Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" Support
- Spotlight
- OmniOutliner now has a Spotlight importer plugin that handles full text indexing and provides many custom metadata keys. For example, you can query for OmniOutliner files that contain more than 4 columns, have a column named "Price" and an "Important" named style. You can set up metadata searches using these custom keys in Finder using cmd-F. Select 'Other...' from the key popup and search for OmniOutliner to see the complete list of extra keys that we support. Note that these keys only show up once you have run this build of OmniOutliner at least once.
- OmniOutliner now has a Spotlight importer plugin that handles full text indexing and provides many custom metadata keys. For example, you can query for OmniOutliner files that contain more than 4 columns, have a column named "Price" and an "Important" named style. You can set up metadata searches using these custom keys in Finder using cmd-F. Select 'Other...' from the key popup and search for OmniOutliner to see the complete list of extra keys that we support. Note that these keys only show up once you have run this build of OmniOutliner at least once.
Important Notes About This Release
- Previous releases had a bug where use of the Save All menu item would prevent the next save operation from working correctly. See the below section on saving for more details. We highly recommend updating to this release in order to make sure you are not hit by this bug.
- This release introduces experimental support for exporting to Keynote 2 themes. (We could already export to Keynote 1 themes.) There is a known limitation that prevents changes to a master slide in the exported file from being reflected in the slides using that master. The workaround is to select all the slides in Keynote and use the 'Reapply Master to Slide' item in the context menu. Once you do that, any future changes to a master slide will be immediately reflected in the slides using that master. See the section below on Exporting for a little more detail. Please report any other bugs you encounter with Keynote 2 export.
Saving
- We fixed a bug that could cause data loss if you used the Save All menu item: any save operation following a Save All would fail to save the changes made after the Save All operation. The problem was that The next save (except for a Save All) would however reset things such that subsequent saves would work correctly.
Stability
- If OmniOutliner failed to open a file for some reason, it was likely to crash. This has been fixed.
- If a document was closed while an attachment label or URL was being edited, OmniOutliner would still attempt to autosave the document a bit later, and would generally crash at that point. This has been fixed.
- Doing a batch find with an extremely long lines could hang. Now it won't, though doing this can still cause performance problems. Common usage patterns shouldn't hit either case.
Localization
- OmniOutliner now sports Japanese, French and German localizations. Additionally, the online help is localized in Japanese. Thanks to all those that helped out in the localization effort. If you are interested in helping localize OmniOutliner or another of our applications to your language, please contact info@omnigroup.com.
Performance
- Another round of performance enhancements for saving files is in place. All our tests now indicate that we are faster than any previous version of OmniOutliner for a wide variety of large documents. If you have a document that is behaving slowly, please send in feedback via the Help ? Send Feedback... menu.
- The first edit after loading a large file should no longer result in an otherwise abnormal performance hitch.
Importing
- Long audio capture sessions could bog down your machine. It turns out that working around one QuickTime issue earlier caused us to step on another QuickTime issue where updating the resource on a movie would rewrite a ton of data needlessly. Now we avoid that and can again handle multi-hour high-quality audio captures easily.
- The XSL plugin support now works for importing XML files with extensions other than "xml" or "xmloutline" (file types defined in the OmniOutliner application). If you sign up as a localization volunteer, you'll likely receive a XSL plugin to read our 'translations' format.
- Keynote 1 and 2 import works, though there are limitations. Currently we get the bullets and speaker notes, but no styles or attachments. This is expected (and really, we haven't gotten much in the way of requests for anything else). Keynote import is primarily aimed at people that start out in Keynote and decide they want a faster way to flesh out their outline before building a polished presentation.
- The clipping service will now launch OmniOutliner Professional if it isn't already running. Also, if the clipping fails for some reason, the service will alert you to this fact.
- Pasting tab-delimited plain text content into an outline would fail with an exception if you had non-text columns in the outline. Now the values in the plain text are converted to the correct types for the columns.
- Dragging in a webloc file would result in an attachment with default style attributes instead of a style appropriate for the drop location.
- Editing attachment labels would display incorrectly for some fonts
Exporting
- Prettier and easier to use Keynote export preferences. The interface for selecting a theme for export is now very similar to what Keynote uses for selecting themes, with a few minor enhancements. Also, you can visually select master slides rather than simply selecting by title. We also display localized preview images for themes and master slides.
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Experimental: We can now export via Keynote 2 themes. As with Keynote 1 export, only topic and note text is exported. We know people want more, but this is a good first step for people that have purchased iWork. Apple hasn't documented the Keynote 2 file format at all, so we had to muddle our way through. If you see anything unexpected, please let us know.
- Known issues:
- The style system in Keynote is pretty touchy about the XML written out and we haven't figured out how to make slides from masters reliably, taking styles into account. The upshot of this is that you need to select all the slides in Keynote and use the 'Reapply Master to Slide' context menu before changing the selected master for a slide (or styling the masters) will change the slides.
- The style system in Keynote is pretty touchy about the XML written out and we haven't figured out how to make slides from masters reliably, taking styles into account. The upshot of this is that you need to select all the slides in Keynote and use the 'Reapply Master to Slide' context menu before changing the selected master for a slide (or styling the masters) will change the slides.
