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Development History
- (versions 2010 and newer)
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Version 2014.220 - 20. February 2014
- Added support for processing ISO images with UDF version 2.0x and
2.5/2.6 file systems.
- Added ability to extract GPS geo-tagging data from EXIF records,
affecting all plugins and file types with EXIF support.
- Added new description plugin for handling MOBI e-books format.
- Minor adjustments to handling specific types of RAR archives, for
example multi-volume RAR archives with some missing parts.
- Minor updates to the IMDB plugin for the latest set of changes on
IMDB web site.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Older versions
Version 2013.1014 - 14. October 2013
- Worked around some problems caused by the new UnRAR.dll when handling
certain types of RAR archives.
Build 2013.1009
- Minor maintenance release.
- Updated RAR compression format capabilities, added support for handling
RAR files in WinRAR 5 format.
- Added Windows 8.1 product family detection, fine-tuned support for the
new operating system.
- Updated IMDB plugin for the latest set of changes on web site.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2013.320 - 20. March 2013
- Minor maintenance release.
- Adjusted visual appearance of several parts of the user interface (like
fonts and spacing in message boxes) to match modern operating systems.
- If plugins log file is enabled, users now have a choice to change the
default location of log file, and select an alternate folder. It can help
resolve write privilege issues on limited user accounts.
- Fixed exporting descriptions to external files on media.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2012.1204 - 4. December 2012
- Minor maintenance release.
- IMDB plugin: adjusted for new searching system and results presentation on
the IMDB web site.
- Minor adjustments for new Windows 8 operating system.
- Adjusted reading of Unicode filenames from some UDF formatted disks.
- Further improved handling of large (>2GB) damaged/corrupted catalog files,
improved built-in recovery capabilities.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2012.901 - 1. September 2012
- Minor maintenance release.
- Added a new pair of plugins: a description and a thumbnail plugin for EPUB
E-Books format, extracting basic details, contents index, and included cover
image as a thumbnail.
- If program settings are imported from external source to currently active
storage (registry or config file), imported settings are now dynamically
applied and are immediatelly visible in the Options dialog.
- Tray icon is now restored after Explorer crashes and restarts.
- Exporting descriptions: for FTP index format, 00INDEX.TXT is used instead
of INDEX_00.TXT. 00INDEX.TXT appears to be more commonly used presently,
although both versions can be found.
- Advanced searching by size: fixed editing previously entered criteria.
- VideoThumbnailsPlugin: minor internal changes in the config dialog.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2012.522 - 22. May 2012
- Minor maintenance release.
- File Management: improved support for moving/copying folders containing
specific Unicode characters.
- Fine tuned file caching and buffering strategies for saving catalog files,
that had to be rewritten in version 2012.104. Saving performance is now
comparable to older versions on all systems while adding support for
catalog files larger than 2GB.
- The Check for Update Wizard is now more robust and will better handle
server-side problems, like receiving corrupt update information and
web site outages.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2012.326 - 26. March 2012
- Minor maintenance release.
- Extracting ZIP files is now re-entrant, allowing plugins to use ZIP
decompression on files already compressed within other ZIP archive. This
can be useful for importing descriptions for files which are natively
ZIP compressed, such as Office OpenXML documents (DOCX, XLSX...)
- Added Windows 8 product family detection.
- Updated IMDB plugin for changes on web site, user comments are imported
once again.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2012.104 - 4. January 2012
- Added (preliminary) support for operating with catalog files (.ctf) larger
than 2GB. Your file system must be able to handle files of that size, and
any single disk image in catalog must still be under 2GB in data size once
saved.
Note that getting catalog files anywhere near 2GB in size requires some
reflection on your actions and intentions, as you are likely heavly
abusing thumbnails, or otherwise getting way too much data in a single
catalog file. Organizing cataloged data and breaking it down into more
catalogs would be strongly recommended.
- Improved performance when moving around large chunks of data, like copying
huge disk images between catalogs.
- Improved catalog saving performance due to optimized write caching.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2011.1216 - 16. December 2011
- Minor maintenance release.
- Updated IMDB and TheTVDB plugins, added support for additional encodings
and handling a few item or language specific issues.
- Maintenance on several description plugins, improving on stability and
Unicode support.
- Adjustments of compare functions, fine tuning of detection if file has
changed since cataloging or not. Details like different time zones are
now taken into account.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2011.902 - 2. September 2011
- Optimized speed in thumbnails importing and processing for several types
of graphics files. Direct assembly code is used in some critical areas.
- Fine-tuned the order of importing files and folders when scanning the
media. On some newer non-removable media and related hardware, this can
result in performance increase due to more efficient data caching.
- Improved searching performance on multi-core CPUs.
- Updated IMDB plugin for the latest changes on their web site, most notably
importing rating information. By now, the same information from IMDB can
come to the plugin in several different forms, depending on whether or not
you are logged-in on IMDB site, if so what your selected preferences are,
and which web browser are you using for retrieval, for example. The plugin
at this time handles all cases.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2011.622 - 22. June 2011
- Minor maintenance release.
- Considerably improved scanning performance in some special cases, like
having thousands of archive files in the same folder.
- Updated IMDB plugin to support new techniques recently used on the IMDB
web site, for example AJAX loading of details like user comments.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2011.403 - 3. April 2011
- Minor maintenance release.
- Improved performance of the internal viewer, loading and processing of
certain types of files is now faster and more robust.
- Improvements to IMDB and TheTVDB plugins, handling additional details.
- Fixed scanning certain ISO files with Juliet file system, some rare long
filenames were not imported correctly.
- A few Unicode related fixes, mostly cosmetical.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2011.201 - 1. February 2011
- Minor maintenance release.
- Optimized the pattern of media access operations, resulting in up to 15%
faster media scanning on some specific, slower media types.
