Sunrise XP Change Log
To check the version number select "Help -> About" from the main menu.
Current Release
Previous Releases
Current Release
Version 2.04 (2008-01-20)
- Note: Compatibility fix for the Windows Vista version of HotSync Manager.
- Changed: Conduit should now be compatible with HotSync Manager for Windows Vista. Functionality has not been thoroughly tested, however.
Known Issues
Known issues and limitations as of the current release:
- Non-Western language encodings are not supported.
- On some Windows configurations and/or Palm OS models, the HotSync conduit will not transfer documents to the memory card correctly. In this case, uninstall the application and reinstall it without the conduit. (The standard Install To Card conduit will then be used instead.)
- The "Show in application launcher" and "Backup during HotSync" settings only work in combination with the Sunrise XP HotSync conduit.
- In rare cases, the HTML parser cannot parse a web page. Unparseable HTML will end up as an empty page in the Plucker document.
- Plucker document creation requires a large number of temporary files to store downloaded data. For large documents, this can easily number in the thousands.
- Parsing large web pages (hundreds of KB in size) may require a significant amount of memory.
- Atom feeds must be well-formed XML or otherwise they are rejected. This is by design. (RSS parsing is more lenient and allows for ill-formed feeds.)
- Animated GIF images with a transparent background may show the background mask colour.
- Converting to 8bpp images is much slower than to other color depths due to the relative complexity of palette matching and dithering involved.
- It's not possible to have multiple instances of Sunrise run concurrent updates at a time.
- When opening multiple SXLs at a time via Windows Explorer, one of the Sunrise XP windows might have the wrong size and positioning.
- The uninstaller may not be able to delete the Sunrise XP installation directory if HotSync Manager holds a lock on the directory. In this case you have to close HotSync Manager and delete the Sunrise XP directory manually.
- The uninstaller does not remove the configuration file for the HotSync conduit. This file has to be deleted manually.
Previous Releases
Version 2.03 (2006-12-17)
- Note: This will be the final release. This product has reached the end of its lifespan and will no longer be updated.
- Changed: Maximum number of simultaneous updates is now 99. See "Tools ->Preferences". (Was previously limited to 5 updates.)
Version 2.02 (2006-11-26)
- Fixed: Bug in HTML parsing of malformed tag attributes. This would cause a crash.
Version 2.01a (2006-10-28)
- Changed: Links to sunrisexp.com changed to sunrise.mobileread.com. Sunrise XP is now hosted there.
Version 2.01 (2006-10-26)
- Fixed: Attempting to clip web pages with double quotes in the title from within Internet Explorer would result in an error.
Version 2.0 (2006-09-02)
- Changed: Moved out of beta phase. No software is bug-free and this is no exception, but the bug reports have dried up over the past few months and the application should be stable enough for regular use.
Version 2.0 beta 9k (2006-08-29)
- Removed: Limit of 10 running Sunrise XP instances.
Version 2.0 beta 9j (2006-07-04)
- Fixed: Existing copies of documents with a HotSync destination would not be replaced during an update. (The new document would be left in the HotSync directory as a temporary file.)
- Fixed: Workaround for Last Update column not being refreshed after an update.
- Fixed: Imported OPML feeds now use the default category.
Version 2.0 beta 9i (2006-06-02)
- Fixed: The application now detects whether the internet connection is offline and displays a proper error message if it is.
- Fixed: The HotSync conduit would sometimes attempt to transfer large PDBs prematurely, resulting in a string of warning messages in the HotSync log.
- New: The Update progress dialog can now be minimized.
Version 2.0 beta 9h (2006-05-05)
- Fixed: Last update time was not saved if the update dialog was dismissed using the "Cancel All" button.
Version 2.0 beta 9g (2006-05-03)
- Fixed: Feed item dates prior to January 1, 1970 are now ignored. Previously, these would result in an error.
Version 2.0 beta 9f (2006-04-26)
- Fixed: Processing empty files or HTTP responses would result in a crash.
- Fixed: 307 Temporary Redirect HTTP responses are now handled correctly.
Version 2.0 beta 9e (2006-04-19)
- Changed: Replaced Help documentation with pages in the MobileRead Wiki. Help menu items now point to the Wiki.
Version 2.0 beta 9d (2006-04-17)
- New: Added "Make Donation" item in the Help menu. Please consider making a donation if Sunrise XP is useful to you. Thanks!
