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Compendium 1.5.2 Release Notes

Welcome to Compendium 1.5.2, the most rigorously tested release ever, following the pre-release of 1.5.1beta to the community. Thanks to ALL of you who have reported bugs and requested features :-)

New Features

 

Tagging Interface

A new Tagging interface

Compendium 1.5.2 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]

Power ExportPower Export: You can now export a single zip archive containing: XML+Reference Nodes, Web Maps and Web Outline. This exports the selected view to full depth.

Moodle blockNote: this export can be processed automatically by the Moodle Knowledge Maps block (shown left), if you want to share and version maps in a systematic way via this open source e-learning system.




Improved Web Outline export: The HTML outline export provides better styling control, and has been redesigned to be more accessible to screen-readers for visually impaired users (particularly useful if this is the only way they have to access maps). Styling now possible for the Detail Date, References, top margins of each element, and the optional navigation menu. You now can save multiple style settings, eg. to support working on projects with differing documentation requirements.

Improved drag+drop options: (With thanks to Sebastian Ehrich for this code). [1] Drag and drop of folders draws folder icon and opens the folder on double-click. [2] New option on User Options drag and drop page to import folder to full depth. KDE logo [3] New option on User Options maps page to enable single click to open nodes. [4] Reference Manager now recognizes OpenOffice file types and draws Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Access icon for the equivalent file types.[5] New option on User Options to switch on support for Linux users with KDE using kfmclient so that launched files automatically open the correct application without the user having to specify.

Integration with FlashMeeting web videoconferencing: The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute provides FlashMeeting, a free research platform for videoconferencing over the web, which requires only the Adobe Flash plug-in on clients (plus webcam+mic). Meetings can be recorded and replayed [public examples]. Events during the meeting (such as whiteboards shown, URLs followed, or meeting notes) can now be imported into Compendium as a set of maps with hyperlinks into the relevant points in the meeting replay. Introduction to the free service, part of the OU's OpenLearn release of e-learning resources on the Web.

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 1.5.2 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.

Define custom icons for recognised URIs and filenames: Compendium can now automatically recognise a URI or filetype and assign it a custom icon that you have defined (e.g. try dragging and dropping a web address from labspace.open.ac.uk). We don't have a cool interface for you to customise this yet inside the tool, but if you're not scared of angle brackets, you can edit the XML file where this info is stored:
<compendium home>\System\resources\ReferenceNodeIcons\referencenodetypes.xml

Node detail date now starts at 1985 as opposed to 1995 (yes we have some veterans out there who go way back!).

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. Note that this is the last release we will be supporting 10.3. 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 E

Other Changes

(taken from the Compendium Reporting System)

    211: Updating List labels
    Export setting for line spacing between nodes/paragraphs
    415: It's too hard to pick the same node label colour repeatedly
    416: Separate Tags and Views display in Web Outline Export
    417: Create unique styles for Tags and Views in Web Outline Export
    418: Add comma between tags in Web Outline Export
    419: Place Tags & Views info after Detail in Web Outline Export
    422: Assign tag without having to close node notes/detail/properties
    424: Need some way to increase font size in new Tags View
    443: Internal reference nodes should mirror behavior in web exports
    472: Allow more text in web map rollover

Bugs Addressed:

(taken from the Compendium Reporting System)

74: Template loaded from the Templates Menu are loaded as Unseen nodes
75: re-import into map loses links unless node ID's are preserved
76: Tags: Show Nodes fails for a tag
79: Putting commas in Project name for new project causes major problems
90: Color chooser doesn't show selected color for background after reopen
99: Can't arrange map
101: File names for HTML web export cannot have '...' as this breaks on Linux
102: When using functions that focusNodeAndScroll, selected nodes were deleted
103: "§" cannot be used in node names
104: Unable to see a delete of a node when it has other transclusions
105: Can't Backup or Convert from MySQL
106: Cannot change User Options. Dialog freezes on saving.
151: IBIS link group is not automatically set as the default link group
152: After importing XML opening the imported map shows no nodes
153: Backing up from Derby escaped all backslash characters when not required.
166: UI freezes if a cycle is created
167: New nodes in zoomed view have full-size font initially
168: Text colour loss when importing XML files
224: Cannot save an edit to a user profile.
225: Restoring a backup breaks internal reference node
274: Link label text does not zoom
291: (1.5 beta) Deleting or cutting a node takes a very long time
403: Outline Export Broken
449: Icon Set drop-down list selecting the wrong item on the list.
454: users can delete themselves
254: Web Maps export without including full-size images
368: Exception: Column '10' not found.
369: Choosing "Search Google" from a Map label opened the wrong dialog
370: # anchor for a local HTML file
405: Apply format to all transclusions" -- not working?
406: Cannot keep multiple selection and use the right-click menu
409: ToolTips in Tag panel's node list
411: Alt-Click/Alt-Shift-Click do not select node's children/parents
414: Node label changes don't show in Working Tags Area
420: Duplicate stencil appears empty when opened
426: Map Weight Column in Lists always displays zero, even if the map has contents
429: List display does not allow selection of node transclusion tooltip
432: Image rollover prevents access to node's text and transclusion indicator
436: SQL backup is still introducing 'escape' characters in text
437: Long delay before getting Login to a Project dialog after startup w/Derby
447: File browse button on Mac should start at current file location
453: non-administrators have administrator privileges
460: Selecting a workspace displays incorrect windows
468: ALT + left click does not select node and all of its child nodes
407: Slow closing of node contents dialog using OK button even if nothing changed
423: Node Transclusion Indicator - Wide tooltip in narrow window
431: Icon Image > Specify Size > Maintain image ratio? - Update fields.
438: Set Percentage of Actual Size doesn't display previous selection
366: Clean up formatting on right-click menu


The Team for Compendium 1.5.2

Acknowledgements...

Software development: Michelle Bachler (lead), Lakshmi Prabhakaran, and contributions from Sebastian Ehrich

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.

     

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