Our fourth public beta build release (version 0.9.284) is now available for download. This build has most of the defects that were submitted during the last beta period fixed as well as the following enhancements and features:

• Designer
• • You can now select multiple paragraphs and press the bullet button to get multiple bullets.
  • Added a toolbar button for the <blockquote> (the indent button still inserts a <blockquote> tag).
  • Toolbar buttons to insert html tags such as <H1>, <H2>, <code> etc. Read more.
    
• XHTML Editor - lot of enhancements on this editor. See this post for more details.
• • The current row and column position is now displayed in the status bar.
  • Find and Replace functionality.
  • Paste as XHTML.
  • Toolbar button implementations for bold, italic and underline text formatting.
  • XHTML schema and CSS valid code completion and call tips.
  • XHTML validation.
  • Clean up and W3C Tidy.
    
• Templates
• • Javascript in the Preview page is now disabled.
  • Added BaseHref support when downloading Blog Templates.
    
• Publishing
• • You now have the option to remove newlines when publishing your posts. For those of you who use Blogger.com and have enabled their "Convert Line Breaks" option should check the "Remove Newlines" check box. This check box is available in the Account and Blog preferences UI. This option removes newlines (so that Blogger will not convert those to additional <br/> tags). Newlines in <pre> and <javascript> tags are not removed to observe the xml:space="preserve" option.
  • XML namespace prefixes (e.g. xml:space="preserve") are removed during publishing. This is mainly to avoid support some WordPress plug-ins that are not XML aware.
  • XML-RPC based file uploads for WP now also send the file MIME content-type. The content-type is needed by WordPress 2.5 to display thumbnails in its Media Library. Thanks to Kirk M. to reporting this defect (among others) and allowing us to use a test server hosted on his machine.
    
• Raven To Go (Portable Version) - When you drag and drop (or link to) image or files from the host machine's hard drive, these resources will be copied to the portable thumb drive when you save your post. Note that this process may take a few seconds (for moderate size resources) since the files need to be copied to a slower device (e.g thumb drive).
  
• Application UI
• • You can now delete only the local copy of a blog post without deleting it from the server.
  • Raven now remembers if the main app window was maximized, so it will start up maximized if it was maximized when it was shut down.
  • Added "Collapse All" button to the Account Navigator - this button will collapse all of the nodes in the tree.
  • Account Navigator now remembers which node was selected when Raven was closed.
  • Pressing the "Dashboard" button in the Account Navigator will now deselect any node that was previously selected.
  • Partial translation language bundles for Spanish (es_MX, about 60% done) and Chinese (zh_CN, about 25% done). Many thanks to Fëaluin (es_MX) and MaoMen (zh_CN) for getting the translations started. We also want to mention that Marcos Silva was one of the early testers to start on a Portuguese (Brazilian) translation, but unfortunately, most of the work he did was lost due to a defect in out translator tool.
    
• Framework - major changes to underlying background task support:
• • Improved synchronization to avoid errors, stack traces.
  • Background Task window should now update properly in all cases.
  • Standard Perspective views have been changed to better handle concurrency (better thread synchronization)
  • Added a section in the Main Application Window's status bar to indicate the current background task activity.
  • Canceling bg tasks should work better now.

Labels: beta, download, portable, raven, raven2go, releaseNotes

The XHTML code editor in Raven (version 0.9.279) is almost feature complete with following enhancements.

• Find and Replace.
• Zoom.
• Paste as XHTML.
• Text Formatting.
• Brace (< and >) matching and XHTML tag and attribute name highlighting (syntax color coding).
• XHTML schema valid code completion.
• XHTML validation.
• XHTML code cleanup and Tidy services.

When using the code editor, note that the content of the editor should content of a XHTML <body> tag. Do not enter <xhtml>, <head> and <body> tags. Use only child tags of the <body> tag such as <p>.

Find and Replace:
The Find/Replace dialog is exactly the same dialog used in WYSIWYG Designer. Press Ctrl+F (or EditMenu->Find) to bring up the dialog.

Zoom Controls:
Press ctrl and + (plus) or ctrl and - (minus) to increase or decrease the XHTML editor font size.

Paste as XHTML (Ctrl + Shift + V):
This is similar to functionality found in the Designer. The difference between Paste (Ctrl + V) and Paste as XHTML (Ctrl + Shift + V) is that the latter will convert the content into a xhtml code fragment before pasting the content into the editor. For example if you copied the following plain text content to the clipboard:

This is the first paragraph
Second line.

Second paragraph
2nd line
3rd line

then pasting as xhtml insert the following formatted code:

   <p>
     This is the first paragraph
     <br/>
     Second line.
   </p>
   <p>
     Second paragraph
     <br/>
     2nd line
     <br/>
     3rd line
   </p>

Text Formatting:
Text formatting toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Bold or Ctrl+B, etc.) are available in XHTML editor. To use it, simply select the text and press the toolbar button (such as Bold). The appropriate markup is then wrapped around your text selection. For example, if the text selection is

Hello World

then the final markup would be

<strong>Hello World</strong>

If you do not have any text selected when you invoke one of operations (e.g. Bold or Ctrl+B), then the relevant markup is inserted with the cursor positioned between the open and close tag. For example, the Bold button would insert

<strong>[cursor]</strong>

where [cursor] indicates the cursor.

Note: Be careful when you apply markup on selected text as the markup is applied to the whole selection even if the selected text had partial markup. For example if the selected text is

em>[cursor]</em>

(i.e. includes partial text for <em> open tag), then after applying Bold, the final markup would look like

<strong>em>[cursor]</em></strong>

Notice that the <strong> tag was applied over the partial <em> tag since it was part of the selection.

