[Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

gunars
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Re: Ctrl+Alt+S broken

Postby gunars » Mon Oct 06, 2014 7:02 pm

usbpoweredfridge wrote:
Thomas Lohrum wrote:PS: Am i actually the only person testing 2.8? I wonder no one else is taking part in the discussion this time.


No, there may be others testing, but the discussion could be way over their heads (personally, I've hardly understood anything you and Alex have been talking about). I often have that same problem when you and Alex get into the nitty gritty of how CintaNotes works, so I just tend to skip right over those discussions - it may be that others are doing the same here.

Chris

I've been using the beta also, but only in regular use, not testing the history feature. My searches are usually simple, so I haven't had as much of a need for this. I'll try to take a look soon, when work permits.

Gunars
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Severe bug: tags can get lost

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Tue Oct 07, 2014 12:25 pm

Not sure whether this is related to 2.8 or if the bug exists in prior versions of CN.

I did edit two notes, both sharing a set of specific tags. After saving and closing the notes editors i realized that one tag got removed from all of my related notes. Luckily i had logging activated. I will send the log file using private mail. Also i was able to check the affected notes by viewing at my last backup. The problem though is serious, as i have no idea, whether other notes got affected without me being aware of the data loss.

Thomas

[EDIT 14:32]I have checked my settings file and noticed that this item "tags.autodeleted = 1" got added to it. This was probably done by migrating to 2.8 beta 2. It seems like the issue is related to this setting.

[EDIT 16:31]Actually i had three editor windows open. I moved content from one note to the other. Finally i deleted the one i no longer needed. Probably that deletion removed all references to the tag. Btw. the tag was still there, but it had a usage count of zero. The tag name was "Optimierung".
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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby gunars » Tue Oct 07, 2014 5:45 pm

I ran into a similar issue last night. Over the last few days, I've added a dozen notes with the tag "ink" (fountain pen inks) - some as the only tag and some with other tags also. I noticed at one point that "ink" was no longer in the tag list on the left, although it still showed up in the tags on each note. Exporting one of the notes that displayed "ink" and "fountainpen" tags produced an xml file that only had the "fountainpen" tag. I turned off the tag list filter (usually set to 'Only Used Tags') and for a moment I saw 'ink' with a count of 0. When I exited CN and started again, the 'ink' tag was no longer on the notes. It was easy to retag them, but disconcerting that they disappeared.

Gunars

p.s. - I also have "tags.autodeleted = 1" added since my last backup of the settings file about four weeks ago.
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Re: Ctrl+Alt+S broken

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 5:52 am

Thomas Lohrum wrote:you're not only an excellent developer, but your social skills are just suited as well. Thanks for summing this all up and make it more understandable. :)

Thank you, thank you))

Thomas Lohrum wrote:I am sure Alex has it on his list, but to clarify i also suggested to add a shortcut, to allow to open the history menu using the keyboard.

Sure.

usbpoweredfridge wrote:I agree the full state is more meaningful to a normal user - but I think as you have already been discussing, a full state can be quite long, and fitting those onto a context menu could be quite a challenge (the deltas are less useful to a normal user, but have the advantage of being smaller and easier to fit onto a context menu). And also as you have mentioned, if two full states are very similar to each other, highlighting the differences between them could be tricky to do - but I think it needs to be done if you are going with a full state.

I think there's no point in implementing a feature without driving it to a usable state. So I intend to do all of the above, but since 2.8 is already a bit late (and mind you that every release brings us a lot of traffic, more sales, and hence a bit more money to support further development), the icons and highlighting will be done in 2.8.1.

usbpoweredfridge wrote:Just thinking about other programs with a history (eg Firefox), I'd say that a combined history as described is probably the way to go here. I think having two sets of histories, one for each button, would be a little too confusing for some.

I agree here. But the question remains: what to do when the user click on the bold state representing "current"? Just silently ignore it and close the menu?

usbpoweredfridge wrote:The history is not saved when you move between notebooks, or indeed even when you close CN. Is that intentional? If so, I think you can remove the 'clear history' item from the context menu (as it would be redudant).

This is partly intentional, partly an occident. I can easily imagine that some users would prefer the history to not be saved, since it can contain some private queries. Hence the existence of the explicit "clear history" command, btw. Occasional it is because not saving history was easier than saving it ;)

usbpoweredfridge wrote: Upon upgrading, all tags in the tag sidebar were hidden by an up arrow. I clicked it, to show my tags, but now can't find way to hide them again (not that I want them hidden, just that I want to see the hiding/un-hiding process in action).

