Tinderbox 4.5.3

Tinderbox 4.5.3 is out. It's got lots of infrastructure improvements, lots of fit an finish. You should grab a copy.

Why should you upgrade, when the specific changes seems small? Small things sometimes lead to things that matter -- or that, at any rate, make your day a little better or your work a little faster.

Here's an example: a customer writes in to point out that date entry fouls up for one way of typing dates, for dates in March, in Finnish. Finnish! OK: maybe you don’t write much (or any) Finnish. OK: it’s only one style of date entry — you can use a different abbreviation. But fixing this also cleaned up some details in Tinderbox’s XML format, details that make it easier for other programs to read and write Tinderbox files. And that might help you down the road, if only because someone might write a widget you’ll need.

Here’s another one: the badge and prototype popup menus now operate on multiple selections. That gives you a new way to change a bunch of things at once. Not a big deal — you could always take a little longer and change things one at a time, or you could use Quickstamp to do a batch change, or you could write an agent. But it's handy, it saves a little time, it means you can do one interesting thing when you used to have to do several boring things.

There's more infrastructure here for Windows. And there's some armor-plating in the XML code to avoid parsing errors, which sometimes crept into Tinderbox files when certain other programs promised Tinderbox one kind of text but actually delivered another.

Special thanks in this release to: Loryn Jenkins, Mark Anderson, Michael Bywater, Allan Tsai, Ivan Petrovic, Maurice Frankel, Neal Perlmutter, Jack Baty, Larry Baldwin, and Tellef Kvifte — testers who came up with key evidence or crucial suggestions.