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Zavala - An open source outliner for Macs, iPads, and iPhones
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Posted by Maurice Parker
Dec 12, 2023 at 05:47 PM
Zavala 2.1 is now in TestFlight for both macOS and iOS. https://testflight.apple.com/join/iFbND23m
The biggest change is that the iCloud syncing engine was rewritten. It is now much smarter about merging changes when one or more devices were offline while changes were being made. In some cases this could cause data loss because parts of the outline could get overlaid. Zavala now determines which changes were made by which device and sews them all together.
This iCloud rewrite (and some personal issues) was the main reason this release took so long. iCloud doesn’t behave as described in the developer documentation and I had to open an issue with Apple to resolve it. An Apple support developer had to read the iCloud code to confirm the undocumented behavior. Once I actually knew what was going on, I had a lot of labor intensive work to get around this undocumented behavior.
Some nice quality of life changes:
* You can now choose the amount of indent spacing and row spacing. You can choose Small, Medium, and Large. I don’t want to allow it to be specified in pixels to keep things from being too fiddly. I would like to hear back on how the 3 presets work for people to see if they need adjusted.
* Drag and Drop had a lot of elbow grease put in it. I think it works a lot better now. Before you might rows moving around as you were trying to drop on them.
* I made a small change that makes Hook integration better if you are using it
* I cleaned up the Help menu and made the About box more attractive and useful
* There are a bunch more toolbar buttons on the iPhone and iPad to make Zavala easier to use without special modifier keys.
* Lots of bug fixes and other little enhancements
Any feedback is greatly appreciated. iCloud testing with devices both online and offline would be a big help.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 13, 2023 at 12:09 PM
Marvellous! Thanks, Maurice, for this update – very reassuring, I’d noticed the data loss issue, which had rather baffled me, but would love to keep using Zavala.
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Maurice Parker
Dec 14, 2023 at 04:53 PM
I’m glad you are still a user Bill! The 2.1 Beta is probably safer to use even as untested as it is. Because I don’t get a lot of help testing Zavala (it just doesn’t have a large or active community), I’ll probably release sooner rather than later and just try to fix any regressions as fast as possible.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 15, 2023 at 01:13 PM
Hm, because it’s you, I might have to become a Testflight user (I stopped using Testflight a little while ago)! I’ll check it out and let you know!
Maurice Parker wrote:
I’m glad you are still a user Bill! The 2.1 Beta is probably safer to
>use even as untested as it is. Because I don’t get a lot of help testing
>Zavala (it just doesn’t have a large or active community), I’ll probably
>release sooner rather than later and just try to fix any regressions as
>fast as possible.
Posted by Maurice Parker
Jan 5, 2024 at 09:29 PM
I released Zavala 2.1 and did several smaller bug fixes to it. Hot behind it is Zavala 2.2. Some of the code that is in 2.2 I already had written before I released 2.1, so this one is coming out faster than usual.
Probably the new feature most requested is Focus (Hoisting). I’d really like to get some feedback on if I missed some feature of Focus or just about the design in general. I didn’t look at a lot of other outliners to create it, only Bike, and may have missed the mark. The implementation isn’t much like Bike’s except for the keyboard shortcuts. I think my interpretation fits well with Zavala’s clean and easy to use approach, but a developer never knows until someone else has tried it out.
Settings were rewritten to make it easier to add them. They look more like the newer style used on the Mac for Settings, so it could be a little controversial to some. I personally like it and especially like the fact that the code is now shared between the Mac and iOS.
Another new feature that I think is original is Automatically Change Link Titles. If you paste a web link into Zavala, it will go out to the web and grab that links page title and replace the text of the link with it. I find this very helpful when doing research, say for Christmas or something else I would like to buy. This feature is opt-in, per outline, since you might be a researcher working on a sensitive subject. In that case, you might not want your outliner going out and making web requests that could falsely incriminate you. There is a global app setting to make it default to on for new outlines.
A couple other little things. You can now disable animations in the Outline Editor. The Editor width is now restricted to a readable width. Word count is available under an Outline’s Get Info dialog. And of course, some bug fixes.
If you would like to help test and shape Zavala, just use the link below. I take feedback seriously and most of these 2.2 features come from community feedback.
https://testflight.apple.com/join/iFbND23m