When opening the “Tinderbox Help” menu in the new release 9.7.0 and pressing on “Release Notes”, nothing happens. All the other releases have pages that open when you click on them.
I’d like to learn what is new in 9.7.0 - how can I do that?
Something odd is amiss with the Help book. Here are the details:
9.7.0
HIGHLIGHTS
Table View
Tinderbox excels at representing complex and multifaceted relationships, but for some tasks, what you need is a table. [Table View](file:///Users/mark%201/Code/tinderbox-9/TinderboxSix/Tinderbox%209%20Help/help/using_table_view.html) lets you review the notes inside a container or agent, sort them, and format them to meet your needs. Table View can also export your table in a variety of ways, to share it with other software.
NOTABLE
Actions
The operator expand(notes, kind) allows an action to expand the size of a note in map view to accommodate a new name. The first argument is a designator or group designator, and determines which notes are to be expanded. The second argument is either horizontally, vertically, orproportionately.
The attribute( attributeName ) operator adds a key “readonly”, which is true for readonly attributes.
Several attributes that control opacity formerly were percentages, with a range of 0 ➛ 100.
- $CaptionOpacity
- $GridOpacity
- $Opacity
- $PlotBackgroundOpacity
- $SubtitleOpacity
- $TimelineBandLabelOpacity
- $TitleOpacity
- $NameOpacity
This was inconsistent with other attributes that use a range of 0 ➛ 1.0. Tinderbox now prefers the range 0 ➛ 1.0. On loading, existing opacity values above will be automatically adjusted to fall in the range 0 ➛ 1; please adjust actions accordingly.
The .contains( pattern ) operator now returns a number, as documented. Previously, it returned a boolean. If the pattern is not found, .contains() returns 0; otherwise, it returns 1 plus the offset of the start of the first occurrence of the pattern.
When editing code fields, attribute names that contain an underscore are colored appropriately.
Displayed Attributes
Dictionary attributes may now be multiline attributes in the displayed attributes table, joining strings, lists, and sets.
Find
If the Find results popover is detached (by dragging the edge) and resized, Tinderbox remembers your preferred width and uses that width for the Find results popover in the future.
HTML Export
Notes with names in non-Roman languages now generate appropriate export filenames.
The .format operator recognizes a new format string, “==”, which formats dates in ISO8601 format while omitting the time component: YYYY-MM-DD.
When marking up text for export, line breaks inside tags are now ignored. Previously, they were tagged as paragraph boundaries.
Map View
Automatic deletion of untitled notes is now extended to map view as well as outline view. In map view, renaming a note in the title pane now expands the note in the map as necessary, if Document Settings:Map has requested that notes expand if the note name is too long to fit. In map view, changing the map scale with option-mouse wheel and option-two-finger drag is less sensitive, giving better control. A new document setting in the map pane allows you to disable map zoom on ^⌥⌘. Some users prefer to assign this key combination to Alfred or Keyboard Maestro. In map view, link labels are now a bit smaller — 75% of the size of note titles. Posters, when selected, now receive keystrokes and mouse clicks.
Outline View
In outline view, Tinderbox automatically deletes new untitled notes that have no text, after the note name’s editing session is closed. This automatic deletion is now deferred briefly, allowing you to click on the text pane and begin typing without choosing a note name.
Text
When editing text in the text pane, it is sometimes useful to sort lists. Edit ▸ Transformations ▸ Sort now sorts the selected lines in the text pane, using the local standard sort comparator. When the Outbound Links and Inbound Links lists in the Links Pane preview their text, the preview is automatically scrolled so the corresponding link anchor is visible. Previously, the preview began at the start of the text. The command View ▸ Standard Scale (⌘-0) may now be used from the text pane. In the text pane, it is equivalent to Format ▸ Style ▸ Standard Size. This command has been rewritten to prevent unintended style changes that accompanied resizing in some fonts.
Toolbar
Options for Crosstabs and Table View now appear in the Toolbar view control.
