What's New in 2.0.0b15?

Bug Fixes

• In the Administrator application, Community and Organization pop-up menus were being built improperly and would report incorrect communities and/or organizations. Now they don't.

Known/New Bugs

• While not really a bug, I have received a request to add the ability to search for users based on their attributes (as described below) while using the Notebook. At present, this is only possible in the Administrator application. At the very least, one will have to be logged in as a special kind of user to be able to take advantage of this feature as I don't want to advertise that this information exists in the database.
• The date normalization code which makes all of the dates downloaded from the database be relative to the date/time on the client machine (the machine actually running the Notebook) seems to be acting a bit odd. It's as if sometimes the normalization delta is added, and at other times is subtracted. This was noticed during some Y2K testing, but shouldn't be an issue for anyone whose Macintosh is set to a nearly correct date/time.
• The Page Content tag of exported pages sometimes has some extra random characters appended to it for some reason. That's not right.
• In some environments, clicking on a page in the notebook window will cause a database query to be executed. This is very weird, and should definitely not be happening.
• The two Fenger connection files installed by the Notebook Installer both present the same name in the login dialog box, even though they work in two very different ways. The names presented in the Server pop-up menu should at the very least be different.
• Downloading attachment files from some servers, or from some client locales, has been known to hang the client machine. I still haven't figured out exactly why or how this is happening, even though I've been able to reproduce it all too many times on my own machine. It's funny, the sample code upon which the FTP portions of the notebook are based don't exhibit the same problems. hmmm...
• The documentation for the Notebook is woefully out of date, and there is no documentation for the Administrator. I'm not sure that really qualifies as a "bug" necessarily, but it is something that needs to be fixed.

New Features

• Statisics gathering window. This won't be of any relevance to most users, but to those of you wishing to collect some manner of not-very-scientific types of statistical information, you now can do so. You have to have an account of a particular type in order for this to work, otherwise the option will remain hidden.
• Extra attributes were added to users so that the user's gender, and some manner of ethnicity, could be tracked. This is for use primarily in conjunction with user-defined groups and the statistics window described above. Most notebook users will never know that this "tracking" facility exists, and will not be able to access that information.
• The capabilities of the "Find" functionality has been extended to allow for locating users according to the newly added (see above) attributes.
• Attributes were attached to the notebook communities so that the default action for what to do when a user has no loadable desktop can be customized for each community. By default, all communities are set to open the Catalog window when a user with no saved desktop logs in.

Reporting Problems

• What kind of Macintosh you have
• What version of the MacOS you are using
• What version of the Collaboratory Notebook you are using
• What you were trying to do, and
• Exactly what went wrong