Compendium Software

Distribution License

Release Notes Archive

Archived Documents

Compendium 1.5.1 Beta 2 Release Notes

Welcome to the Beta version of Compendium 1.5.1. With this release we depart from our previous practice of restricting beta releases to a small group before making the "production" release generally available. We want to make the new features and fixes more widely available sooner, and get your feedback and bug reports incorporated into the new version before it replaces version 1.5 as our production release.

System Requirements:

Windows system requirements: Windows XP (other Windows versions may work but Compendium has not been tested on them); Java Runtime Environment v1.5+ (a version of which is included with the Compendium installer). A Pentium III with 256M RAM is the minimum recommended for reasonable performance.

Mac OS X system requirements: With this release we have produced a version of Compendium for both Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4.

The 10.3 release requires JRE v1.4.1_02 or later.

The 10.4 release requires J2SE 5.0 Release 4 or later.

Note: to avoid a potential problem with folder ownership, installation has currently been restricted to the Applications folder. Once installed, you can relocate the Compendium folder if desired.

Linux system requirements: This release of Compendium for Linux has been tested on x86, using Red Hat Enterprise WS Linux Version 2.6.9-11 EL

New Features:

A new Tagging interface

Compendium 1.5.1 beta has one major new feature -- a complete overhaul of the Tags interface. The old process of selecting and applying tags required a lot of clicks, and much useful information was hard to get to. With this version, the Tags View appears as a pane you can leave open on the left side of the screen, and the whole process of tagging and untagging nodes is much more visual and interactive, along the lines of web tagging interfaces like del.icio.us and flickr. Clicking on tagged nodes in your maps instantly highlights the relevant tags in the Tags view in green, with orange indicating tags held in common by all nodes. Clicking one or more tags instantly filters your project and lists all nodes matching that tag set. Adding or removing tags is a simple matter of checking or unchecking them. Groups of tags can be expanded and collapsed as in the Outline View. The alpha team has already found it incredibly useful in several projects -- please check it out and let us know what you think. [screenshots]

Other new features in this version:

• Control over image size: You can now specify the display size for node images that you add to Reference and Map nodes. Before there was only "thumbnail" size, now inside the node there are options to make your images their actual size, thumbnails, or a size you can set. This gives much better control over the appearance of your maps (and incidentally makes creating Web Maps that look the way you want them to a lot easier).
  
  



• List view improvements: List views have long been an underdeveloped area in Compendium, and we still have some distance to travel. But 1.5.1 adds some major improvements. List views now have columns for the same node icon indicator data that you can see on Map views (details, tags, parent views, child count). Just like Maps, you can roll over the indicators and see what tags, details, etc. the node has, and you can click on them the same way you can in Maps. Further, you can sort on any of the columns.
  
  
• Map level formatting to full depth: Compendium 1.5 added much better control over how your nodes appeared -- it let you set label color, font size, and a number of other formatting attributes. Formatting is applied to all selected nodes. While previously you had to manually select nodes, we have now added a new right-click menu option to map and list nodes ("Apply format to full depth"), which will allow you to apply the formatting of a Map/List to all the nodes it contains to full-depth. So you can nest your Views and apply formatting to the whole set at once.
  
  
• To assist working with the new Outline view, there’s a new right-click option to list a node’s tags and parent views. Parent views can be clicked on to open the view. Tags clicked on will be removed from the node. If you’re viewing a node in both Outline and main Map/List view, selecting a node in the Map/List now selects it in the Outline view as well.
  
  
• Keyboard shortcuts for bold and italic: You can now use Ctrl+B and Ctrl+I to set bold and italic on the node labels for selected nodes.
  
  
• Better information on startup: Now when you start Compendium, the splash screen has more information, such as the current software version and other details.
  
  
• Node detail date now starts at 1985 as opposed to 1995 (yes we have some veterans out there who go way back!).

Bugs Addressed:

The Team for Compendium 1.5.1 Beta 2

Acknowledgements...

Software development: Michelle Bachler (lead), Lakshmi Prabhakaran

Design and requirements: Simon Buckingham Shum, Al Selvin, Michelle Bachler, Jeff Conklin and Maarten Sierhuis

Testing: Simon Buckingham Shum, Al Selvin, Michelle Bachler, Ben Hawkridge

Webmastering: Al Selvin, Michelle Bachler, Simon Buckingham Shum

Funding: Compendium is funded from public research grants. We gratefully acknowledge the support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation OpenLearn Project, the UK Joint Information Systems Committee MEMETIC project, the UK Economic & Social Research Council/National e-Social Science Centre ECOSENSUS project, and the UK Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council CoAKTinG project.