[Nevernote-announce] NixNote 2 Beta 1

[General A. a. N. <nev...@li...>]

Hi Everyone,

I've NixNote 2 Beta 1 to SourceForge for anyone who is interested.  Like
any beta, it you can predict the occasional odd behavior or crash, but
hopefully they won't be too often.  I'm not sure that I have linked
notebooks working perfectly, indexing still needs some tweaks, and there
are still a few minor missing features, but it should work well enough for
general use.

Once you start it, all user data is stored in the ~/.nixnote directory and
it doesn't share anything with the old NixNote (which stores most things in
~/.nevernote), so you can run both at the same time.  If you ran any past
alpha release, you must delete ~/.nixnote prior to using this beta.

Please be aware that unlike the past alpha releases, UPLOADS ARE ENABLED in
this release.  If this makes you nervous you can disable uploads under
Edit/Preferences/Debugging.


What has changed since the last alpha:

   - Deb, RPM, & tar.gz (with an install script) have been created.
   - Support for reminders.
   - Ability to capture images from a webcam.
   - You can open a note for editing in a new window.
   - If you enable uploads, linked notebooks will now be sent.
   - Support for encrypted text (RC2 only).
   - You can pin or unpin notes.
   - You can add HTML entities via a dialog box (thanks to Milos Kozina).
   - Basic support for note history (premium users only).
   - You can now open/close notebooks.
   - Note title colors can be changed (not synchronized).
   - You can import Evernote extract files (enex).
   - You can do backups, restores, imports & exports to NixNote extract
   files (nnex).
   - Spell check has been added.
   - Significant performance improvements when loading notes with a lot of
   resources and when generating thumbnails.
   - Sync is more efficient, faster, & should resume properly after
   interrupts.
   - Many other smaller changes.
   - Lots of bug fixes.
   - Lots of new bugs.  Hopefully less than the number of bugs I corrected.
   - Upgraded from Thrift 0.9 to 0.9.1.


Features from NixNote 1.x that are not yet fully implemented or may not
ever be implemented:

   - Note title colors can be set, but this is not synchronized or saved
   during a backup & restore.
   - Selective notebook syncs is not implemented and might never be
   implemented.  If this is a critical feature to you let me know, otherwise I
   don't plan on adding it.  It was a little odd to implement and I'm not sure
   anyone ever used it anyway.



Features from NixNote 1.x that will not be implemented:

   - Encrypted databases won't be supported.  This was buggy in 1.x and
   since you can encrypt your home directory it is rather pointless.



Things that work but you should be careful using:

Import folders should work, but be aware that their behavior is different
than the Evernote's. When NixNote starts it will automatically import and
delete anything in a folder that is set for import/delete. Folders that are
import/keep are not imported until something in them is changed while
NixNote is running. The import/delete behavior is the same as the old
NixNote except for the "include subdirectories" option. With this option
enabled it will scan every subdirectory and will import and delete anything
it finds, so setting an import/delete folder of root will cause it to
recursively delete everything in your root directory. Honestly, I wouldn't
use import/delete with subfolders unless you are sure the import/delete
itself works properly. It "should" work, but bugs happen.

There is a screen capture utility but it will only work with some systems.
Some window managers just give you a big black box. If this happens, I
don't think there is anything I can do. You can only use the tray icon if
your system supports system tray icons AND you have it enabled in
Edit/Preferences you should see an icon for NixNote in the system tray.
Left clicking on it will bring up the menu and you can select "Screen
Capture". There are no shortcuts for anything in the system tray since (as
far as I can tell) Qt doesn't support system wide hot keys. The minimize to
tray & close to tray are very problematic on some window managers.

To Use NixNote 2


   - If you used any prior alpha, then you MUST delete all the
   ~/.nixnote directory.
   - There are a number of dependencies.  Look below for the list of Ubuntu
   packages.
   - If you have a sandbox account and want to use that rather than your
   production account, you need to start NixNote and create another account
   under File/Add User.  From there, specify a name and that the server is
   sandbox.evernote.com.  You should then be able to switch to that account
   & sync with Evernote's sandbox servers.


If you are running Ubuntu, these should be all unusual packages you'll need:


   - libc6
   - tidy
   - libhunspell-1.3-0
   - libpoppler-qt4-4
   - libqtwebkit4
   - libqt4-sql
   - libqt4-xml
   - libqtgui4
   - libqt4-network
   - libqtcore4
   - libpng12-0
   - libpoppler28 or libpoppler43
   - libsqlite3-0
   - libtbb2
   - libopenexr6
   - libavcodec53
   - libavformat53
   - libswscale2
   - libdc1394-22


Optional Packages:

   - mimetex (optional - needed fo LaTeX formulas)
   - java (optional - needed to encrypt/decrypt text)
   - libreoffice-common (optional - needed to index some office attachments)


On Fedora 20, I was able to just do a "yum install" on these packages to
get the dependencies.  Other things seemed to be installed by default.

   - tidy
   - qtwebkit
   - poppler-qt4
   - mimetex (optional)

Thanks for testing & have fun! Please report bugs and/or feedback on the
user forums and please be sure to indicate that this is for the NixNote 2
beta so I don't get confused which product you are talking about.

Thanks!