- Changed: Clarified the document destination setting for the web browser extension.
Version 2.0 beta 9c (2006-04-14)
- Fixed: Threading issue in the update logic. Potential fix for the issue that causes updates to hang at "Updating (99%)".
Version 2.0 beta 9b (2006-04-13)
- Changed: Removed dependency on the HotSync Conduit for transferring documents to the handheld. Without the Sunrise XP conduit installed, the standard Install and Install To Card conduits will be used instead.
- Fixed: HotSync conduit no longer logs debug messages.
Version 2.0 beta 9a (2006-04-12)
- New: Web browser extensions now let you clip only the selected part of a page.
Version 2.0 beta 9 (2006-04-11)
- New: Web browser extensions for clipping pages while browsing. Versions for both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (v1.5 or later).
Version 2.0 beta 8 (2006-04-09)
- Fixed: Selecting documents using the keyboard would not properly enable/disable commands.
- Fixed: "Clear list automatically" setting is now saved when running an update through the update shortcut.
- Fixed: Image links are now correctly resolved in case the destination link is not actually an image. These would show up as "[img error: bad image type]" messages in Plucker.
- Changed: Documents are now always created using a temporary file on the hard disk in the Windows temporary directory. Previously, this temporary file was written directly to the destination directory, which could end up being very slow when writing to a USB memory card reader.
Version 2.0 beta 7 (2006-03-10)
- Fixed: HotSync Conduit now uses single-threaded code model.
- Changed: Reduced ZLIB compression factor. This results in faster image conversion and document generation at the expense of slightly larger Plucker documents.
- Changed: Minor performance improvements in HTML and image conversion.
Version 2.0 beta 6 (2006-03-05)
- New: Skip Schedule command. Convenience function for skipping the next scheduled update.
- New: Status bar now shows the size of the selected documents.
- Fixed: Document names of feeds imported from OPML files were not properly truncated, resulting in a crash when updating the documents.
Version 2.0 beta 5 (2006-03-01)
- New: Feed items are now excluded entirely if their link matches an exclusion filter.
- Fixed: Editing SXLs opened through read-only files no longer crashes the application.
- Changed: Grayscale and 8bpp images are now dithered using a "serpentine" scan. (Alternating left-right/right-left for even/odd rows.) Common graphics processing wisdom states that this produces better-looking results. (In practice, you might not actually see much difference on a small PDA screen.)
Version 2.0 beta 4 (2006-02-26)
- New: Paste Special command. This command makes exchanging SXL settings easier. This is used in the Showcase.
- New: Showcase SXL with predefined settings for feeds from BBC News, New York Times and several other sites. (Note: the showcase is a separate download.)
- Fixed: Source browse dialog would not show up if an http:// URL was filled in.
Version 2.0 beta 3 (2006-02-22)
- New: Incomplete first draft of the Help documentation. (Will be revised and expanded later.)
- New: Option to limit the number of saved feed items automatically.
- New: Menu commands to open the HotSync conduit and application settings directories.
- Changed: Revised the Preferences dialog.
- Changed: Changed "Restrict to host" label to "Restrict to server".
- Changed: Rewrote some of the HotSync Conduit code for transferring documents to memory cards.
- Changed: Update report stylesheet now truncates long URLs to avoid having to scroll the page horizontally.
Version 2.0 beta 2 (2006-02-15)
- New: The uninstaller now offers options to delete saved newsfeeds, update reports and application preferences.
- New: Distribution is now significantly smaller (shrunk from 930Kb to 820Kb) due to better compression.
- Fixed: Update reports and newsfeeds are now saved in the local, non-roaming Application Data directory. (Previously, they were erroneously saved in the roaming Application Data directory.)
- Fixed: Updated links and fixed the formatting in the readme.
Version 2.0 beta 1 (2006-02-14)
- New: Convert Sunrise SDLs to Sunrise XP SXLs.
- New: Import/export document settings to/from OPML files.
- Fixed: Local files whose type cannot be determined through the filename's extension are now treated as plain text.
- Fixed: SXL file open dialog no longer allows nonexisting files to be opened. (Would cause a crash.)
- Fixed: After closing the Choose Details dialog, the columns in the main window would revert to their previous widths.
Version 2.0 alpha 5b (2006-02-12)
- New: It's now possible to create new documents by dragging and dropping HTML files on the main window.
