The first non-beta version of Raven 1.0 is now available for download. A big thank you goes to the Raven user community for reporting defects and sending us valuable feedback. Some users have gone to the extent of giving us access to their servers to test Raven.

The formal press release can be found here. We think Raven is one of the first WSYIWYG blog editors designed to be portable. (We do want to mention that the editor we used before Zoundry made an editor - wBloggar - can also be run on a USB stick. wBloggar is not a true WYSIWYG blog editor). When installed as a portable application, Raven stores all of the downloaded blog content, drafts, thumbnails, clipboard copy/paste content in the USB drive. Any resources referenced on the primary hard drive (e.g. images in the C:/ drive) will be automatically copied to your profile in the portable USB drive.

It took us a while to get to the 1.0 version as we wanted to resolve as many issues as we could before releasing it. There are still a few known issues still unresolved.

• Embedding video links - To add video (youtube.com, google video, ifilm, photobucket, piratr, slide, veoh, and vsocial), all you have to do is drag and drop the youtube.com link into the editor, or if you already have a link to a video site in the editor, then right click on the link and choose "Link -> Create Embed Content".
  
  The issue related to a video embed is that it is not properly rendered in the editor (it is OK in preview mode). The video embed (in the editor) may remain blank until you either grab it and move it around or double click on it.
• Diacritic marks when entered as entities are converted to Unicode characters.
• Font settings user interface supports only fixed font size units (px). Relative font size units such as em and percentage can be entered via xhtml editor.
• Image and attachment links to UNC paths do not render correctly and are not uploaded when posting.
• HTTP Proxy supports only BASIC authentication. ISA server specific (windows logon) schemes are not supported.
• UPDATE: The Splash screen and About page image still "thinks" its a beta. Oh well!

Portable Application:
If you plan to install Raven on a USB stick (pen drive), then please make sure to check the "Portable Application" check box shown in the install wizard. You can read more about this here.

WordPress 2.6 :
WordPress 2.6 users must have the XML-RPC Remote Publishing enabled to use Raven.

Labels: download, portable, raven, raven2go, releaseNotes

The fifth (and likely the final beta) build release (version 0.9.360) is now available for download. This release contains mostly bug fixes and a few enhancements.

• Added support for Flickr media storage (image upload).
• HTTP Proxy support. See Tools -> Preferences -> General -> Proxy. Note that the current implementation does not support Google ClientLogin (i.e. Blogger.com and Picasa). Updated July 24, 2008 - Version 0.9.363 supports Google ClientLogin via HTTP Proxy - please see this forum post.
• When image files are dropped into the editor, a dialog box is shown to allow you to choose the thumbnail size settings.
• Width and height attributes of <img> tags are automatically generated if they are not set (images without these attributes do not work on WordPress.com hosted site).
• The <img> tag ALT attribute is now automatically set (derived from the filename) when you drag and drop an image into the editor.
• When you drop attachments/files into the editor, the <a> tag TITLE attribute will be set with the file name and file size.
• The Src input field in the Image Properties dialog now supports paths that start with underscores as well as UNC paths.
• The XML-RPC layers uses local Date Time format (instead of UTC) for TextPattern. This is a work around until TextPattern's XML-RPC layer plugin supports UTC.
• The src attribute in <img> elements for Picasa urls contain the imgmax parameter. This parameter is now also applied to href attributes in <a> elements. E.g. link from a thumbnail image to larger image. (If the imgmax parameter is not added on to the URL, then Picasa server returns the large images as attachments which forces the browser to prompt the "Open With" or "Save As" dialog.)
• WordPress specific:
• • When you remove existing tags for a post and update the post, the tags are removed from the WP entry.
  • You can now set WP per-post password.
  • You can now change the WP post status such as Pending, Private etc.

WordPress 2.6 users should enable Remote Publishing on the WP server.

As usual, many thanks goes to all our users for taking the time to send us feedback as well as bug reports.

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

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

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

Our second public beta build release (version 0.9.223) 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 - a new UI to help in translating Raven to other languages. If you would like to contribute, please let us know - directly from the Raven.
• No More Technorati Tags - well, unless you want it. You now have the option of selecting Technorati or other tag sites. Read more.
• Blog This - command line options to allow external programs launch Raven. Read more.
• Editor Font - you can now chang the working font name and size of the Designer editor. Read more.
• Trackback - you can now send trackbacks. Enter the trackback URLs in the blog post settings user interface.
• File Attachment Upload - upload non-image files by simply dragging and dropping them into the designer. Read more.
• Bug/defect fixes.

Labels: beta, download, releaseNotes, zoundry raven