Life Balance 4.1b3 and 3.5b3 public beta

We have a new public beta of Life Balance for your perusal. This version includes significant new features and fixes since beta 2, but please take note:

• As with any beta, you should be sure to have backups of your data in case anything goes wrong.
• You must be a web site member and be logged in to download the beta.
• The Palm edition of Life Balance will upgrade your data to a new format which is not compatible with previous versions. You must have backups of your Palm data in case you need to revert to a previous version of Life Balance.
• Beta builds are slower and larger than regular builds because they include extra code intended to catch and display various conditions and errors.
• These beta builds have a strict expiration date of September 1, 2008.

What's new in Life Balance 4.1 and 3.5

For Mac and Windows, we've added new Move Up/Down/Left/Right menu items to the Task menu that can be used to rearrange your Outline. On Mac, the keyboard shortcuts for these commands are Control-Command arrow key. On Windows, the shortcuts are Control-Alt arrow key.

For Palm, we've also added "Catch Up," "Skip," and "Defer Until" commands to the Task menu in the To Do List view. These work just like the same commands on Mac and Windows, so check out one of the desktop manuals if you need to know how those commands work.

On all platforms, we've added icons that appear in response to the Catch Up, Skip, and Defer Until commands so you can tell that these commands have taken effect. These icons disappear when the to-do list is updated, so you will only see them on Mac and Windows if your to do list is locked.

What's changed since beta 2

• Added special icons for the Skip, Catch Up, and Postpone Until commands that will appear in place of the usual checkbox, so there is some visual feedback that these commands have taken effect. This was especially important on Palm, where the forced update of the to-do list that we were using to provide feedback in beta 2 was considered too slow by one of the testers. These new icons disappear when you update your to-do list, so you will not see them on Mac or Windows if your to-do list is set to auto-update. You will only see them if you update your to do list manually.
• As a general rule, you can't skip a task that is scheduled to happen "once." In this release, we enhanced the Skip command so that a "Once" task that is governed by the schedule of a repeating parent (either routinely or by calendar) can also be skipped. In this particular case, the task is checked off without assigning any credit. As an example, this is handy if you have a repeating pattern for "healthy eating habits" where you may still skip "breakfast" sometimes.
• On Macintosh, we removed the synchronization of Life Balance places to iCal locations, since that seemed to be causing problems for many users.
• On Macintosh, added an auto-scroll timer to the outline, so you no longer have to wiggle the mouse to scroll when dragging a task.
• Added code to Palm to treat yearly repeats equivalent to monthly repeats with a 12-month frequency. Missing Sync is generating events in this format.
• Added code to correctly import calendar events that happen yearly on a particular day of the week. This affects all vCalendar formatted input, including iCal sync, AppleScript, and exchange files.
• Added code to automatically "Verify Data" after upgrading the Palm data format.
• Added code to check for arithmetic overflow in the credits calculation on Palm, which could cause assertion failures and incorrect calculations when very old dates are involved. This is not a condition that most users would encounter, but prevents corrupt data on the Palm from interfering with the calculations that update the to-do list.
• Fixed a conduit crash where the Palm date book category info was uninitialized when doing a two-way sync to a Palm where Life Balance was installed but had never been launched.
• Fixed a very rare conduit bug that could cause HotSync to go into an infinite loop when trying to resolve a complex set of outline rearrangement and deletions.
• Shortened the default installation path for single-user installs on Windows in order to avoid 127-character path length limit in Palm HotSync Manager. This should solve the problem where the Life Balance conduit would not show up in the HotSync Manager for some Windows users, even though the installation completed successfully.