- Fixed: Filename extensions used for determining a file's type are now compared case-insensitively. (This only applies to local files.)
- Fixed: ANN library was mistakenly linked statically into the Sunrise XP executable. It is now linked as an external library and as such complies with the LGPL under which this library is licensed.
Version 2.0 alpha 5a (2006-02-09)
- Fixed: Threading issue that could result in a crash when cancelling an update.
Version 2.0 alpha 5 (2006-02-07)
This release rearranges the some parts of the user interface and makes several important changes.
- New: Support for including full-size, alternate images.
- Fixed: Long-standing issue with the conversion to 2bpp and 4bpp images. Due to this, images would end up being too bright and dark patches would disappear.
- Fixed: Document names are now limited to 26 characters, per the Plucker document specification. (Previously, 31 characters were allowed.)
- Changed: Rearranged the Document Properties tabs and its secondary dialogs.
- Removed: Ability to specify multiple sources. You can now specify only one source.
Version 2.0 alpha 4a (2006-02-05)
- Fixed: Enabling "Update only if sources have changed" would produce an error if the source was not updated.
Version 2.0 alpha 4 (2006-02-03)
The major change in this release is the removal of non-Western language encoding support. This functionality will be reimplemented in a future, post-v2.0 release.
- New: Option to output only new feed items.
- New: Ability to specify link rewriting filters in the interface. See "Links" tab on the Document Properties dialog.
- Fixed: Crash when opening the HotSync Conduit configuration dialog.
- Fixed: Text links containing line breaks now use the correct link colour. (Regression bug, due to change in alpha 3b.)
- Fixed: RSS feeds with CDATA sections containing raw HTML are now parsed correctly.
- Fixed: Publication dates in Atom 0.3 feeds were not handled correctly.
- Fixed: Date stamp was not used for the PDB filename.
- Changed: Update report stylesheet is now stored in the installation directory.
- Changed: Update reports now have a dedicated ".sxr" file extension.
- Removed: Support for non-Western language encodings, due to problems with the character transcoding library.
- Removed: Link rewriting scripts. (Replaced by ability to specify link filters in the interface.)
Version 2.0 alpha 3c (2006-01-27)
- Fixed: Regression bug introduced in alpha 3b. Rescaling images with a 1-pixel width or height would crash the application.
- Fixed: Character encoding in HTML <meta> tag was not properly detected in some cases.
- Fixed: Errors during transcoding to non-Western language encodings would hang the application.
Version 2.0 alpha 3b (2006-01-26)
- Fixed: Resolved threading issue that occurred when cancelling multiple pending updates. This could cause Sunrise XP to hang.
- Fixed: Crash when shrinking images to thumbnails with particular dimensions.
- Changed: HTML line breaks now cause new paragraphs to be created in the Plucker document. This greatly improves Plucker rendering speed, albeit at the cost of making the document marginally larger. (The document looks the same visually, but structurally it's different.)
- Changed: Multiple HTML line breaks are no longer collapsed to a single line break.
- Changed: HTML anchor points no longer cause paragraphs to be broken in the middle.
Version 2.0 alpha 3a (2006-01-25)
- Fixed: Transferring documents to memory cards now works with HotSync Manager v4. (This would only work with HotSync v6.)
- Fixed: Non-ASCII characters in the HotSync user directory are now correctly encoded.
- Fixed: HotSync conduit would not properly match slots and VFS volumes for devices with multiple card slots if one of the cards was not present.
- Changed: HotSync conduit now makes a distinction between memory cards not being present and volumes being read-only.
- Changed: Saved newsfeeds are now loaded into memory only during an actual document update. (Previously, saved newsfeeds were held in memory during the entire update process.)
- Removed: "Generate update report" setting. Update reports are now always generated.
Version 2.0 alpha 3 (2006-01-22)
The highlights of this release are support for non-Western language encodings and automatic updates.
- New: Support for non-Western language encodings. (Select the language in the Document Properties dialog.)
- New: Automatic updating of scheduled documents, including integration with Windows Task Scheduler for updating documents when Sunrise XP is not running.
- New: Atom feed support. (Both Atom 1.0 and Atom 0.3.)
- New: Update context menu command in Windows Explorer. (Right-click on an SXL file in Explorer and select "Update".)
- New: Script stylesheet for testing link patterns in the web browser.
- New: Pseudo-anchor support for jumping to sections in a document based on the HTML "class" attribute. Useful in combination with link rewriting.
