can get the update from the user support area. Another improvement is that this version will not ask for portable codes if you use its “Tools–Copy WhizFolders..” operation to update a portable copy of WhizFolders that you had installed earlier.

In addition, the new version has a smart improvement on the text copied and pasted from Internet Explorer. It now resolves the links in the pasted text and also prefixes the location that the text is copied from. The location-prefixing feature works for FireFox browser too but the text copying remains limited to plain text due to the inability of FireFox to put RTF data on the clipboard.

WhizFolders 6.1.4 has been released. Both the Pro and Deluxe editions have been updated. If you are an existing customer, you can obtain the update from the paid user support area.

The new customers will get the above version automatically when they purchase from the Buy Now page of this web site.

Please click here to see a list of new features in version 6.1.

Trial version is still old: We have not yet updated the trial version of WhizFolders. But we are working on it and hope to release it later this week.

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We are glad to announce that a new version 6.1.4 of WhizFolders is in pre-release. It is only available to the paid users from the special user support area at support.whizfolders.com.

Please click here to see a list of new features in version 6.1.

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.”
      

Latest Status (Jan 6, 2007): I am glad to announce that we have now fixed this problem in the Live spelling-checker and will be releasing WhizFolders version 6.1 very soon.

Earlier Post:
We had sincerely hoped to release the next WhizFolders 6.1 in the last week of December. At the last minute, we found some occasional access violation errors and the release was stalled. As a principle, we never make a release if we find even one access violation error during our own testing.

Well, finally we know the reason for the mysterious errors. It is the new “Live spelling check and correction” feature that causes these problems. Since the spelling checker is made by another company, we are not really in control. Hence, we have decided to remove the new “Live spelling check and correction” feature from the coming release. If other things go well, we should have the new WhizFolders 6.1 (both Deluxe and Pro editions) in beta testing next week.