I spent a lot of time this past week working on this build. It may not seem like I changed that much, but updating to current versions of the major components was a large change under the hood.

You will find that the themes have changed. The theme system for the components was changed by the provider, and they changed the look of the themes that they supplied by default, and I didn’t like their new look. For every theme but the Black theme, I tried to approach the previous look as well as I could, but you will see some differences. I pretty much gave the black theme a complete overhaul.

I also added text to speech. It can only be accessed at the moment via a shortcut key (Ctrl+Shift+S) as I haven’t decided the best way to toggle it (A tool bar button? Context menu item?) If you have a section of text selected, it will read that text. If you don’t have any text selected, it will read the current document. The shortcut key also works in the notes and synopsis panels.

If you see any problems with the build, file a bug and I’ll get anything major fixed as quick as I can.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

I’ve been waiting for quite awhile to do this update. I was waiting on a promised change from the developer of the suite of controls I’m using to build StoryBox. It will hopefully fix quite a few outstanding issues, and perhaps should be faster (they keep talking about speed improvements).

They finally released the latest version earlier this month, and one thing I found is that the themes I’d been using had changed. I didn’t like them at all, especially the black, which had even less “black” in it that the current black theme.

The next update is all about integrating these controls and making the themes look the way I want them. There will be changes to every theme. It’s unavoidable. I hope you like the new ones better.

Here’s an early look at the “New Black”

For the second time this week, I’ve released a build, only to have someone report an annoying bug right after I released it.

I have heard rumors for a couple weeks of an annoying issue where, on start up, people would get a cascade of error messages, mostly after a first install (mostly on upgrades, I think). No one had reported real information until today, though. Report it, I fix it.

The problem was that the theme info went missing for some reason. I put a band-aid on it. Now, with this fix, if you WERE going to run into this issue, it will default to the silver theme.

Unlike Monday, I added a couple of features to this build to ease the pain of a second install. You can now add documents by right clicking in the Storyboard and Outline views.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm

This latest version of StoryBox adds a new “Act” document type to let those of you who like even more structure work more easily with more structure. There are is also a fix for those with European date styles and the statistics. I tried to fix the dates in the project when the project loads, but if your statistics don’t show up, send me the project in a bug report and I’ll fix it by hand.

I think I fixed the never shuts down bug, too. I know I fixed it in one case. I hope it translates to others.

http://www.storyboxsoftware.com/download.htm