- Fixed: Images with a 1-pixel width or height could cause a crash when they were rescaled to a smaller thumbnail.
- Fixed: Inline HTML content in RSS feeds was not handled correctly.
- Fixed: HTML <cite> was erroneously treated as a block-level element.
- Fixed: Character encoding specified in the XML declaration was not detected correctly in some instances.
- Fixed: Character encoding specified in the <meta> HTML tag was not detected correctly in some instances.
- Fixed: RSS feeds were not detected correctly in some instances.
- Fixed: Multiple line breaks would be collapsed to a single line break if the containing paragraph consisted only of unformatted text.
- Fixed: Standalone update window would not show up properly on the Windows task bar.
- Changed: "Enable link rewriting" setting to "Enable scripts".
- Changed: Minor tweaks in the user interface.
- Removed: Aggregation identify setting.
Version 2.0 alpha 2b (2006-01-15)
- Fixed: Several issues in HTML parsing that would either cause a crash during the document generation or would cause links to point to the wrong pages/images.
- Fixed: Linebreaks for paragraphs containing only images are no longer collapsed.
- Fixed: Ampersand entity references (&) in URLs are now correctly decoded.
- New: Ability to start a new Sunrise instance by holding down the Control key when creating or opening an SXL. (For example, hold down Control and click the New SXL icon on the toolbar.)
- Changed: Navigation links for feeds with "multiple pages" layout.
- Changed: HotSync Conduit configuration dialog layout, to better emphasize that the destination selection is for viewing files only.
Version 2.0 alpha 2a (2006-01-11)
- Fixed: HotSync Conduit would produce the error "could not find HotSync user" for usernames containing spaces.
Version 2.0 alpha 2 (2006-01-10)
This release adds several key features - most notably RSS feed support - and fixes many issues.
- New: RSS feed support.
- New: Feed formatting options.
- New: Ability to save feed items to a file.
- New: Link rewriting scripts.
- New: Monthly schedule.
- New: Attach date stamp to document name.
- New: Plain text conversion.
- New: GZIP decompression of HTTP responses.
- New: HTTP User-Agent preference.
- New: "Update only if sources have changed" setting now implemented. (Did not actually work in the previous release.)
- New: Command-line option for updating documents automatically. (Select "Update -> Shortcut" to create a shortcut.)
- Fixed: Fixed several threading issues in the spidering engine. Cancelling an update could, for instance, result in a crash.
- Fixed: Multiple HTML <br> line breaks are now folded into a single line break.
- Fixed: Parsing invalid HTML would sometimes yield a "Mismatched setting" error.
- Fixed: Invalid HTML with empty paragraphs would cause paragraph breaks to be ignored.
- Fixed: Formatting (alignment, font, colour) are now correctly reset for table cells.
- Fixed: Invalid images are no longer linked to. (These would show up as "[img error: bad image type]" in Plucker.)
- Fixed: PNG/JPEG/GIF image types are now detected by looking for their signature "magic bytes".
- Fixed: "Restrict to domain/host/directory" setting did not work correctly and using it could result in a crash.
- Fixed: Added missing character encoding mapping for Japanese. (shift_jis)
- Fixed: HotSync conduit now aborts properly when the connection to the handheld is lost.
- Fixed: "Store downloads in cache" setting was not saved.
- Fixed: Drop-down lists were not displayed under the Windows "classic" interface.
- Fixed: Numerous minor bugfixes and tweaks in the user interface.
- Changed: Documents are now considered to be due if they 1) are scheduled and due 2) have no schedule at all. This change in semantics makes updates clearer for the user.
- Changed: Rearranged the Document Properties dialog.
- Changed: Reimplemented Cut/Copy/Paste operations. Cut operations are no longer immediate, but "delayed", as when using Cut and Paste to move files in Windows Explorer.
- Changed: Palette matching of 8bpp images now uses a faster algorithm.
- Removed: Update report output directory preference. Update reports are now always saved in the "Application Data\Sunrise XP\Reports" directory. (The actual location of which is configuration-dependent.)
- Removed: HTTP headers setting.
- Removed: Option to disable individual schedules.
Version 2.0 alpha 1a (2005-12-15)
- Fixed: Bug in the generation of URL info data for large documents. (More than 200 records.)
Version 2.0 alpha 1 (2005-12-14)
Initial release