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Text File | 1995-11-01 | 13.2 KB | 326 lines

August 25, 1994 Welcome to Almanac 3.5! This major update provides significant new features to Almanac together with a host of improvements and enhancements. We've been delighted with the enourmous reaction to Almanac from customers all over the world, and are extremely happy to continue improving Almanac as the world of computing advances. We hope that you will enjoy this release just as much as all of us at Impact have enjoyed producing it. Please allow us to take this opportunity to thank all of our customers for showing their support by voting with their pocketbooks. These customers deserve our thanks and more, because without them, updates like Almanac 3.5 would not be possible. Our hats off to you! The rest of this document describes the additions and enhancements to Almanac since version 3.1. We hope that this will help our current users identify the changes in order to begin exploiting the new capabilities of this release as soon as possible. Sincerly, The Impact Team -------------------------------------------------------------- General Changes =============== At first glance you will notice that Almanac's Tool Bar has been upgraded with full-color tool buttons. Open any dialog box and you will see a 3 dimensional 'chisel' look provided by Kyle Marsh at Microsoft. Function key accelerators have been added for easy keyboard access to most of the selections on the Window menu. For example, F5 will activate the Schedule Window, and F10 will reset Almanac's window arrangement to the settings stored in your calendar file. A significant across-the-board enhancement to Almanac is the addition of time zone information to all time-of-day events. Whenever you enter a time-of-day in the definition of a Schedule, To Do, or Overlay event, by default it will be recorded as occurring in the time zone of your current Point Of Reference (set via Options.Location...). You have the ability to select a time zone when you define or edit any entry. This provides several new possibilities. You can change your location in Almanac as you travel and always have the correct local time for all of your events. Perhaps you work at a company that has offices in more than one time zone. Almanac will allow common schedules to be distributed to all locations without any need for manual adjustments to consider local time differences. New custom controls have been created to accept the entry of dates and times. These controls appear in the dialogs that define overlays, appointments, and to do items. They are designed after the popular drop-down combo controls. Each control includes and 'edit control' component which acts exactly as the previous edit controls for these fields. A drop-down pushbutton allows access to a graphical data entry panel that can be used by both keyboard and mouse users to navigate to the date or time they desire. And last but not least, we have significantly improved and enhanced Almanac's online Help. We hope that you will find it to be one of the most informative and useful sources of online assistance found in any Windows application. Here is a list of many of the specific areas that have been improved or added in Almanac version 3.5: New Overlay Features ==================== 1. Overlay entries may now optionally have a time-of-day associated with them. The information is used primarily for display - the time values cannot be used to set alarms or reminders or such. They are used to format the display of the event just as a schedule item would be displayed, as well as to insert the event into a display list in the appropriate sequence designated by its time-of-day. 2. When a time-of-day is assigned to an overlay event, the user can also specifiy the time zone that the event occurs in. 3. Overlay entries may now be assigned a Listing Priority. This information is used to give the user control over the order that events will be displayed should multiple items fall on the same day. The listing priority is a value that is used as a 'weight' when displaying multiple events. Entries which have a time-of-day assigned to them are always sorted by time in the display list, however the Listing Priority still provides a way to control the order of multiple events which have the exact same time-of-day assignment. 4. Appropriate types of overlay definitions now include special weekend processing allowing the event to be placed on the Friday before or the Monday after a weekend. 5. The operation of the Options.Overlays... dialog has been updated to execute requests immediately while remaining open to process as many requests as are desired. The 'Create', 'Add', and 'Remove' pushbuttons have been replaced with the more familiar 'New', 'Open', and 'Close' operations. New Scheduler Features ====================== 1. Time zone support has been added to the Scheduler tool. Appointments that you entered with an earlier version of Almanac that did not support time zone tracking will be calculated as occurring in the time zone that you specify for your system clock (set in Options.Locations...) unless they are updated (edited) using the new version. 2. The Scheduler tool window scroll is no longer limited to midnight-to-midnight scrolling. The scrollbar will provide normal scrolling action throughout the hours of the day. When the scrollbar elevator box reaches its topmost or bottommost position, a subsequent tap on the appropriate scrollbar arrow will reset the scroll bar to the previous/next day and continue scrolling. 3. Events may now be defined across midnight. New Phonebook Features ====================== 1. The drop-down combo control used to select an entry in the Phonebook has been enhanced with scanning logic that will position the Phonebook to the first matching entry as you type. 2. The individual address fields (street, city, etc...) are now combined into one, complete address entry. This will allow the entry of any address format around the world. Existing phonebook records will display their address information as before in the Phonebook tool window. If required, the address may be edited and reformatted to a style appropriate to a location outside of North America. 3. Labels appropriate for each phone number entered are now available. Existing phone entries will default to the old Office, Home, Fax, and Other labels. You can insert any label p to 11 characters in length for each phone number. 