That's very strange. Do you mean that the expanding/collapsing arrow next to parent tags dissapeared? Could you please send me a screenshot?
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Re: Ctrl+Alt+S broken

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 5:55 am

Thomas Lohrum wrote:i use CintaNotes differently. I use "All sections" in 98% of my use cases. Occasionally i do a search limited to one section only. Until now i never had the need to select more than one section, though i agree it is great to have this possibility. As always different users have different needs. I rather suggest to never show [All sections]. That is, if nothing is added it means "all". Always show a single or multiple sections inside squared brackets. Imo this makes sense, because this state is different to "all". Also you mention the "active one" (section), but unless you add it to the history, how would i know which one is the active one?

That's a fair comment. The only problem that I see here is that when the user works in just one section (and I guess there're plenty of users who do it, I'd even argue that this is a majority), the history will be filled up with useless "from Main, from Main, from Main..."
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Re: Ctrl+Alt+S broken

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 5:59 am

usbpoweredfridge wrote:If so, I think you can remove the 'clear history' item from the context menu (as it would be redudant).

This makes sense even when you use one database only. I can even think of using the "Del" to delete a single item from the history

I'd argue to leave the command. The fact that the history is cleared on database switch is not self-evident, whereas the command is clearly visible. Regarding removing single items from history, I think this is a good idea in general, but I wonder if many people would really use it. Probably it would be best to add it to the roadmap once the history feature is released.
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Re: Severe bug: tags can get lost

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 6:05 am

Thomas Lohrum wrote:After saving and closing the notes editors i realized that one tag got removed from all of my related notes. Luckily i had logging activated. I will send the log file using private mail. Also i was able to check the affected notes by viewing at my last backup. The problem though is serious, as i have no idea, whether other notes got affected without me being aware of the data loss.


Thanks for the report, Thomas. Unfortunately I still can't reproduce the problem. Without reproduction we can never be sure that the bug is really fixed. Please try to remember the following crucial information:
1) How many uses did this tag have prior to your editing?
2) Was this tag used in only one section or in several?
3) Were all sections active and the time of edit?
4) When you edited the note, did you remove this tag, or added it, or maybe didn't touch it?
5) Do I understand correctly that you didn't use the F4 dialog for tagging?

Thanks!
BTW as far as I understand the new "tag.autodeleted" option (which correcponds to the new Options/Tags/Autodeleted by default) should not be directly connected with this problem. It only affects creating new tags.
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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 6:07 am

gunars wrote:I ran into a similar issue last night. Over the last few days, I've added a dozen notes with the tag "ink" (fountain pen inks) - some as the only tag and some with other tags also. I noticed at one point that "ink" was no longer in the tag list on the left, although it still showed up in the tags on each note. Exporting one of the notes that displayed "ink" and "fountainpen" tags produced an xml file that only had the "fountainpen" tag. I turned off the tag list filter (usually set to 'Only Used Tags') and for a moment I saw 'ink' with a count of 0. When I exited CN and started again, the 'ink' tag was no longer on the notes. It was easy to retag them, but disconcerting that they disappeared.

Thanks for the new data, Gunars! Please also answer a couple of questions:
1) Was tag "ink" a new tag, or did it exist before? If it existed, how many notes had it?
2) How did you add the tag, in the Note Edit dialog, via F4, or via middle-click?
3) Did you edit one of these notes afterwards?

Thanks!
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Re: Ctrl+Alt+S broken

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Wed Oct 08, 2014 8:00 am

CintaNotes Developer wrote:I agree here. But the question remains: what to do when the user click on the bold state representing "current"? Just silently ignore it and close the menu?


Yes, that's precisely what should happen. The only other alternative would be to make the current state not clickable. I have a rough guess as to which would be easiest to implement ;)

I can easily imagine that some users would prefer the history to not be saved, since it can contain some private queries.


Which is why I mentioned the shared PC thing in one of my previous posts - history needs a way to be disabled if it is going to be saved, because there are going to be users who won't like it.

That's very strange. Do you mean that the expanding/collapsing arrow next to parent tags dissapeared? Could you please send me a screenshot?


No, I mean all the tags themselves disappeared. They were replaced by an up pointing arrow. As soon as I clicked it, the tags appeared again - this was in all my multiple notebooks - but when I closed and reopened CN, they had disappeared again. I can't reproduce at the moment (if I ever can, I will screenshot it) - sometimes the tags have vanished, sometimes they haven't when I start CN. I know it is 2.8 related though - I've been using CN for a while now, and only have seen this since the 2.8 update.

Related question - if I wanted to downgrade to 2.7 (I don't like my tags vanishing), how would I do that? The 2.8 update backed up my 2.7 database when I installed it, but I foolishly have added one or two entries to my notebooks since - and thus I can't simply restore the 2.7 backup (I usually don't use the CN beta's because of the possibility of problems like this, but you did ask me about the history, so I installed Beta 2 just to get a look at it - I should have reverted to 2.7 immediately afterwards I suppose, but I forgot).

