News

The WebIssues Client got a new improved UI style on Windows similar to Office 2003. It's based on the QtDotNet Style recently migrated from the Trolltech Labs. There are a few new screenshots demonstrating this new style. There are also some usability improvements in some areas (quick search box, find bar in the issue history) and the user's manual was updated.

Another important change was dropping CMake and switching entirely to qmake. This was possible thanks to the Trolltech's recent decision to add support for Visual Studio to the Qt/Windows Open Source edition. I think this is a very good move and it should encourage more open source developers to support Windows. I also created simple configuration scripts so that compilation should be easy under both Linux and Windows.

This release introduces one new feature: proxy support for Internet connections. It should work with HTTP and SOCKS5 proxies with no authentication and username/password authentication. Please test it if you can and report any potential bugs and problems. In addition a number of important bug were fixed, some memory leaks were removed and a few minor usability issues were solved.

The number of recent bug fixes and improvements was so high that I decided to release one more beta version before the release candidate. My goal is to have a final 0.9.2 release by the end of the year and I'm going to focus mainly on testing and fixing bugs. In fact this beta release should already be much more stable than the 0.9.1 version :). Also thanks to everyone who volunteered to translate the application, I'll send you the translation files as soon as the RC version is ready; if anyone else would like to join, you're welcome.

This release introduces mostly bugfixes and improvements related to the new folder watches functionality. It also fixes a bug which could lead to sending invalid requests to the server. Finally, I added support for the MS Visual C++ compiler which helps me to develop and debug the application more efficiently, since I'm forced to use Windows most of the time :).

The new installer for Windows was created using binaries compiled using Visual Studio. Even though the open source edition of Qt doesn't officially support it, there is a third party patch available (see this KDE TechBase article for more information) and it seems to work fine. Note that the installer will also install the required Visual C++ runtime libraries.

Since Monday I'm starting my holiday and I will be offline for two weeks. When I come back I'll start working on the release candidate which should be available in the beginning of October. I'm planning to add a Filter Manager window, update the manual and prepare for internationalization - please contact me if you would like to translate the program.

This version is far from being complete, but I decided to make a preview release because it contains a number of new features which were requested on the forums. Feel free to test it and report bugs, suggestions and comments. The user's manual is not yet updated, so here's a short overview of the new features.

The main new feature is the so called 'folder watches'. It allows to display summary information about total, new and modified issues matching given filter criteria is selected folders. For example you can create two watches for a 'Bugs' folder: 'My Active Bugs' and 'My Resolved Bugs'. This way you can quickly see when a new bug is assigned to you or when someone has modified a bug resolved by you.

In addition, watched folders and their issues are marked with a small dot icon. A green dot means that the issue was modified since it was last read (or a folder contains some modified issues). A yellow dot means that the issue was never read (or a folder contains some unread issues).

Another feature is the ability to import and export client settings associated with a server, i.e. all column settings, filters, folder watches, etc. This is useful if there are multiple users working in a similar environment, for example in a help desk company. The administrator can configure the client for the users and they can easily import the prepared configuration.

As I recently announced on my home page, soon I'm going to suspend working on WebIssues for some time and move to other projects. So version 0.9.2, once completed, will probably be the last release this year. But there's still a lot to do, so don't worry, I'll be back :).

A bug slipped into the latest version of the server which made User attributes not work with PostgreSQL and SQL Server databases. As this is a serious bug, I decided to make a hotfix release of the server. You don't need to install it if you use a MySQL database. When upgrading from version 0.8.3, just copy over the files as updating the database is not necessary. Upgrading from older versions works as usual, just follow the instructions in the manual.