Release Notes

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• 0.91 Object transmission, intelligent compression of the data streams, and Voting added
• 0.92 Installer changed to correct permissions on directory for Vista users
• 0.93 ini reset to use application directory, fader timer (FadeTime) added to ini, fader initial on/off (DefaultFaderOn) added to ini, right button set to always fade regardless of fader state, Strikethrough and Underline bugs fixed
• 0.94 Has a number of changes making it not fully compatible with previous versions and previously saved files.  The changes are:
  
  1. Straight Diagonal lines were added and mapped to shift function; Connections were remapped to shift+CTRL.  Previously Shift+CTRL and Shift+ALT made the shapes symmetric (e.g., circles are symmetric, ovals are not).  This can still be done, the shift key now acts as a toggle while the mouse button is held down (if the shift is down, the shape will be symmetric).  The "trick" is to use the shift key after the left mouse button has been pressed.
     
  2. Vote label resets to 0% when the vote is "reset" on host, client label no longer changes.
  3. Previously, all pen strokes pasted out were offset by +5, darn useful to locate and move them on the same page - but darn annoying when pasted to other pages.  Now, the paste-offset only occurs when pasting to the same page.
  4. Plain and HTML Text pasting was added.   By default, NetPen's current font, size and style are used. 
     
  5. A warning message was added (rather than crashing) if copying from the clipboard exhausted memory.
  6. Compression was added to large transmissions and the Transmission Dialog now provides a close estimate rather than the exact time.
  7. Some users were experiencing excessive connection failures, fixing this required a change to how objects are serialized which is why 0.94 isn't guaranteed to be backward compatible with other versions or with .pen files produced from earlier versions.
  8. "Multiple Choice" was added to text fields.  Any line of text that begins with a CTRL+Space will display a square box next to it.
     
     
  9. Fixed a bug caused by pressing the alt key (it shifted focus away from the drawing area to the menubar as per standard OS mnemonics) Unfortunately, it also meant the next mouse press went to the menubar, causing NetPen to miss the next mouse down event and have odd drawing behavior.
     
     
• 0.95 adds the Test ability (see the documentation for more information) and corrects these bugs:
1. Corrected a bug in the open/load/import logic to correctly transmit the changes to remote nodes.  Any client or host can now open, load, or import to the session.  Note that since "Open" does a clear, only the host can do an "Open", remote clients attempting to do an "Open" get the "Load" behavior. 
   
2. Corrected a bug where clicking on a pre-existing object after first opening .pen file caused the object size to go to zero
3. Fixed was added as an attribute to pen strokes, this prevents the penstroke from being modified in any way (it can only be copied) and is used for the page 0 icons and tests.
4. The eraser erasing pen stokes on other pages was fixed.
5. The "show messages" diagnostic was eliminated from the Connection Dialog.  Clicking in the dialog frame now toggles that behavior (eventually this will go away completely).
6. An Email address field was added to the Connection Dialog and the .ini file.  The email field is now appended as a document property and is also used on Test pages to simply returning graded tests (see Testing).
7. Objects can now span multiple pages, works with the Test functionality and isn't directly accessible.
   
8. Diagnostics were removed from the error log file.
9. Users that have outlook are presented with the option of emailing errors back for analysis.
10. Properties were added to the .pen file; however there is not currently a convenient way to access them and they are primarily used by the testing feature.

• 0.96 is a bug fix release:
• A bug in testing where the system didn't fall back to the client name if the email address wasn't specified thus causing incoming data to all go to the same page
• some minor typos were corrected
• Corrected an error while trying to send email if the page didn't contain an email address.
• Previously, students making marks to other than page 1 of testing would be transmitted to their test results.  Now, any marks not on page -1 during a test are not sent.
  
• 0.97 adds or fixes these items:
• If text or an image is in the current selection and copied (e.g., CTRL+C); the last selected text or image is also copied into the clipboard's buffer allowing it to be pasted into other applications.
• Pasting text from Microsoft Word has been worked-around.  Since Word supports text and image for any clipboard operation you don't really know what's on the clipboard (it's up to the receiving program to decide what it wants).  NetPen always goes for an image if it's available so that you get whatever special fonts, colors, or formatting the other program did for you.  The problem with Java is that the alpha (transparency) bits get lost during this operation - they become black.  So, normal black text on a white background from Word shows up as black text on a black background; not of any use at all.  NetPen now uses a detection scheme to see if the image is all black; if the image is all black NetPen dumps the image and uses text.   A word of warning; the all-black detection is examining every pixel and therefore slow; so copying more than a few lines from Word may take a while.
  
• Text editing was greatly improved.  Double-clicking on the text pops up a dialog where the text can be edited.
  
• A link to the Google Spell Checker API was added and removed (Google's API won't handle more than a couple of lines at a time).  It's a shame as the Google Spell checker was very nice and supported multiple languages.
  
• The Jazzy spell checker was added to the new text editing dialog.  Incorrect words are highlighted, to correct the word with a suggested spelling select the word (double click it), then right click and select from the list.  You can also ignore words or add them to a personal dictionary.  All dictionaries must reside in NetPen's 'lib' directory.  Which dictionary is used can be changed by editing the dict entry in the .INI file.  The user dictionary must be named user.dict and must exist even if it is empty.  Two dictionaries are currently included, a US (default) and a UK version.  Dictionaries are just lists of words, if you put one together for your language send it to me and I'll make it available on this web site.  If you find an error in a dictionary please let me know.
  
• Simple HTML commands were added for the text editor.  To use them, select the text and click the button.  Note that this will embed the HTML directly into the string - looks ugly in the editor and the spell checker will complain about it, but it gives you great control over what you want to see.
• Known Issue - when converting a string to/from normal text to/from html the text goes down/up the height of one line. 
  

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