What's new in Xiphos 3.1.1
Aug 18, 2009
- Today's release is for intermediate bugfixes and small features. We are still working toward several major features' completion for 3.2, but slow summer schedules have left us needing to present these smaller issues to the public.
- The Help->Chat interface had to change, because policy equilibrium broke down between Freenode, where our #xiphos channel exists, and the folks who run mibbit, the previous browser chat interface. Now we use Freenode's own.
- Per-verse user annotations ("inline marking"). Along with the personal commentary plus journals and prayer lists, we now offer a smaller, more immediate form of personalized markup. In dead-tree Bibles, many people use a yellow highlighter to mark verses, writing marginal notes to themselves. Xiphos now offers this as "Annotate Verse" on the right-click context menu. Ask to annotate, and a dialog for the current verse opens, offering a text box in which to type a note to oneself. Finish by clicking "Mark." Remove an annotation by selecting "Unmark" instead. When an annotation is visible in the current chapter, it is displayed in reverse emphasis colorization (default, navy blue on yellow) and the beginning of the verse gains a marker *u, after the fashion of footnote *n and cross-reference *x. Mouse-hover on this new marker and the previewer shows your personal annotation. When marking, delete the module name in the dialog to make the annotation apply to any Bible module.
- There is a new geography interface through BibleMap.org: Mouse-select any place name, right-click, select Lookup Selection -> Browse in BibleMap.org. Your browser will open a new window to obtain a Google Maps-driven display of that place.
- Module manager now can do automatic repository discovery from the "known repositories" list maintained at CrossWire. At the moment, the 4 entries there duplicate the 4 hard-coded names previously known to Xiphos, though the official names change somewhat. In the module manager, on the Sources page, there is now a button labeled Load Standard, which updates your list of sources from the official content. It does not remove any, but it will replace any that have exactly the same name with their updated information. It will be necessary to remove any old-name versions manually, because Xiphos cannot detect that they are duplicates.
- An ancient module manager bug was fixed, where closing the mod.mgr via the title bar "X" decoration would leave the mod.mgr unable to re-open until after a restart.
- An equally ancient difficulty with the general book window (that alternates with commentary) not being filled when first viewed was finally fixed.
- A workaround is in place regarding a failure of the logic for removing a module list from Advanced Search. Also, other logic for creation of module lists and range lists has been updated.
- The verse navbar now has normal relief on book/chapter/verse.
- A failure to redisplay properly after loading a tab set is fixed.
- Freakish European keyboard Ctrl +/- should now work.
- Some fixes were applied to journal/prayerlist editing.
- If the sidebar is detached, it now gets a title bar name.
- Bugfixes to the logic which preserves tab names as they are added or deleted.
- New Slovak translation.
- Strong's markup is now handled in pre-verse headers.
- Ctrl-F4 will delete a tab.
- Some general resource management fixes have been made: Window size causing trouble with 2-verse context; lack of any genbooks making Xiphos unable to remember on what Bible verse it should start; redisplay faults in several circumstances.