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Re: Ctrl+Alt+S broken

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Wed Oct 08, 2014 8:34 am

usbpoweredfridge wrote:I can't reproduce at the moment (if I ever can, I will screenshot it)


Magically, the very first time I launched CN after typing this, the problem occurred. Here is a screenshot - I have whited out my notes for privacy reasons, but you can see the red rectangle I put around the arrow that is hiding my tags.
http://i.imgur.com/s8CKBhS.jpg

This is definitely a 2.8 problem - I have switched between my multiple notebooks hundreds or thousands of times before updating to 2.8, and this never occurred even a single time before the update. If I click that arrow, the tags re-appear, but then as I have mentioned previously, it won't save like this. Opening and closing my notebooks at random, and suddenly the tags will be hidden again.

I am thinking the best way for me to revert to 2.7 would be this:
1. Install CN Portable (2.7).
2. Open my 2.8 (main) install, and open the new 2.7 (portable) install.
3. Unfilter my main notebook in the 2.8 install, and highlight all the notes, and then right click->Cut.
4. Swap to 2.7, and right click->Paste.
5. Hope that CN doesn't crash, as it did the last time I tried to copy/paste more than a small number of notes between notebooks. Repeat steps for all my multiple notebooks.
6. If the notes copy across, I can uninstall 2.8, uninstall 2.7 (portable), and then reinstall 2.7 (non-portable) and hopefully use my new notebooks from there.

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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 9:08 am

Chris, thanks for the useful info and the screenshot! I'm already looking for the probable cause.
Regarding how to downgrade - why can't you just export the extra notes you added in the last days
to XML, and use the backup + import the XML with extra notes? I guess this should be the simplest way.
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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Wed Oct 08, 2014 9:24 am

CintaNotes Developer wrote:Regarding how to downgrade - why can't you just export the extra notes you added in the last days
to XML, and use the backup + import the XML with extra notes? I guess this should be the simplest way.


I can't remember which notes I have added now, so I was unable to do that - even had I thought of it, which I hadn't :( Anyway, I went ahead and did the dual install thing - luckily, CN has a multiple instances option, otherwise I would not have been able to do that. Sadly, though I now have my 2.7 install back, I have lost my CN recycle bin from my old notebooks, as those appear not to be copied over by the copy/paste method (I guess that is logical, wish I had thought of it before I did the reinstall though). I do hope there was nothing important in there that I needed to recover :(

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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 9:28 am

usbpoweredfridge wrote:I can't remember which notes I have added now, so I was unable to do that - even had I thought of it, which I hadn't :(

It could easily be seen by the modification date.

usbpoweredfridge wrote:Anyway, I went ahead and did the dual install thing - luckily, CN has a multiple instances option, otherwise I would not have been able to do that. Sadly, though I now have my 2.7 install back, I have lost my CN recycle bin from my old notebooks, as those appear not to be copied over by the copy/paste method (I guess that is logical, wish I had thought of it before I did the reinstall though). I do hope there was nothing important in there that I needed to recover :(

Please don't despair - you still have that backup don't you? With the recycle bin intact.
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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Wed Oct 08, 2014 10:49 am

CintaNotes Developer wrote:It could easily be seen by the modification date.


Ah, I didn't actually know that CN kept the modification date of a note (I do now though that you have mentioned it - I shouldn't have been surprised in retrospect, as I knew that the CN notebooks are SQL format, and thus would likely have more information in them than just the plain text of each note).

Please don't despair - you still have that backup don't you? With the recycle bin intact.


I do have that backup, yes. I am hoping that you may be able to work out what the problem with the hiding tags is in 2.8 and that it is a program setting - rather than a setting saved to the converted databases that the 2.8 install created - so I can restore the backup and go back to using 2.8 (returning to 2.7.2, I realise how badly the lowercase notebook names in the versions prior to 2.8 bug me).

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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby CintaNotes Developer » Wed Oct 08, 2014 1:00 pm

usbpoweredfridge wrote:Ah, I didn't actually know that CN kept the modification date of a note (I do now though that you have mentioned it - I shouldn't have been surprised in retrospect, as I knew that the CN notebooks are SQL format, and thus would likely have more information in them than just the plain text of each note).

Yes, both creation and last modification dates are retained.

I do have that backup, yes. I am hoping that you may be able to work out what the problem with the hiding tags is in 2.8 and that it is a program setting - rather than a setting saved to the converted databases that the 2.8 install created - so I can restore the backup and go back to using 2.8 (returning to 2.7.2, I realise how badly the lowercase notebook names in the versions prior to 2.8 bug me).

