Now that Winslew 1.3 has hit the road and seems like to be quite stable (at least I didn't get any negative feedback until now and used it myself very much on a long train trip this week) it's time to think about what the next version shall feature. First of all I have one last user request open on UserVoice in the moment: auto refresh the items list and (optional) hiding to tray icon - see UserVoice 568661.

Next I want to tune a little bit the design of the interface - e. g. the two search fields do work as they should but look a little bit ugly I think.

Third and in the moment most important to me is some changes in license key handling. While license key handling itself works without any problems I do have a major problem on how I get the license keys out to you when you have purchased Winslew. I already have had several buyers who had trouble getting the license key using email - spam filters tend to be very aggressive these days Even worth I had several buyers whose given email address in the Paypal payment have been invalid and the sent license keys came back not able to be delivered. Here I want to enhance my license key generator (yes, it's an own program with a modern user interface ) to not only send the email but also store the license key in a database here on li-ghun.de. Winslew itself than shall check on startup if it already knows a license key - and if not ask this database to automatically download the license key and store it.

While this will solve the problems in the future I still have some license keys open whose sending has been failed. As I don't have any other way to reach those buyers I decided to just write them down here - nobody else can do something with those keys so why not show it public...

• Robert Smith 1831: Please send me your Read It Later user account name
• Sophie: e545876b4b
• Scott: f4237c5ef4

If you also are waiting for a license key and already checked your spam filter - drop me an email and I will add your code here too.
Finally: Please submit wishes at UserVoice - I wanna extend Winslew to fulfill all your requirements

After more than a month of coding, testing and documentation I am happy to finally release Winslew 1.3 today. So here what's new:

1. New cache view "Full"
Next to Online, Less and More I have added a fourth view called "Full". This view trys to fetch as much as possible from the page for offline view. This includes stylesheets and images.


2. Styles for "More" and "Less" view
Until now those two views where always black on white. With Winslew 1.3 I added the option to choose between different styles including a reverse view white on black. You also can define own styles which are simple Cascading Stylesheet files. See the new extra manual for creation of new styles.




Important: Styles are only available on newly created or updated caches.

3. Print page
You now can send the current view to the printer

4. Change title
You now can change the title of an item

5. Better list view
The list view has been slightly enhanced


6. Cache creation is background process now
Cache creation already took quite some time but this became even worse with the new Full view. Because of this cache creation is now an own background process which will take place while you already can browse your items and there cache (if already created at that moment of course).


7. Better documentation
Or should I say documentation at all? Anyway - the documentation page has been reworked completely and now really features all functions of Winslew.

In my last post about what will be new I wrote I hope to release Winslew 1.3 in the end of April. Today it is May, 1st so I won't reach that goal as you might have already guessed. While the main features are all done and working fine all the work on performance improvements let me to some new ideas to handle cache downloads at all and I am currently reworking also the download of the "old" caches "less" and "more".

If I am lucky I will also add one or two additional features into this release which have been recently asked for and are viewable at UserVoice here and here.

Current progress always live at my Twitter account

Winslew 1.2.1 is out now already for some days and I wanna give you a short preview on what you can expect to get when Winslew 1.3 will be finished. There is one big new feature in the works: A third offline view type. As with Winslew 1.2.1 we have two of them: "Less" and "More". With 1.3 the third one will be called "Full".

Full will download the webpage including as much media data as possible meaning it will fetch the used Images as well as the CSS informations of the page and make them available offline. The good news is that this new fetching algorithm is already completed and doing a great job. The bad news is that it takes quite some time per page to download and parse all the stuff. So I will spend some more time on the updating mechanism which shall be run in the background in the future so you can access the articles already when cache is being build. See an example here.

The original online version:



And the downloaded cache version available offline:



See how close the offline version comes to the one you read online? Cool, isn't it?

As a small addition there will be a print function for the currently view item.
Winslew 1.3 is planned somewhere in the second half of April for now.

Let me first thank all my customers for having payed for an individual license code of Winslew. I am very happy that you think my work is worth this amount of money and I am now even more motivated in creating new and better features (and please don't stop making suggestions of what you wish for the future).

Recently I got some payments via Paypal with the field for the Read It Later username being blank. I need this information to create the license code so asked those customers to please send me the user account separately. To make it clearer that I need this username I added a short note on the download page and added a new entry into the FAQ section.

Due to the great response for my 1.1 release (which is only two days old...) and an overwhelming work by Ben who put together many ideas and wishes on UserVoice and having two free days Winslew 1.2 now is available already for download.

So what's new in this release?

• Cache view selector (online, more, less) is now a dropdown box to get more space on title bar and have room for more options on future versions
• Open in external browser added (UserVoice 568063)
• Copy current item url to clipboard added (UserVoice 568063)
• Added context menu to items to toggle read state, open in browser and so on (UserVoice 568143)
• When opening the "Add item" window and the clipboard has an URL stored this url is pasted into the url-textbox automatically
• Statusbar shown information about current API usage of user and Winslew (UserVoice 515029)
• If API limits gets critical a Snarl notification is shown (UserVoice 515029)
• Snarl notification on cache updated added
• Snarl not running hint added to statusbar (UserVoice 568681)
• Update cache window is now semitransparent
• Delete button now really stays on screen all the time...

The next release will be about having a forth view next to online, more and less which shall provide an offline version of the webpage including as much as possible media (mainly stylesheets and images) which is covered by UserVoice 560313. Because of the complexity of this task this might take a little longer than the two days of the last update

I just uploaded the new Winslew version 1.1 to the download section. There are some quite amazing new features available - let's have a look:

Filter your list by the content of the title or tags


Auto updater added


Rows can now be sorted by title, tags, added and updated


Tooltip of columns gives you now all informations about the current item

• The width of the columns is memorized if changed by the user
• Delete button now always available (not only in read view as before)
• Version number display now trimmed (e.g. 1.1 instead of 1.1.0.0)
• Link to documentation in Windows startmenu fixed

Have fun with this release and let me know your bugs and wishes on my feedback page

After one week since release of Winslew 1.0 and first users having bought a license I wanna thank you all!

And as 1.0 is good but of course could have some more features or even have some bugs (no, I never create bugs of course...) I want to ask you for any feedback like feature requests and bug reports so I added a dedicated page here for that.

Finally for today I extended the FAQ to cover some more common questions.

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of Winslew 1.0. Compared to the last beta we now have favicons displayed next to the items (if a favicon is available for that site), some minor bugs fixed and finally the license code checker is included so if you buy a license you now have a place to put the license code in

The trial version which can be downloaded has the exact same feature set as the licensed version but only displays 10 items at once (and will give you one single hint to buy a license).

We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of the first public beta release of Winslew 1.0. Go and get it on our download page and let us know what you think about it. This beta release has a built in expiration date at March, 31st 2010.

Changes since the Beta 2 include:

• Expiration of beta version set to March, 31st 2010
  
• Main window position and size now remembered and restored on new start
  
• When adding a new page the "updating cache window" is now shown to show what is happening
  
• The cache of an item can now be updated manually
  
• Added About window

During the first beta tests of the beta 1 some bugs have been found and killed. Those bugfixes mainly address issues if you started Winslew with no internet connection available. Now the collection is saved upon closing the upon and can be loaded again if Winslew encounters being offline on startup time.

And more important: Winslew now has a complete automated installer and uninstaller

Beta 3 is planned being the first public beta and to be released very soon. If you want to try the current beta 2 in closed beta just send me an email and I’ll be happy to hand over you a download link for it.