Thought it might be wise to keep both products going at the same time. Actually, this will cause Pocket SharpMT to jump to 1.3 for it’s initial release, but that’s no big deal. I want to keep them together because the blogDrafts.xml file can be shared across the desktop and Pocket version (if your Pocket PC can handle the large XML file!) So 1.3 of SharpMT brings a few new features and a couple of bug fixes… Download 1.3 Beta 1 here and read the updated FAQ.

What’s news in 1.3? First off, there was a bug in how the drafts were handling categories. This was actually found in Pocket SharpMT’s Beta 2, but it was also showing up here as well. The bug came into play while saving drafts and having changed the Primary category before posting – it has been fixed. I never saw it on my site because I only ever use one category at a time; this is why it slipped through.

There’s a new look for the Options dialog – thanks for the suggestion, Steve – and I think you’ll find that it is a bit clearer in design.

There’s also a new image that has been added to the Open Drafts pane/dialog. Whenever a draft has been successfully published to the server, it will show with a green arrow’d icon. That came out of my own necessity: now that I have some extra time on my hands, I’ve been writing up a few Rants at a time. Because I usually forget what I’ve posted (and worse, what I haven’t) I thought it would be a nice to have. Some notes on this… this is strictly an internal tracking thing – it has nothing to do with the Publish/Draft status that MT uses. It can also be toggled with a right mouse click on the Drafts pane (so you can set older drafts as “published”.) If you load an existing draft that has the green arrow, make a change and save it again, the green arrow disappears; after all, this version is no longer published. It’s just a little thing I needed to add; I thought it was useful.

Lastly, there’s a new “field” on the Advanced tag for “Authored On” date/time. The button is initially set to “Use Server Time” – this has been how SharpMT has been posting things all along: it allows MT to set the Authored On date and time as the draft is being added to the server. If you click this button you can select a date and time value to back-date an entry; you can also set it back to the default of “let MT set the date/time”. Given that MT like a variant of the ISO.8601 format (which is shown on the button when you set a date/time value) I figured this was a cleaner way to get this particular data – we’ll see what it looks like on Pocket SharpMT, where there’s no Date/Time picker.

Otherwise, that’s it for this release – I’m just keeping paces with Pocket SharpMT, which will have all of these features in it’s Beta 4 sometime this week.

Updated screenshots:

Download SharpMT 1.3 Beta 1 and check the FAQ for more information.