New in PageSpinner 2.1

Among the numerous improvements in version 2.1 you'll find:

1. Speed! PageSpinner is now PowerPC native, which gives a notable speed increase in many operations. A 68K version is also available.

2. Improved algorithm for restyling contents in the pages. The 68K version is up to 3 times faster than version 2.0.1. The PPC version is up to 6 times faster.

   

3. Support for Navigation Services Open and Save dialogs in the PowerPC-version lets you open multiple files, resize the open/save windows, preview text documents, put PageSpinner in the background etc. Navigation Services is available in Mac OS 8.5.

   
   

   You can press the Option key to temporarily use the old-style Open and Save dialogs. The menu item File : Preferences : General... lets you disable/enable the use of Navigation Services.

4. New built-in text editing commands lets you indent blocks of text and balance brackets pairs, like (), [] and <>, which can be handy when working with JavaScript and and other scripting lanuages.
   

5. Three types of line wrap options can be selected in Edit : Editor Options.... The option to disable soft line-wrapping can be very useful when working on pages created by some WYSIWYG-editors.

6. Auto Indent. The editor can now optionally auto-insert tab characters that match the indent of the previous line when you press Return or Enter.

7. New JavaScript topics added to HTML Assistant. Create rollover buttons like this one: in three easy steps.

   The rollover functions should work in version 3.0 and later of Navigator and version 4.01 of Explorer, and other browsers that support the document.images property introduced in JavaScript version 1.1 (and should not cause any errors in most of the older browsers).

   Another JavaScript topic enables you to show contents from files in a separate user-defined window.

8. The Save to Server in the File menu command will now place files inside sub-folders in the correct sub-folder on the Web Server and not in the Server's root directory. You need to specify the Root folder in File : Preferences : Web Server... to use this feature.

9. Customize your keyboard shortcuts! It is now possible to bind commands from the PageSpinner menus to Function keys, in additon to the Control-key combinations previously available.
   

10. The path to Web Server directory can now be displayed by clicking on the information in the status bar at the bottom of the editor window. (You need to select a root folder and a server path in the Web Server Preferences to be able to view the Server path).

11. Improved color picker for web-safe colors; it is now possible to directly control the brightness and amount of red, green and blue in a color.

    

    It is also possible to use the System's Color Picker by pressing the Option key when choosing a color, or selecting it as the default color picker in File : Preferences : General...
    

12. The HTML Version icons have been updated to indicate tags new in HTML 4.0 and tags that won't be supported in the next HTML version.

13. Support added for saving files to Web Servers using NetFinder or Finder as the file transfer application. Anarchie and Fetch are still supported.

14. Pulldown-menus are available for most buttons in the toolbar.

    You can access these by control-clicking the button.

    If you for some reason do not want to Control-click, you can set the General Preferences to enable you to Command-click or simply click and hold the mouse button pressed for a short moment to access the menu.
    

    The menus in the HTML buttons contain items that let you insert variations of a button's standard tag and HTML attributes of the tag. In the menus of the other buttons you can select options for saving, searching, previewing and checking the current page.

    Use Balloon Help to find out more about the items in the pulldown-menus.

15. Support for using two browsers simultaneously when previewing pages.

    Preview in Explorer and Navigator simultaneously!
    

    PageSpinner 2.1 will also remember up to three user-selected browsers. This enables you to develop and check your pages in both Explorer or Navigator. The third browser setting may for example be used to give quick access to a browser open in a Windows-emulator. Control-click the Preview button in the toolbar to select or activate one of the three browsers from the pulldown-menu.

16. Support for automatic previews of the main page when editing an included file, CSS-file or JavaScript file that has been opened from the main page with the Open Selection in the File menu.

    You can also control-click the Preview button in the toolbar to access a pulldown-menu that lets you manually deselect/select the main page of the frontmost document.

    This can be very useful when working with these types of files - and you can even combine it with having your previews displayed in two browsers!

17. A sub-menu containing Backup commands is now available in the File menu. These commands are the same as in Site Assistant, but you are now able to perform backups directly from within PageSpinner without having to launch Site Assistant.

18. Improved AppleScript support, the following commands have been added:

    • insert link tag: Inserts a link tag, <A HREF=...>, with a path relative to the document

    • insert image tag: Inserts an image tag, <IMG ...>, with a path relative to the document

    • relative path: Returns a string with the path relative to the document

    • link tag string: Returns the start link tag, <A HREF=...>, with a path relative to the document

    • image tag string: Returns an image tag, <IMG ...>, with a path relative to the document

    • encode URL: Encodes characters with ASCII codes > 127 to a string using %xx encoding

    • decode URL: Decodes characters with ASCII codes > 127 in a string containing %xx encoded characters

19. You can now open and edit JPEG and GIF images with a user-selected graphic editing application by selecting the path in the SRC-attribute of an Image tag, and select the Open Selection command in the File menu.

    Select your favorite graphic editor application in the File : Preferences : Helper... dialog.

20. Support added for menu sharing with e.g. Frontier and other menu serving applications, which enables users of Frontier to run scripts from menus added to the PageSpinner menu bar.

21. Tired of the background color in the editor and Notebook window's toolbars? In File : Preferences : General... you can now select to use bondi blue or any other color, or use one of the built-in background patterns.

22. Also included are several minor improvements plus fixes of some minor bugs.

    An incomplete list of minor changes and fixes:

    • Several minor changes have been made to the handling of included files to get faster processing and to fix display-related problems.

    • Buttons that will display the HTML-based example files have been added to PageSpinner's HTML Example window. It is possible to Option-click a button to directly open the Example folder in Finder.

    • Relative paths are now supported by the Open Selection, Preview Selection, Save Selection to Server commands.

    • A new Show in Finder menu item, which will reveal the current document in Finder, is available in the pulldown-menu of the Save/Document button in the toolbar.

    • You may now Command-click the file name in the editor window title to display a popup-menu containing the folders enclosing the current document just like in Mac OS Finder. You can then select a folder name in the menu to display the folder's window in Finder.

    • You can now select and insert one of the three new DOCTYPE declarations introduced in HTML 4.0.

    • Paragraph and currency symbols have been added to the Special Characters sub menu. Note that some of these symbols, for example the Euro symbol, will only be displayed on systems running the latest browser and system software.

    • HTML Assistant's Link topic adds support for defining a message that is displayed using JavaScript's onMouseOver event handler, plus a pop-up menu with the pre-defined target names for links inside frames.

    • The Font topic in HTML Assistant can now also set the font size to be smaller.

    • It is now possible to undo the last operation after saving a file in the ISO Latin-1 format as long as no high ASCII character was converted during the save.

    • Support added for localization of text in several of the dialogs (in addition to the localized menus available in PageSpinner 2.0).

    • Text in dialogs will use the font selected in the Appearance control panel.

    • New Cascading Style Sheet and Table examples added to the HTML Examples window.

    • Changed algorithm when saving files with MS-DOS line feeds, which gives much improved performance when opening and saving files. Note that this change will require you to restyle the contents of the file saved with MS-DOS line feeds using the Restyle Text command in the Edit menu the first time you open existing a file with DOS line feeds in version 2.1.

    • Added an option in File : Preferences : General... to run a compiled AppleScript at startup.

    • Relative paths containing spaces inside them will now be hex-encoded to %xx character codes. This can be useful when e.g. using a Mac-based Web server.