4. Several modes of phone dialing are now available. The Options.Phonebook dialog now allows you to choose a DEFAULT dialing style. The choices are Dial Using SmartDial, Dial Exactly As Entered, and Preview Numbers Before Dialing. Each phone number entered into the Phonebook can be set to use your current default dialing mode, or you may select a specific dialing mode as described above. SmartDial can be used in may locations in North America that use 3 digit area codes that must be dialed for long distance calls and cannot be used for local call. It logically strips the area code before dialing a phone number in your own area code. Dial Exactly As Entered does just that. It dials a number without any type of editing for outside line or long distance access codes or area codes. Preview Numbers Before Dialing will provide a popup dialog box when you request Almanac to dial. It allows you to select either of the first two dialing modes, or edit the number as required before dialing. 5. The Phonebook now attempts to remember which entry to position itself at when you switch between Individuals and Organizations, and when you close and reopen it. New To Do Features ================== The To Do tool has been updated to support the same time zone capabilities described for Overlays and the Schedule tool. New Notes Features ================== Depressing Shift-F5 while the cursor is positioned in the text area of the Notes window will insert the current time and date into the text. New Search Tool =============== A new tool window has been added to allow all the searching of any information stored within Almanac. A tool bar button with a familiar picture of a magnifying glass provides easy access for mouse users. The Search window has four pushbuttons to control the search operation. Selecting Where... invokes a dialog that is used to specify the scope of the search. You can select which areas of information to scan, and include a time range for limiting the scan of events that occur on specific dates. The Find button will initiate the scan of information, looking for the text that you enter in the Query edit control. Two checkboxes next to the Query field allow you to control the case sensitivity and whether you would like to match on complete words only. When a Find operation is performed, information that is found during the search is entered into the bottom listbox. Selecting a 'found' item and either double-clicking or pressing Enter will cause Almanac to proceed to that entry. When this occurs, the Search tool window will be moved away from the found item and collapsed to show just the pushbuttons and allow you more viewing area. Selecting the Reopen button will re-expand the Search window to its original size. The time range that is entered into the Where... dialog will be saved between sessions, and will 'float' as time progresses. So for example, if you perform a search across information from two weeks ago through three months in the future, and then you return to do another search after a week has passed, the search range will reflect appropriate dates for a period that is two weeks in the past through three months in the future. New Export/Import ================= An Export/Import... selection is now available on Almanac's File menu. This ivokes a dialog that will allow you to select what data you wish to work with and whether you want to import or export the information. Once a data type and operation are selected, a dialog will be presented to you displaying all of the available data fields associated with your selection. You may choose the fields that you would like to work with and the order you want them to appear in the CSV file that is being imported or exported. Enhanced Day View ================= The calendar day view now displays the current 'focus' that can be moved from the date at the top of the display through the Scheduler and To Do areas of the display. This allows keyboard access to all items when using the day view. Pressing the spacebar will recall the current item for editing. If the focus is set to the current date displayed at the very top of the day view, a new overlay event can be entered by pressing the spacebar. The Almanac section of the day view now includes the local time and azimuth of moonrise and moonset. Enhanced Month View =================== 1. Any event that is displayed on the month view may now be accessed for editing by simply double-clicking on the text of the event. 2. Clicking the right mouse button over a date cell on the month menu will invoke a popup menu that contains the selections Enlarge Cell, Day View, and QuickEdit. When the Enlarge Cell option is selected, the date cell will be expanded to four times its normal area, similar to depressing the action provided by the keyboard SHIFT key. The date cell will remain expanded until the mouse cursor is moved outside its boundary. Enhanced Location Handling ========================== 1. Almanac includes up-to-date information for over 50 world time zones. 2. Pushbuttons for New, Edit, and Delete operations have been added to the Options.Locations... dialog. Customizing your location data base is a snap. All you need to supply is the location name, its latitude and longitude, and select the time zone! New Metafile Generation ======================= A "Print To Metafile" selection now appears on Almanac's File menu. Selecting this option and Almanac can print either a month or year calendar to a Windows meta file on disk or to the clipboard. The output is targeted towards your current printer and page layout settings, allowing presentation quality calendars to be inserted into your word processing or page layout application. New Jewish Calendar Features ============================ 1. A pushbutton on the Oprions.Calendar... dialog labeled Jewish Setup... provides access to a second dialog for configuration to individual tastes and observances. Currently, the names of the months may be edited, and you may select to display the candlelighting times on Friday and Saturday evenings. The times are displayed in the top of the monthly date cells with appropriate candle symbols. 2. A new overlay event type now provides the option to display Rosh Chodesh on the calendar. This type of event only needs to be defined one time for any given calendar. It will cause Rosh Chodesh to be calculated and displayed for every month. 3. The Birthday and Yahrzeit event types have been enhanced to designate if the event took place after sunset, and will cause the original event and all subsequent observances to be displayed on the correct day of the week.