Wyneken 0.5.2 Release Notes

Written By: Karl J. Abbott

Highlights of this release

Wyneken 0.5.2 is the latest in the 0.5 release series. The 0.5 series is the development series for 0.6. This release represents an improvement over 0.5_aluminum and a major improvement over the 0.4 production version. Overall, I find this release to be the most solid release of Wyneken ever. Once you get the workflow, working in Wyneken 0.5.2 is really nice. There are a couple of new features that make this miles better than any previous release -- even if on the surface it doesn't seem much different feature wise.


The highlights of this release include:

Dependencies

The Move to Qt

This is probably one of the more controversial moves in the history of Wyneken. Moving the project to the Qt framework has always been in the back of my mind. It is my hope that you find the Qt version to be the best iteration of the Wyneken gui to date. My personal reasons for moving from GTK to Qt are as follows:


With the move to Qt 4, you will notice Wyneken at home on your KDE 4 desktop. We do plan on being cross-platform in a future release. As Wyneken moves forward, there are plans to rewrite the wyndb library using the Qt Database interface, so as to fully accept UTF-8 encodings. This will allow Wyneken to save documents with international characters, and will open up the translation possibilities. For those of you familiar with DocBook XML, we are looking to have a po2wyn and wyn2po command set thata will allow for the easy translation of your Wyneken documents. With Qt, Wyneken can realize that goal.

A visual look at 0.5.2

When you first fire up Wyneken 0.5.2, you will be presented with the preferences screen. This is to make sure that these are set properly. If you do not properly set this up, you may experience undesirable behaviors.

One big thing to note in Wyneken 0.5.2 is that it is an autosaving application. Stop worrying about whether or not you saved your document. Wyneken has saved it for you.

Once you click ok on the preferences screen, you will be greeted by the main Wyneken screen. There isn't a whole lot that you can do here until you open a document. To do that, click on the button at the upper left hand corner of the applications that has a tooltip of "Edit Documents."

This screen is known internally to the project as nopen. Nopen handles anything that you would need to do with a document short of editing it, building it, and commiting a revision to it. Nopen is built to be a powerful look into your Wyneken projects and documents.

When nopen first comes up (assuming that you have never used Wyneken before), it will be blank as shown below.

In nopen, buttons appear to the right of the object they control. If you look above, you will see a "New" button next to the Projects list. Clicking on this brings you the following dialog, which allows you to create a new project. All Wyneken documents must be in Projects.

Clicking the New Document button in nopen causes the following dialog to appear:

After having used the previous dialogs a few times, we will have created a screen like the one immediately following this text. One thing to note is that we have created all of these projects and documents, but haven't opened anything yet. You can stay in nopen building projects/notebooks and documents as much as you like before actually opening a document with the Open button at the bottom of the window.

Once you do decide to load a document, you will see Wyneken ready to use. As you will notice, all of the buttons are active at this point.

If you click on the Add Image icon, you will get the dialog that you see immediately following this text. There is a very important option at the bottom of the dialog, and that is the subsampling option. If you have an image that is already 300 dpi, you will want to uncheck this option before clicking "OK". Also, this dialog will determine the maximum size that your image will look good at. It will then use that number for the width of the image when you click "OK".

Back in the main documnent, we show a Wyneken document with a hyperlink. This happens when you click on the Include Document button. It brings up the nopen dialog, and you simply navigate to the document that you want to create (or create a new document to include) and then click "Open". Once you have done that you will see the hyperlink. In Wyneken 0.5.2, it is recommended to use the Include Document button as opposed to trying to hand type the include commands. If you click on the link, it will actually take you to the document that it references after saving the document that you are in. Remember that Wyneken is an autosaving application and thus saves your document quite often.

This is the document that was linked from above. Here we are showing the navigation toolbox opened and you can see that back and home are options. If we click home, it will take us to the last document that was opened with the nopen form. If we are in a notebook, clicking home will take us to the master notebook file, from which we can build the entire notebook.

The following shows us commiting a revision of our document:

The following shows the revisions interface, where you can revert to a previous revision or you can delete a previous revision.

Saving Documents in Wyneken and the absence of Save and Save As.

In Wyneken 0.5.2 we have introduced a strong dependence on AutoSave. This marks a shift from 0.4. We have shifted even further from 0.5_aluminum in that we no longer offer Save As. At first, this may seem a step backwards, but we have introduced "Make Copy" to replace it.

Make copy can be accessed from the nopen dialog. It is to the right of the documents panel in this dialog. It will make a copy of the document that is selected with whatever name you provide. We want to get away from the idea of save and save as and move towards the peace of mind that your documents are safe in Wyneken. We certainly will accept any feedback on this change, but we feel that this change will be for the best. In a future release, we plan to provide the functionality to make a copy from any revision of any document that you have access to.

The short of it is that you should be able to do all of the same things as if you had Save As, but at the end of the day, you should feel better about the contents of your documents.

Include Links and Import Graphics

One of the big new features in 0.5.2 is turning include links into hyper links. In 0.5.2, it is best to use the include document feature as opposed to typing in [include] commands by hand.

With the new links, include statements actually link to where they point and the navigation buttons allow for going home (last document you actually opened with nopen), back, and forward. This also allows for the easy creation of bigger documents. Consider the following scenario:

You are working on a master document. You need to add a new chapter, but you want that chapter to be a separate document. This was somewhat painful under older releases of Wyneken. Now you just click the include document button and that interface works exactly like nopen. So from there, you simply click the New Document button, title your new document, and then click open and the link is generated into your master document. You can then click the link to begin editing the new document. And right before you went to the new document, Wyneken was smart enough to save your master document without you even knowing it!

Hopefully that says in words what works best in a demonstration. I think it's a very cool feature!

With regards to importing graphics, Wyneken 0.5.2 will subsample images to a specified dpi if needed. For that to work, you need to have inkscape installed. Also, when you include an image in a document, Wyneken determines the maximum width at which that document will look good at.

Not sure if you need subsampling? Uncheck the subsample box, click OK, and then see if the width is wide enough for you. If it is not, delete the img command that the dialog inserted into your document and try again subsampling at 300 dpi. That should work much better for you. If the image size is bigger than you need it, you can always reduce the width.

Known Bugs

While there are probably some bugs that still need to be found, there is one bug that I know of at this time:

Release Numbering Changes

First off, we are using a standard release numbering with the hope that this will make it easier on those trying to package Wyneken.

Secondly, we have moved to an odd/even release cycle. This means that anything with an odd number as the minor number should be considered a development release. (ie., 0.5.2, 0.5.3, 0.5.4). Anything with an even number should be considered a stable release (ie., 0.4, 0.6)

Release Early, Release Often

This is something that we haven't done a good job at considering that the last release was almost a year ago. The move to Qt4 should help facilitate more frequent releases. We look to have 0.5.3 out by the end of August 2008. We definitely plan on having more releases as we move to 0.6.

Looking forward to Wyneken 0.5.3

With the move to Qt 4, there are a couple of areas that are now easier to implement and will be the focus of the 0.5.3 release. Among these areas are:


Due to the fact that Wyneken has been an ISO-8859-1 application for so long, the move to UTF-8 will be the big focus of this release. To make this move, wyndb, wyn, and wyneken will all need to have major changes made. Wyndb in particular will undergo a rewrite to link it to the Qt Database library as opposed to pysqlite proper. This will end up removing the dependency on pysqlite.