Gotta love having downtime and not losing power at the same time – at least I think ya do… two neat things, two changes, and one bug fix for this release. Download 1.3 Beta 2 here and read the updated FAQ.
Bug fix: Massive oops on my part! Delete from the toolbar, main menu, and right-click menu should all work again, for deleting Drafts. If you’re in an edit box, it works like Del should in an edit box; if you have focus on the Drafts, it should delete the Draft – after the confirmation message box of course!
Title attribute: By user request, I’ve added a new field in the Add URL dialog box for the Title attribute of the Anchor tag. Simple thing, really: if you have text in the title edit box and click OK, a title=”text” will appear in the inserted link.
Music plug-in support: This was really easy to add but it can be a nightmare for support. First off, I’ve only tested this with Windows Media Player 9. For that to work you need the WMP9 Blogging Plug-in. What this will do is store some information about the song that’s currently playing in the registry. The caveat with this is that there must be a song playing for it to work; it does not store the most recent song! If WMP9 isn’t running with a song playing, you will get an error message from SharpMT.
Also, with regards to this plug-in stuff, I hear that there is a similar plug-in for WinAMP 2 and 3. I like WinAMP 2 and it’s what I use on my own PC’s so I installed the plug-in but I couldn’t find the data in the registry. I believe it’s supposed to be in the same place as the WMP data but I never saw show up, so I cannot confirm that it works.
Options changes: I moved the Customized Tag options onto the Editor tab of the Options dialog – I think it makes more sense to have it there, now that the Options dialog has grown. In addition to this, there is also a new section on the Editor tab for the Music information described above. There are four values that are available to SharpMT via the music plug-in’s and not everyone likes the same format. So in the Insert text edit box you can add any of the four values (using the dropdown list and the Add button) and format it however you like. HTML tags are allowed as well so if you want the song title to always be italicized you can do it here. Also, the “music tags” must be capitalized but they can be in any order that you want them to be; this is why there’s that dropdown list and Add button – it helps inset the “available” values.
Updated screenshots:
Download SharpMT 1.3 Beta 2 and check the FAQ for more information.
Does .NET support an MDI environment? Sometimes it would be nice to have multiple drafts open, either to read previous stuff, or to copy/paste into new drafts. Or simply to open #MT without a blank draft created.
Another thought that just crossed my mind would be a feature to open a log from MSN Messenger into #MT where we could copy/paste bits from the chat into our blog draft. The logs are saved in XML anywya, so it would just be a matter of parsing it. Just a thought for another toy to play with, heh!
Oh, and another thought for the Add URL thing – maybe allow it to be able to grab a .url from the user’s Favorites folder? (Obviously, an IE-only option, but…) and you’d have the URL and TITLE all in one action.
The desktop might; the Pocket definately doesn’t – either way I hate MDI so odds are it won’t happen :) There is no limit to how many SharpMT windows you can have open, but that will probably cause issues with the saving of drafts… never really thought about having multiple drafts open at the same time.
I’ll think about the chat from MSN-IM, but I think the clipboard would be easier for bits and pieces to be pasted :D
As for add URL, I could probably do another tab… I know the drop down list should show favorites but I’m not sure where it’s pulling the URL’s from – there’s a few sources for it… I can probably add a new tab for it tho…
The URL droplist in #MT retrieves the ‘Typed URL History’ from Internet Explorer. (ie. the list if you drop down the Address Bar in IE)
Favorites are in (VB alert!) Environ(“UserProfile”) & “Favorites”, at least on XP.
Not sure how C# obtains it, but if nothing else, it’s in HKey_Current_User\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\MenuOrder\Favorites\
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Trouble with just clipboarding from MSN Messenger is: that only works if the window is still open :) I have yet to see any log reader for Messenger, not sure why they bothered to save it to XML if they don’t give some way to read it again.
Ok I just found an MSN logreader at http://users.pandora.be/mouseman/en/html/logviewer.html
Haven’t installed it yet – but anything has to be better than reading the XML files in IE.
No worries on the Favorites – it’s a “special folder” (I think) so I can find it through the shell services. Much like the My Music and My Pictures folders. And if not, with it being in the registry it can always be gotten – assuming it’s the same on all versions of Windows, which is why I like the shell services method best of all: it should always find the right one. The concern I have is pulling the information out of it, but I’ll tackle that when I look into the feature more.
Glad to see that you found a reader for the saved chats, though! Should help ya out a bit.
Upload Image: maybe I’m just being dense, but…where is the image being uploaded to? I’ve tried uploading simply image.jpg then images/image.jpg then /images/image.jpg and I have searched every directory on my site and cannot find the file, though #MT says it was successful.
I have an /images/ directory off my main site, and a /blog/images/ directory as well.
Well, upload image is at the mercy of MT, but if ya look at the dialog it should show you where the images are relative to. So for me they go to https://www.randyrants.com/. If I upload to images/this/directory/image.jpg it goes to https://www.randyrants.com/images/this/directory/image.jpg – either way it’s at the mercy of MT.
Ok, just tried to upload an image via MT itself for the first time ever, and got a ‘Permission denied’ error. So that probably explains why I’m not finding the image after several attempts at uploading vie #MT. :)
Now to figure out why the hell it doesn’t have permission to upload…