VisualBlogger 2004 Beta 2 Status Report
I just spent the better part of 4 hours working on some major modifications
to VisualBlogger. I heard your struggles, I felt your pain. I made configuration
much simpler. Instead of using a config file for some global settings, I'm
pulling from the registry. You should no longer get any errors when the
application loads. The Configuration.xml file has been renamed to Blogs.config,
and the default location is prespecified to be relative to the executable.
Should make life TONS easier.
I've added a new system to give you feedback during the posting process. It's
very simple really, after you select your blogs to post to, and click submit,
you'll get a report of whether or not each blog succeeded or failed. Should help
the process out a bit while I refine the multithreaded mechanism I'm working on.
In the meantime, a tip for current and future builds... the toolbar buttons stay
highlighted in orange while any operation is in progress. That means, if you
click "Submit", and it stays orange for a minute, it's still posting to the
various web services.
On the UI side, I added a few more icons in place of some of the text buttons
in the UI. People said it was too hard to read the sideways text, so I put some
placeholder icons in there. Some of them might stay, many will not. We'll see
what happens. Also, I locked down the toolbar positions so that they cannot be
changed/moved/redocked/whatever. I'm sure a few of you won't be happy with that,
but oh well. I need to redesign some of the UI to be able to handle the
readjustment that takes place when the toolbars get redocked. So until that
happens, it's best just to disable UI customization until it works properly.
Feedback: We now remember your Name and E-mail address for the feedback form
(stored in the registry). Hopefully that will coax some more people into using
the online submission system for sending us bug reports and feature requests.
Please keep them coming.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Someone asked me to make VB2004 minimize to the
system tray, so this build does that by default. The icon is totally lame, and
there aren't many right-click options, but it works. If you have any ideas for
what options should be available on the right-click menu from the system tray,
let me know.
I was going to put out the new beta this morning, but I am having a problem
implementing a new feature I'm working on, which I will discuss in a separate
post in a few minutes. At any rate, I won't be ready for a new drop until
Wednesday.
We've had over 200 verifiable beta testers, and the response has been
overwhelmingly positive. Thanks for trying it out guys... please keep sending me
your feedback. it's already much more stable thanks to the comments I've gotten
so far.