State of JournalBetter January 10, 2012

UPDATE Feb 20: Will not work for Norton customers or 2nd user on a Windows computer.

• Norton Antivirus does not recognize this software and thus will not allow it to be downloaded. Submittals to their process are underway....
• If a second user attempts to install JournalBetter on a Windows computer, the user will get a strange message and the software will not start up.

Summary:

1. You might need to close and re-open views to see your data after some of the buggier moves. Or, sometimes even restart the whole app.
2. Undo/Redo still not implemented
3. Documentation still in progress
4. Backups may not be necessary any more, but they are both easy and fast.
5. Maybe beta in a few months, eh?

Where things are and why we are summarizing many bugs in one place:

For 19 months we have been working on JournalBetter to both define what it does, and make it all work.

We have now reached a place where you can pretty nearly see what it will do for the first beta release (still months away). In most of the critical ways, it pretty nearly does what it needs to do.

So now we are finally sending our families, and even a few close friends, links to our software. Anyone can use it, and we ourselves have been using it every day for months. It is already useful enough where you might accidentally fall in love with it, even if the bugs make it a love-hate relationship for the time being.

But there are still many bugs which pretty much all have the same kind of nature, and they pretty much all have the same workaround. So rather than describe them individually, we're going to describe the general nature of most of the biggest bugs that we are working on, so you know what to expect and how to make it 'no big deal' if you are like us, and you want to use the program despite the nuisance of the bugs.

When you do stuff, it might not show as done everywhere it needs to:

The essence of JournalBetter as a value proposition is that you can work without having to anticipate where your data is going to be important to you. After all, the mind just doesn't know that your one idea today would have so many consequences tomorrow (or, none at all ever). So you just write things as they occur to you, then tagging and re-organizing occurs whenever it starts to be obvious how it all works together.

What that means is that one piece of data might show up in one or more tags, and a tree, and in multiple views.

We have been implementing all of those features as quickly as we can. It has been a period of great discovery for us - sometimes we conclude that we had no idea how complex something simple like that might be. 

So you might drag from point a to point b and find that the final result of the drag really isn't even "right" until you shut down a tag view and then re-open it. Some of the worst bugs you have to shut down and re-open the whole app to see the right changes. Kinda crazy, but that's where things are, and we're still working on each individual use case until they are all fixed.

When you do stuff, there is no undo or redo:

This app was always designed for undo and redo functionality.

The implementation of this functionality is a different thing. Basically what that means is we have to 'take a picture' of the way things are before we do anything, so it will undo to that picture when you hit undo. We haven't done any of this 'picture taking' work yet, so undo and redo still don't work.

We're working on that now, but it's a slow process that has to be tested and fixed as it goes along. So please don't give up on us if it takes a while. Meanwhile the only way you can undo stuff now is to redo things manually :(

Documentation In Progress:

Until recently the app was so unfinished we didn't even try to document it.

We even now haven't updated our videos for a year, despite over 45 releases of improvements!

Now that things are beginning to settle down as far as the adding of features and fixing of bugs, we're beginning the slow process of catching up on documentation.

Please feel free to give us plenty of feedback. You might be amazed how many obvious things don't occur to us - we've been looking this thing so closely we often miss the most obvious needs.

Is Your Data Safe?

For the first 20 or so releases we cautioned users not to try us unless they had data to lose :( We kept finding ways to lose data by using the app. That's the way it is developing new software.

Those days appear to be over. We had one incident a few weeks ago where the data was becoming invisible and we had to run some SQL in the diagnostic window to restore what was not visible before we fixed the bug, but all appears to be well so far.

Meanwhile, please feel free to make frequent backups of your database - it's a really fast and painless process. You may never need the backups, but it doesn't hurt anything either except taking up space on your hard drive.

Where Things Are Headed:

We're in love with the idea of making this app work for you. We work on it full time every day, and we hope to make it something you just can't live without. We've still got a couple years of capital left before we have to make the app pay for itself, and we're going to use that to serve your needs as well as we possibly can.

There are tons of features we've got planned, such as sharing tags and docs with external users. And other features we can't even talk about! But we think you'll enjoy watching them emerge.

But before we do any of these, we've got to whip this app into beta shape. No more bugs in the existing feature set. Undo and redo working perfectly. Documentation up to snuff.

Then we call it a beta, make all the appropriate announcements, and see how the market likes it! Go Pete and Jacquelyn!