News

A release candidate of WebIssues Client 0.9.5 is available. It features mostly minor usability improvements and bug fixes. A new dashboard view was introduced with improved look and feel. The behavior of the single window mode of user interface was improved to prevent opening separate windows when adding new issues and when navigating to other issues. Also a few bugs were fixed, including problems with compiling the program on Qt 4.4 or earlier.

As this version is quite stable and mostly feature-complete, please test it and give some feedback, especially whether you like the new three-pane mode. At this point some final tweaks and adjustments can still be made. You can expect the final version in a few weeks.

In the nearest feature I will not work on new versions of the client, but rather focus on the new major version of the server. I would like the first preview of WebIssues 1.0 to be available by the end of this year and it's going to be a big step forward, with many features redesigned and many completely new ones, especially a web interface as an alternative to the desktop client. Of course it's not possible or even desirable to add all cool and nice-to-have features in a single new release. Version 0.x which I considered experimental proved to be quite successful and in the long term WebIssues is going to become a very powerful yet easy to use information tracking system. Anyway I'm always glad to hear your suggestions and opinions and I'm taking them into account whenever I can.

The second beta release of WebIssues Client 0.9.5 introduces a number of improvements related to usability. It is now possible to select and copy text in the issue details view and to change the layout of that view so that issue details are displayed side by side or above the history. That extends the possibility of customizing the layout of the UI and improves usability of the application, especially on machines with high resolution screens.

As requested by some users, the default sort order can now be permanently changed for issues of each type. A drop down calendar control was added to the field for editing date/time attributes and additional operators (such as contains, starts with, etc.) are now available when defining filter criteria for drop down attributes. Also a bug related to handling cookies, which occurs when the server sets more than one cookie, was fixed.

A number of futher improvements and minor bug fixes is planned for the release candidate version and the final 0.9.5 version should be available in Summer. In the meantime, as I recently announced on my home page, some work on version 1.0 of the server has already started. Visit our development web site for more information.

The first beta release of WebIssues Client 0.9.5 features a new three-pane layout of the main window which follows the familiar design of many e-mail clients. It's now possible to view and work with folders and issues directly in the main window, without opening additional windows. The three-pane layout is now the default one, but the old single pane layout is still available and can be activated using the settings window.

The toolbars have been redesigned so there are more icons for frequently used functions. The Windows style was tweaked a little bit. Besides this release adds new Czech and Portuguese (Brazilian) translations. It also fixes a crash occurring in some cases when deleting an attribute. In future releases of version 0.9.5 there will be more functional improvements and bug fixes.

Version 0.8.4 of the WebIssues Server and version 0.9.4 of the WebIssues Client were released today. The main feature introduced in this dual release is sending e-mail notifications when new issues are created in selected folders and when selected issues are modified. Users can individually configure notifications using the new user preferences feature. Both the server and the client are fully backward compatible with previous versions, but to use the new features of the server you also need the new client.

Version 0.8.4 of the server has two mailing engines allowing to send e-mail notifications from both the local host and an external SMTP server. E-mails are created using a simple template engine; two templates for plain-text and HTML e-mails are available; they can also be used to create custom templates. This release also adds support for the Firebird database. In addition it fixes adding large comments and includes a few optimizations, mainly related to handling large comments and attachments.

Version 0.9.4 of the client adds the possibility to mark watched issues as read or unread and extends program settings with switching the language and limiting size of comments. It also adds command line options for overriding default file locations. This release also features the Portable WebIssues Client which can be carried on a portable device (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, CD, etc.) and used on any Windows computer. Settings and cache data can be stored on the portable device as well. Finally, the Windows executable is now linked statically to allow installing by non-administrator users and packed with UPX to reduce the size of the package.

Release candidates of both the server version 0.8.4 and client version 0.9.4 were released today. The new version of the server contains some optimizations which significantly improve handling large comments and attachments, and solves a problem with parsing large commands (for example when adding a very long comment). The new version of the client adds the possibility to mark watched issues as read or unread and extends program settings with switching the language of user interface and limiting the size of comments.

In addition, this release features the first version of the WebIssues Portable Client - the desktop client packaged as a portable application which can be carried on a portable device (USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, CD, etc.) and used on any Windows computer. Settings and cache data can be stored on the portable device as well. The Portable Client can be used either stand-alone or together with the PortableApps.com Platform.

The final releases should be available in a few weeks, as soon as the documentation and translations are updated. Then I'm going to start working on the single window interface for WebIssues Client.