- Known issues:
- Exporting to RTF no longer strips trailing newlines from the end of rows
Interface
- Fixed a typo on the Summary pop-up menu in the Column Type inspector.
- Dragging in an attachment could result in crazy scrolling previously. We don't like crazy scrolling.
- It wasn't possible to set the row numbering to an empty string on a specific row if an ancestor of the row had specified a level style with a non-empty value for the prefix or suffix.
- In locales where the currency symbol should appear as a suffix (Swedish, for example), selecting the currency format in the Column Type inspector for a number column would result in a zero value being displayed as "kr 0,00" when the correct display was "0,00 kr".
NOTE: If you have an existing document with a column that was incorrectly formatted due to this bug, you'll need to reselect the currency format in the Column Type inspector to reset the format on the column to the corrected version.
- Tabbing in the Find panel cycles through fields reasonably now.
- If your left-most column is a checkbox column, hitting return to add a new row will no longer cause the window to lose focus on the outline.
- Previously, if some but not all of your documents were minimized when you quit OmniOutliner, only those that were minimized would be automatically reopened when you next launched the app. Now all documents open at quit time will be restored on next launch, whether minimized or not. (This is only applicable if you have the appropriate preference set, of course.)
- When indenting a row causes it to no longer be a section, the focus would previously get lost.
- Foreign keyboard layouts previously had issues with our inspector shortcuts (French keyboards, for example, have the numbers in the shifted position). Now we base the keyboard shortcuts for those inspectors off keyboard location instead of a specific character. There is more work to do in this area, so let us know what issues you run into.
- Setting a persistent sort ordering for a column via the main menu wouldn't update the display until you moved the mouse.
- Persistent sorting should less frequently move stuff around while you are editing your document.
- When opening a document with more than 20 rows in an unlicensed copy of the application, the window title is adorned with 'Unlicensed' instead of 'Read Only' so it is more clear why you can't edit your document. This was confusing when upgrading a OO2 file since one of the options there is to import the file "Read Only" but selecting "Upgrade" would result in a file that was read-only anyway.
- Modifications to a row while you are editing a non-text cell (like a date) could previously cause the edits in the non-text cell to revert to the original value.
- The code that checks whether you've seen the release notes for the current version of the application now handles version numbers with more than one period in them (for instance, 3.0.2).
- Clicking on the status checkbox on a parent row could fail to set all the children to have the same status as the new parent status if you had sorting enabled on the status value.
- Using the "Insert date/time" menu items will now work better in date columns.
- Long blocks of text could result in the view scrolling unexpectedly when you changed editing focus. Did I mention that we don't like crazy scrolling?
- If you had a corrupt PostScript version of Helvetica in your fonts directory, our inspectors would lay out bizarrely. This problem is gone, but there are still problems if you have corrupt fonts, particularly something like Helvetica.
Styles
- Copying styles now copies the full effective style rather than just copying locally applied style attributes. This is probably what more people expect and you can still get at the power features in the style system via the Styles View.
- Copying a row with two or more named styles applied to it and then pasting it would result in a row that had the same named styles in the opposite order.
- We now handle fonts with the narrow and fixed-pitch attributes. Oops.
- Changing a column's background color will now immediately update the display
- Toggling bold/italic in an empty cell should update the inspectors correctly now. There was also an issue where doing several style modifications in a cell with no text selected (just a cursor) wouldn't result in the combination of the modifications -- only the last one would take effect.
- Un-checking italic in the Appearance inspector now works when you are editing an empty note cell.
- When the Keyboard Preferences were set to split when creating a new row, the style of the current row wouldn't get cloned to the newly created row if you hit return while editing (worked fine if you just had the row selected).
Printing
- Styles applied to headers & footers in the Page Setup sheet would print w/o the styles
- Newlines in headers & footers in the Page Setup sheet could cause the application to hang when printing (or when bringing up Page Setup again).
- Text in the default style (black) should print out the same black as our handle images.
- OmniOutliner Pro has fully customizable headers & footers, but in all the work getting that implemented, the default header & footer support that was available in OmniOutliner 2 accidentally got dropped. It's back now; you can enable or disable the default headers & footers in the Page Setup sheet in OmniOutliner
AppleScript
- The 'select' command now takes a boolean 'extending' argument. This allows you to more easily control whether you replace or extend the selection, particularly in cases were you pass rows from multiple documents to 'select' (did you know that's possible?)
- Added 'expel ancestors' and 'expel descendants' commands. Both of these take a list of rows as input and return a smaller list of rows. The first removes any row that is an ancestor of another row in the list, while the second does the same for descendants.
- Added 'leaves' relationship to row and document.
- Added 'sections' relationship to row and document. The row version returns all the descendants that are also sections.
- Added 'selected rows' relationship to row. This returns all the selected rows that are descendants of the row.
- Added 'writable document types' and 'readable document types' property on the application. This can help in dealing with the dynamic document type support in OmniOutliner Professional (due to XSL plugins). These each return a list of records where each record lists the following
- type: the string identifying this type -- can be passed as the 'as' parameter to the 'save' command.
- displayName: a human readable name for the file type, according to the user's preferred language
- fileExtensions: a list of file extensions for this type; the first element is the preferred extension for this type
- type: the string identifying this type -- can be passed as the 'as' parameter to the 'save' command.