Code Completion:
The auto complete list is a list of schema valid xhtml and css keywords that can be inserted at current document (cursor) position. The list is automatically shown when you type in a start tag "<" or an end tag "</" character sequence. This list will also automatically hide if any of the characters you typed did not match a tag in the list shown.You can also display the list by pressing Ctrl + Space (e.g. after the < character).

Below is a screen shot showing the tag list at the top (root) level:

Once you are inside a tag, Ctrl+Space will show the list of available attribute names for the current element.

If you are in a style attribute, Ctrl+Space will show the list of available CSS style names and or values depending on the context. Similarly, attribute value options for href, class attributes are shown when available.

The list for class attribute values shown are based on what you have already used in the current document (post). The href values are also based on list of links you have in the current working document. For example, soon after typing http:// you should see a list of possible matches links based on other links in the document. Screen shot below shows the auto complete on font-family CSS style attribute:

The auto-completion on a close tag character sequence </ will show the matching closing tag (when possible i.e. as long as your content is well formed).

XHTML Validation:
This version of Raven also allows you to validate your post entry using XHTML 1.0 Strict or Transitional by pressing the Validate button on the tool bar. The validation messages with warning/error line numbers are shown in the message list below the editor along with corresponding "markers" (icons) on the editor margin.

Note: validation is performed against your post - and not against your Blog site. You should make sure that your Blog site is XHTML compliant (most are based on templates).

XHTML Clean up and Tidy:
This tool bar option allows you to manually run a basic code clean up process (e.g. convert plain text to xhtml, clean up MS Word tags etc.) followed by a call to W3C Tidy. Note that is also automatically performed when you save or switch to the Designer.

Labels: editor, how-to

Many users have requested a feature enhancement to allow them to insert xhtml markup tags such as headers (H1, H2 etc) and other inline tags such as <sup>, <code> etc. using the Raven WYSIWYG Designer instead of having to switch to the XHTML code editor .

These feature enhancements have now been included into Raven (starting with version 0.9.279) as a tool bar drop down button.

The tool bar has two buttons - one is for formatting block level elements such as <h1>, <pre> etc. To format text as a header, simply select the text and choose one of the tags shown from the drop down menu. The horizontal rule (<hr>) tag is also available in this menu. If you want to insert a <hr>, make sure that you do not have a text selection - otherwise your selection will be replaced with a <hr>.

The second tool bar button also allows you to format you text selection, except that the list of available tags are schema dependent. In most cases, you will see inline tags such as <code>, <em>, <sup> etc.

Labels: how-to

A question that we recently had asked on the forums was "How do I backup my Raven profile data?" This particular user was interested in doing this due to a needed re-install of Windows. I think it's a good question in general, so here's how you do it.

Raven stores all user data in your profile. You may have as many profiles as you want, but most users will likely have only one. You use the Zoundry Profile Manager to add, import, create new profiles. For backup purposes, simply backup the entire profile directory (or directories). By default, the profiles are located in your Application Data directory, for example:

C:\Documents and Settings\ZoundryMan\Application Data\Zoundry\Zoundry Raven

Of course, unless you log in as "ZoundryMan", that part of the path will be different (your username). For the record, I don't mind if you use "ZoundryMan" as the username for your computer. :)

If you are using Raven2Go, then your profiles will be in a "profiles" directory within the Zoundry Raven installation directory, for example:

E:\Portable Apps\Zoundry Raven\profiles

When restoring from your backup, all you need to do is copy those profile directories back to your computer. Feel free to put them wherever you want, although in most cases putting them back where they were before is best. Once you have done that (and presumably re-installed Raven) it is a simple matter to add them back in. Run Raven, and choose New in the Profile Manager. You will see the Create New Profile dialog. In that dialog, name your profile whatever you want, and point the path to one of your newly restored profiles.

That's all there is to it.

Labels: backup, beta, how-to, raven, zoundry

Our third public beta build release (version 0.9.250) is now available for download. This build has most of the defects that were submitted during the last beta period fixed as well as the following enhancements and features:

• Translation Tool - made some improvements to the Translation Tool, since some of our translators were experiencing crashes and losing all their data! I can't guarantee that this build fixes the crash problems (we hope so), but we added "journaling" to the UI so we can recover any data lost. If you are translating Raven, and you experience a crash, contact us and we can help you recover anything you may have lost.
• Raven2Go - when you install Raven, you now have the option to install it as a Portable Application.
• • When you install, you will notice that there is a new installer page. Use it if you want to install to a portable drive (or if you just want us to stay out of your registry).
  • If you copy/paste an image (e.g. via Photoshop or Gimp) into Raven, we will create a local image resource in your profile directory.
  • If you want to make sure any other images are available wherever you go, you will need to copy them to your portable drive prior to linking to them in your blog post(s). We will be fixing that in a future release.
• Fixed Picasa hot linking issue. Images uploaded to Picasa Web should display correctly. Raven will choose the appropriate image url on Picasa based on your image width and height properties.
• Paste images from Windows clipboard. For example, copy and paste images or a selection within an image from Photoshop, Gimp etc. to Raven.
• Fixed image and link unicode issues. All img src and anchor href values are now in IDNA (Punycode) format. This is mainly to support older browsers such as IE6. The values within the designer (e.g. Image Properties dialog) will still be in unicode.
• Fixed WordPress delete post issue where the post was first deleted directly from WordPress and was not able to remove it from Raven.
• Canceling background tasks (publish, template download, etc) should now work better.

Labels: beta, download, portable, raven, raven2go, releaseNotes