I'm already working on this. You don't need to do anything special to go back to 2.8, the database will just get upgraded again.
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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby usbpoweredfridge » Wed Oct 08, 2014 1:39 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:I'm already working on this. You don't need to do anything special to go back to 2.8, the database will just get upgraded again.


Very good - I think everyone else has probably already said it previously, but thanks again for your continued hard work on CN! :)

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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby gunars » Wed Oct 08, 2014 3:02 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:Thanks for the new data, Gunars! Please also answer a couple of questions:
1) Was tag "ink" a new tag, or did it exist before? If it existed, how many notes had it?
2) How did you add the tag, in the Note Edit dialog, via F4, or via middle-click?
3) Did you edit one of these notes afterwards?

Thanks!

1) The "ink" tag had been in use for over a month and had about 12 notes tagged with it.
2) They were all tagged, one by one, in the Note Edit dialog as I created them. I did use F4 to retag them after the tag was lost. Since the word "ink" existed in the text as well, I could still search and then retag them with F4.
3) Yes, I did edit some of the notes afterwards, but not to touch the "ink" tag and probably not any other tags either. I probably had only one edit window open at a time, but there could have been another once or twice. Also, most of these notes originated by clipping from a web page.

A few other pieces of information:
1) This notebook only has a Main section. The database is about 700KB with about 200 notes.
2) I'm using the portable version, installed in a Dropbox folder (except for the backup directory). I'm always very careful to make sure CN is closed (Exit) and synching has finished before shutting down the computer. Although the folder is shared, for the last month, I've only been using CN on one machine, so there were no other copies running.

Have there been any changes in how CN interacts with Dropbox? I sometimes see DB indexing a file called cintanotes.db-journal. Maybe this was there before and I didn't notice it. I've been noticing it more because sometimes (not always) it seems to take DB a long time to index cintanotes.db and upload it after changes, so I've been keeping an eye on the status.

Gunars
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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Wed Oct 08, 2014 6:34 pm

Hi Gunars,

gunars wrote:Have there been any changes in how CN interacts with Dropbox? I sometimes see DB indexing a file called cintanotes.db-journal. Maybe this was there before and I didn't notice it. I've been noticing it more because sometimes (not always) it seems to take DB a long time to index cintanotes.db and upload it after changes, so I've been keeping an eye on the status.

Taken from SQLite's docs:

"The rollback journal is always located in the same directory as the database file and has the same name as the database file except with the 8 characters "-journal" appended."

https://www.sqlite.org/tempfiles.html

There is no reason to worry about that file. It gets created for transactions reason and is fully managed by SQLite (CN's database engine).

Thomas
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Re: [Ann] CintaNotes 2.8 Beta 2

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Wed Oct 08, 2014 6:40 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:
usbpoweredfridge wrote:Ah, I didn't actually know that CN kept the modification date of a note (I do now though that you have mentioned it - I shouldn't have been surprised in retrospect, as I knew that the CN notebooks are SQL format, and thus would likely have more information in them than just the plain text of each note).
Yes, both creation and last modification dates are retained.


Chris,

you can check your Options->Notes List... settings. Myself i have "Date and time display" set to "None" and "[X] Always display sort mode date" checked. Since i sort for modification date it will always be used for displaying the notes list.

Thomas
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Re: Severe bug: tags can get lost

Postby Thomas Lohrum » Wed Oct 08, 2014 6:52 pm

CintaNotes Developer wrote:
Thomas Lohrum wrote:After saving and closing the notes editors i realized that one tag got removed from all of my related notes. Luckily i had logging activated. I will send the log file using private mail. Also i was able to check the affected notes by viewing at my last backup. The problem though is serious, as i have no idea, whether other notes got affected without me being aware of the data loss.
Thanks for the report, Thomas. Unfortunately I still can't reproduce the problem. Without reproduction we can never be sure that the bug is really fixed. Please try to remember the following crucial information:


1) How many uses did this tag have prior to your editing?
A: 12

2) Was this tag used in only one section or in several?
A: in several

3) Were all sections active and the time of edit?
A: not sure, but likely, since i use 'all' most of the times

4) When you edited the note, did you remove this tag, or added it, or maybe didn't touch it?
A: did not touch it

5) Do I understand correctly that you didn't use the F4 dialog for tagging?
A: I did not use it for assigning. It is possible though, that i used it to rename the tag at some time. However, this was probably done before 2.8 appeared.

More details:

  • the tag was in use for a couple of months
  • the notes were all tagged one by one using the note editor
  • i edited the notes text only - no tags were changed
  • i had at least three editor windows open, editing at least two of them

Thomas

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