Life Balance 4.1 and 3.5 final candidate 1

(This article has been superceded. Now that version 4.1 and 3.5 have been released. Beta attachments have been deleted.)

Life Balance 4.1 and 3.5 are now final candidate builds. There were significant changes prior to making the final candidate builds. We would be grateful if you can take a moment to be sure that these final candidate builds are ready for release into the big wide world.

• 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.
• Final candidate and release builds are optimized to be faster and smaller than beta builds.
• These final candidate 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 new in since beta 3

Although this final candidate build contains no user-visible changes from the last beta, it is a release build with the extra testing code removed, so speed should be back to normal. Also, the assertion failure messages that some customers encountered should now be gone.

This build features the revised documentation. When we post the final build, there will also be html versions of the docs that display beautifully on the iPhone.

What changed in beta 3

• 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.

What changed in beta 2

• Palm: Corrected an error in the "Postpone Until..." code where we were failing to add the base year value, which is 1904, when converting the year from the Palm date format.
• Palm: Corrected a fatal error in the "Postpone Until..." code that could happen when creating an exception to a repeating calendar event.
• Mac and Windows: Added code to detect and repair invalid repeat frequencies on a repeating calendar event. This was to help out one particular customer who had a problem in his data. This was not likely to be a common issue.
• Mac: Removed the code that synchronizes the location field in iCal to places in Life Balance, based on poll results and follow up conversations with our customers.
• Mac: Added a timer so that the outline will auto-scroll when dragging a task without having to wiggle the mouse.