DETAILS
Actions
Comparing two empty dictionaries incorrectly evaluated as false. Empty dictionaries equal other empty dictionaries. New attributes include TableFormat, TableAttributes, and TableHidden. Corrected list parsing in the presence of apostrophes, e.g. [Baker;O’Connell;Denver] $NameOpacity now controls the opacity of the name in map view. This replaces the attributed $TitleOpacity, which is retained but deprecated. If $NameOpacity is zero, no space in map view is reserved for the title (which would be invisible) and the text thumbnail is now drawn (it formerly matched the title in opacity as well as color). Tinderbox actions are now more scrupulous to enclose lists in brackets [item;item;item] “Naked” lists without brackets continue to be acceptable, at least for now, but brackets are often necessary when building complex data structures. The .following() operator no longer honors Tinderbox comments starting with //, as this confounds URLs. Date expressions using local variables were mishandled in confusing ways, because Tinderbox was falsely assuming that date expressions that don’t refer to attributes are cacheable constants. The characters ? and / are now percent-encoded by urlEncode(). Even though these are now permitted in the query portion of URLs, NSURL balks at their presence. Corrected an unusual crash associated with the create action. The fetch() action is now evaluated on the agent queue, rather than on the network queue, to avoid errors when the fetch action was run during an agent update.
Autofetch
Autofetch, when retrieving content that is not HTML, now preserves whitespace and is smarter about character encoding.
Export
File ▸ Export ▸ Attribute Browser was inappropriately enabled when the current view was not an attribute browser. Added a DOCTYPE to the built-in HTML single note template.
File Menu
The File ▸ Open Recent menu now accommodates up to 30 documents.
Infrastructure
Corrected a potential crash when drawing outline and chart icons during agent updates. Addressed a possible cause of a long-standing but infrequent crash when updating the progress bars in the inspector’s Agents and Rules pane. Part of the update was async, but as we’re already on our own queue it ought to be sync. Crash logs should now include additional useful information. Please email crash logs to tinderbox@eastgate.com; they’re very helpful. Addressed a deadlock at startup by avoiding reference to $Path inside Lynx::InHintsFolder() Applying a stamp that deletes links (or changes the note’s prototypes) could crash, because the current editing session was ended after the stamp was applied and might reference links that no longer exist. Programmatically creating a note with a title containing paired square brackets could lure Tinderbox into recursively evaluating the proposed title as an apparent expression. Improve opening of exceptionally-large documents. Corrected some possible concurrency issues relating to fetch() actions.
Hyperbolic View
In Hyperbolic view, crosslinks are now drawn. The hyperbolic model was previously suppressing crosslinks even when selected in the list.
Map View
Guarded against a potential crash when updating the text thumbnail of a note with images. In map view, the first image in the text thumbnail was flipped incorrectly, inverting the image if the image was not at the start of the note text.
Quickstamp
Quickstamp: pressing the Apply button for a Boolean attribute did not respect the current setting of the Value: checkbox. Disable Quickstamp Apply button for booleans, because the checkbox takes effect immediately
Text
The text link renamer is no longer active. This facility ran after a note was renamed; if the old name was identical to the source anchor of a text link, it changed the text to its new name. Unfortunately, this raised some performance and concurrency challenges that seem not to be merited by the modest benefit.
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2 Likes
Many thanks!
and please add the release notes for 9.7.1 too 
9.7.1 fixes some blunders and corrects a couple of subtle infrastructure problems that gave some specific documents fits.
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Efforts to avoid sporadic crashes in TbxThumbnailCreator, apparently involving LayoutMap’s destructor.
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The inspector, having been closed with the red close button and then reopened, failed to rebuilt color menus correctly because the menus were not yet informed of the new hypertext they were to inspect.
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Documents opened from Favorites and Untitled documents should no longer appear in the Recent Files menu.
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Editing %-formatted columns no longer causes problems.
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In map view, dragging a link to the background creates a new note and completes the link. In this case, the untitled note is no longer automatically deleted.
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In Quickstamp, the Apply button is now in fact disabled when editing Boolean attributes, since clicking on the Value checkbox applies the change immediately.
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Table entries with currency formatting can now be edited. Formerly, the table — spooked by the currency symbol — set the entry’s value to zero.
The fetch() operator gains a new optional argument:
fetch(url,headers,attribute,command[,method,body])
If the method is POST, body specifies a message body to be sent to the designated server.
2 Likes