WordRad

(6/2/10) WordRad 1.8.3 now available for download - Enhancements to enable restoring user state of WordRad web page (e.g. scroll position of page) when navigating back to it (see last comment regarding ver. 1.8.2 below).

(6/1/10) WordRad 1.8.2 now available for download - Various enhancements and fixes: when selecting 'New' from File menu, the currently selected font is retained, and not automatically changed to Arial 10pt as previously; All necessary files for a web page now listed in the Output Files listbox in the Build Web Page dialog (and in the web page xml file itself). A couple of newer files had been left off previously.

Also, it was discovered that since version 1.6.5, a title of more than one word given to a web page prevented the web page from being displayed. This was fixed. The reason this bug had occured is that in 1.6.5 an undocumented enhancement was made in WordRad to use Adobe Flex SharedObject, in order to restore the state of a WordRad web page when navigating back to it from another site. The web page title was being used as a key to restore the state of the page, and inexplicably, SharedObject.getLocal does not accept spaces on input, in fact it throws an exception and just aborts if it encounters spaces. (This is truly bizarre behavior for this component of Adobe, "SharedObject".) So anyway, when a title of more than one word was passed into it, it just aborted, and this problem had not been reported by anyone. So anyway, that was fixed. (Also, the webpage filename is now used as the key instead of the title, but spaces are OK now in any case.)

(5/11/10) WordRad 1.8.1 now available for download - When hitting Cancel after hitting Build in the Build Web Page Dialog, the web page (i.e. xml file) shown at the top of the dialog is now always restored to the exact same state it was in prior to hitting Build. In previous versions (prior to 1.8.0) the web page was always functional after hitting Cancel, but depending on when it was hit, fonts or other resources may have already been changed. Now the page is always completely restored.

Version 1.8.0 (the previous version) actually broke the restore capability outright. Version 1.8.1 was originally intended purely as a bug fixing release. However, as the opportunity existed to completely fix how restore functions after Cancel is hit, that was done as well. Also - cancel is now properly initiated automatically when the user shuts down WordRad itself while a web page is being built.

(5/6/10) WordRad 1.8.0 now available for download - Image and texture files created by WordRad for a given Web Page are now available to other web pages in the same folder. This was accomplished by naming such files using a hash key of the actual file content. So for example, if a texture file is created by WordRad for the background of a web page, it now names it something like "g_2c1e89f731.jpg" where the '2c1e89f731' is a hash of the actual binary content of the created file. Any other web page in the same directory would use this same name as well if it had the same background, and thus would access the preexisting file instead of creating a new one. In previous versions of WordRad, such files were named referencing the name of the web page itself (for example the texture file 'g_london2_1.jpg' for a web page called london2.xml). But such a name effectively precluded the file from being used elsewhere.

The new naming scheme drastically decreases the amount of files required for a set of web pages stored in the same folder, and thus drastically decreases the download time for those web pages as well. Admittedly this sort of feature is necessary to make WordRad web pages fully suitable for a production environment, but at least this has finally been done, and it is a major feature upgrade.

Also, the new naming scheme facilitates deletion of such auxiliary files on the development machine running WordRad, when they are no longer in use anywhere and now such files are tracked and deleted when appropriate.

Note that as a result of this new scheme, a previously existing (but little-used) feature in the Build Web Page Dialog has been permanently disabled: user-specified alternate output directories for image, texture and font files. Such files are now always stored in the same directory as the web pages accessing them. Allowing such files to be output to arbitrary directories would make it impossible to keep track of who was accessing them and when they could be safely deleted.

(4/27/10) WordRad 1.7.0 now available for download - Fonts without a defined italic and bold now look the same on a web page as they do in WordRad. Many fonts do not define a seperate italic and bold version, and for such fonts, Windows generates italic and bold algorithmically. However, the algorithm it uses to do so is different from what is used by Flash. Specifically, the oblique angle for such fonts is much less for italic in Flash and the bold version is less bold than in Windows. However this has now been addressed by WordRad, so such fonts now look the same on a web page.

(2/19/10) Another addition was made to ver. 1.6.7: A user can delete files by right-clicking in the open xml or save xml dialogs. Most importantly, if the file being deleted is a WordRad XML file, the user is notified of that, and also that all associated files with the same root as the xml file will also be deleted. This is a greatly needed feature that was implemented, because when a WordRad web page is built, a number of auxiliary files associated with the XML file are also created, and previously there was no feature to automatically delete all of these if the xml file were deleted.

(2/18/10) WordRad 1.6.7 now available for download - A crucial change was made effecting when a WordRad xml file (i.e. a web page) is opened and then rebuilt using the name of another existing WordRad xml file. Previously, the display options for the new web page were retrieved, not from the already open xml file, but instead from the xml file that was being overwritten. Now those options are retrieved from the already open xml file. Essentially, the behavior here now mirrors what the user would expect in a typical "Save As" type file operation in most other software.

(2/4/10) WordRad 1.6.5 now available for download - The Anchors Dialog is introduced in this version. It is accessible from the 'Build Web Page' Dialog by hitting the new 'a' button next to the Images button to toggle the Images button to read 'Anchors'. Click on that and it takes you to the new Edit Anchors dialog. You can enter or edit html anchor tags here for your page (meaning you no longer have to modify the XML file directly to add anchor tags - which never worked particularly well anyway.) You can even paste arbitrary text (e.g an arbitrary html file) into the anchors dialog text box, and it wil strip out everything but the anchor tags and display them only. Also new in this version, the dynamics of hyperlink display on Wordrad web pages have been greatly enhanced. If downloading the new version from this website, make sure to download the new help files as well (in Setup2.exe).

(12/27/09) WordRad 1.6.1 now available for download - A default bullet is now used on a web page if the current font does not have bullets (see the last comment below for version 1.6) Also a few other issues as well that cropped up immediately after the release of 1.6 were all fixed.

(12/20/09) WordRad 1.6 - The Insert Object Menu selection is now fully functional in WordRad, so you can now select "Paintbrush Picture" for example, and then within WordRad draw an image directly on your page with Microsoft Paint, with that image being displayed and subsequently modifiable with all the built in WordRad texturization effects, as well as of course that image being a part of a web page if you build one. (See the end of the 'Paste Mask' section of WordRad Help, for further details.) Also new in 1.6: The options available through the Format menu selection (tabs, bullets, paragraph formatting) are now all fully functional for web page development. Note however that to display bullets on a web page, the bulleted text itself has to be in a font that has a defined bullet character. So if a bullet doesn't show up in the web page, you need to select a different font.)

WordRad 1.5.0 - The previous release of WordRad, 1.4.0, introduced the 'wyswyg' option for images in the Web Images dialog. It allowed a user the option of displaying images on a web page in the same format as they appear in the original WordRad document. This was made possible by advances in FlashPlayer 10, which allows efficient implementation of bitwise logical operations on image pixels. (WordRad employs a bitwise algorithm for combining an image, forground and background in the original WordRad document. This algorithm could not be employed for web page images in previous versions of WordRad.) Version 1.5.0 capitalizes on these advances in 1.4.0 by now allowing the user to apply any bitwise logical formula to a web page image. This feature is accessible through the new "Alter W" dialog. Also new in 1.5.0: the 'W' option allows the original WordRad bitwise formula, or any bitwise formula, to be applied to embedded images and embedded .SWF (flash) applications now as well (Consult WordRad Help for details.)

***NOTE: New versions of WordRad are periodically made available in the File Catalog (to fix bugs when they are reported and when existing features are enhanced. Make a note of the version number.) These new versions of WordRad can be downloaded and installed directly over your existing WordRad installation.***

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