Saturday, October 16th, 2004

I think VoodooPad 2 is ready for some public testing at this point. I've been using it for months without any problems, and I've had a great group of testers that have pointed out the big flaws which have since then been fixed. So I'll call this new release beta 1.

Obviously there is more work to be done, but I don't expect there to be any drastic changes from here on out. Mostly bug fixing and polishing. VP2 is certainly usable.

I've also updated the store so you can buy a VoodooPad 2.0 license for 24.95, or you can get an upgrade for 9.95. If you bought VoodooPad 1.x on or after June 1, 2004 you get a free upgrade. Go here to find out what your 2.0 serial number looks like. VoodooPad 1.1 licenses are still for sale... so if you buy one before 2.0 goes final, you'll basically save 5 bucks.

There's lots of fun new features in there, and lots of changes under the hood. Here's some of my favorites:

• Sketch- a little sheet comes down and you can draw pictures to insert into the current page.

• Backlinks- see what pages link to the current one.

• Improved link recognition. I spent quite a bit of time making sure url's and email addresses and such linked like they were meant to.

• Plugins. I've got a ton of ideas for VoodooPad, but unfortunately I don't have time to do them all. So I've come up with a plugin api for VoodooPad, and I'm giving away the source to the core plugins that VoodooPad uses as examples. Who's going to be the first person to come up with a plugin that exports a document as a Bliki?

• "Strike-Out and Move to Bottom" - this was a little plugin I wrote that takes the current paragraph, draws a line through it, and moves it to the bottom of the page. It's very gratifying. Think long lists of things your have to do- I got the idea from reading Getting Things Done. (And I should probably get past the second chapter so I can find more ideas.)

• Customer Supplied Easter Eggs. Buy a copy of VoodooPad 2.0, and you can have your own easter egg inserted into the next build of VoodooPad. Impress your friends or a date.

Download for 10.2 and up:
http://flyingmeat.com/download/VoodooPad2b1.dmg
http://flyingmeat.com/download/VoodooPadLite2b1.dmg
http://flyingmeat.com/download/plugin.tgz

Practice safe computing, backup your VoodooPad documents before running this.

All VoodooPad 1.x serial numbers will work in the betas up until the final build.

I'm also waiting to update the official website once it goes final, so here and the mailing list are the only places you'll see an official announcement for new betas and such.

If you download it and have any problems with it, please fill out a bug report. I'm usually pretty responsive with the reports- it's not like it goes into a black hole or anything. (*cough* Apple *cough*)

Enjoy.

Update. Of course, there's always something that goes wrong. It doesn't seem to want to work for 10.2 users anymore, but I'm looking into it.

comments (6)   # posted 10:28 pm (uct-6)