The making of

Just a quick note on what we've been working on for the last two weeks.

After releasing multilingual versions of our forum and helpdesk applications, we received a lot of constructive feedback from our international customers. Mostly, it were feature requests, so the last two weeks were pretty busy.

HelpDesk 2.7.6 (already out) features handy pie-chart diagrams in the "summary" report, customizable email notifications text and many other cool features, including enabled email-notifications in the trial version.

AspNetForum 4.5 (still in development) brings hashed password storage, forum signatures for users, FAQ for users (along with the admin manual) and many other features.

MailJet 2.32 which is also still in development features some minor GUI improvements and a number of performance optimizations.

All these releases are almost finished, and will be out in the next 48 hours.

Routine

It's been a while since my last post, but I guess it's OK considering how busy we have been this week.

Our Macro Recorder software has been featured at GiveAwayOfTheDay for 24 hours. People have made some quite reasonable comments, so we had a lot of ideas how to improve our Macro Recorder. We are already working on a new version which will fix the context-menu positioning, add some new macro commands and more.

We have also released fresh versions of Jitbit ASP.NET Forum, which fixes some critical errors under MySQL, and System Purifier which improves its performance.

AspNetForum: future plans

Just a short note to let you know we're working on the next version of our ASP.NET forum software which will bring:

• "closing a thread" feature to make it readonly
• cleaner source codes and a bit of optmizations
• users list will show most active forum users, most recent forum users etc.
• logging "last visit" for all users

And many more. Stay updated.

Bug fixing

Now this is funny. Recently a couple of users have reported, that the online demo of our HelpDesk software was down, keeping everyone from logging in. After some investigation it appeared that somebody was testing the HelpDesk's administrative functions. Specifically... resetting the passwords!

We have also located (and fixed) a very shameful bug in our MailJet software. This is rather sad than funny: under certain conditions, when sending personalized emails, the program was always placing the name of the first recipient into the email, no matter how many recipients there are. Many thanks to Michael from Bloombit Software for pointing us at this (and suggesting some very nice other features). The updated version is already published on our website.

Help-Desk: the making of

Just a small announcement on what's coming in the next version of our ASP.NET Help-Desk software that we hope to release in the next few days (fingers crossed):

• XHTML-conformance
• CSS optimizations
• Knowledge-Base will be accessible to non-authenticated users
• some more general improvements

UPDATE: a user on our forum has suggested to store the user's first/last names along with the login-name. This will also be added to the release.

Macro Recorder: new timing architecture

Here is another post in the series of "the making of" posts where I speak a bit about what we're doing on the next versions of our products.

Today we have looked at our Macro Recorder and decided to abandon the idea, that every command/event in a macro must have a "timeout" characteristic.

This was stupid. We admit it. It's a legacy feature, left from the days when Macro Recorder was just a tiny little mouse-recorder/player tool, without all this "if-then-else-goto-repeat" stuff. Actually sometimes I miss those happy days... ;)

Now, this timeout field was supposed to mean "how many milliseconds to wait, before executing the command". It was very confusing for a new user to understand, why does Macro Recorder assign this "timeout" to the recorded commands, instead of simply inserting a DELAY command before it? It also made the text of a saved macro look obscure. That's why we are getting rid of it. No more timeouts. If previously a saved macro would look like this:

0 : Keyboard : D : KeyDown
14: Keyboard : D : KeyUp

From now on a saved macro will look like this:

Keyboard : D : KeyDown
DELAY : 14
Keyboard : D : KeyUp

Looks more human-readable, right?

Also we have found a small error in the exe-compiler, which may lead to incorrect GOTO-command processing. Many thanks to Henrich Eckhardt for reporting!

Macro Recorder: the making of

Now, with this blog, I finally have a place to whine about our everyday struggle for new versions. So, this post marks the beginning of a series of "the making of" posts which will tell you a bit about what we're doing on the next versions of our software.

So, if anyone is interested what's behind those dry "what's new" lists, here we go.

It occurred to me the other day, that our Macro Recorder has an "IF" statement, but there's no "ELSE" statement. How dumb were we not to add this feature? So I got filled with enthusiasm (Dan, I promise, I will never call this late again) and we started coding right away. After a while I realized that adding "else" would be more complex than I thought, since I will have to rewrite all macro-command stack processing... At the same time I found a general bug with IF-statements which can result in improper behaviour. After all, what I thought would be a 15-minutes job resulted in 3 sleepless nights.

But now it is almost finished. I even decided to add another type of IF-statement - "IF Window Exists" - to this release. I'm pretty sure it will take me no more than 15 minutes...