- Added support for two additional different variants of TIFF files to
the appropriate thumbnails plugin.
- Improvements and several adjustments to both IMDB the TheTVDB plugins,
improving title detection and accuracy of search results.
- Improved internal diagnostic of host system related problems, such as
missing or non-functioning system components, resulting in friendlier
and clearer error messages from the program rather than failures or
generic errors being reported by the system.
- The setup program will now specifically check if WhereIsIt is running
before attempting installation, and warn the user.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Several other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2010.1208 - 8. December 2010
- Minor maintenance release.
- Search engine has been improved with added negation in quick searches. You
can specify words and phrases you want to exclude from results by prefixing
them with a minus sign, i.e. "photo -digital". This also works when
searching by file names or descriptions in advanced search expressions.
- Quick searching now has two operation modes when searching by both file
names and descriptions. Previously, each file name and description have
been evaluated independently, and at least one had to match. Now you can
optionally have file name and description combined to a single text string
before evaluating. This returns a bit different kind of results, i.e.
if you are looking for two words, one can be present in file name, and the
other in description. Adjust the setting to your preference.
- Fixed selecting a large number of items on a list (tens of thousands), for
example when pressing Ctrl+A. The selection took unnecessarily long time to
complete in most cases.
- The setup program has been improved, it can now also install your license
file at the time of installing the program. There is a checkbox available
for registered users that will make the setup program prompt for your
license and place it for you.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Several other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2010.1026 - 10. October 2010
- Minor maintenance release.
- Updated IMDB plugin for large scale changes on the IMDB web site, featuring
a completely new web site design. Plugin currently supports both old and new
IMDB design. Languages other than English are not tested at this time since
the new design is not yet available for other languages.
- The Descript.ion plugin now supports assigning descriptions to files with
Unicode file names.
- Added new options in program's Display Settings for switching between ribbon
and toolbar mode, and minimizing the ribbon. Those same options were already
available directly by right-clicking ribbon or toolbar, however some users
have problems finding them.
- Fixed a problem in Catalog Setup dialog when using "Copy From" function to
copy categories from some other catalog.
- Eliminated desktop flickering on autoloading password protected catalogs.
- Several other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Build 2010.909
- Minor maintenance release.
- Updated TheTVDB plugin; added a workaround for an apparent bug in the XML
data structure returned by TheTVDB.com, preventing retrieval of details
about individual episodes.
- Updated CDDB/freedb support for submitting entries containing UTF-8 data.
- Added a check for GDI+ availability on the system. If GDI+ is not available,
it will show an appropriate error message instead of crashing on startup.
Microsoft GDI+ Library is required for WhereIsIt to run, and is included by
default on all but oldest Windows versions.
- Minor search performance improvements when using specific search criteria.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Several other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2010.714 - 14. July 2010
- Improved scanning error tolerance in safe mode, the program can now handle
and recover from several additional error conditions (typically crashed
plugins) that would previously cause scanning to fail.
- Updated IMDB plugin for correctly handling some special cases of encoding.
- Updated CorelDRAW Thumbnails and AutoCAD Thumbnails plugins for supporting
Unicode file names.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Fixed Compare results window occasionally throwing an error when changing
view mode under certain conditions.
Build 2010.621
- TheTVDB plugin: Fine-tuned series information caching and recognition.
- On some systems, setting toolbar UI mode was not correctly remembered for
the next time the program was run. Fixed.
Build 2010.614
- Minor maintenance release.
- Updated TV Series Database (TheTVDB) plugin to support handling
special episodes.
- Added recently used catalogs list to the toolbar's Open button.
- Ribbon is enforced as the default user interface in new installations.
Help file has been updated to emphasize the availability of both ribbon
and toolbar user interface modes, and how to switch between them.
- Improved multithreading in the internal viewer, graphics processing is
now more reliable and slightly faster.
- Recently used catalogs list has had some problems if the program was set
to store settings in a config file. Fixed.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Several other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2010.502 - 2. May 2010
- Minor maintenance release.
- Added support to switch between ribbon and toolbar mode in the main
window, for die-hard toolbar fans. Note that toolbar offers only a basic
set of commands, corresponding to the ribbon's Main tab. This sufficies
for daily use, the rest of the commands are available via shortcuts,
item's right-click popup menus, or by switching back to the default
ribbon view.
- Addressed several visual and cosmetical issues, such as painting drop-down
menus from toolbar buttons, behavior of the view mode drop-down window, etc.
- Windows like Search Results and User List now correctly size to available
monitor work area when maximized, avoiding taskbar.
- Enhanced several thumbnail and description plugins for robustness in
handling invalid files, improved performance and therefore disk scanning
time for several thumbnail plugins.
- Some code optimizations, resulting in smaller executable file and improved
performance in certain parts of the program.
- Several other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2010.319 - 19. March 2010
- Significantly improved built-in scanning troubleshooting capabilities.
- Introduced optional scanning safe mode. In safe mode, all plugins are
run in their own separate threads, separating them from the scanning
process and allowing it to retain a level of control over executing
plugins. In safe mode, stuck plugins can be terminated by user action,
or automatically if they execute longer than predefined allowed time.
Plugins causing problems can be turned off for the remainder of scanning.
Long archive file operations can be canceled as well, allowing scanning
to continue immediately.
- Added detailed scanning status information, available on request at any
given moment. This status information reports current task in progress,
as well as all available related information, including running plugin,
file being processed by the plugin, current folder being cataloged etc.
Plugins activity logging is still available, however it should now rarely
be necessary to use.
- Improved help file documentation for media scanning troubleshooting.
- The Windows Shell Thumbnails plugin has been heavily optimized. Asking
Windows shell about available thumbnails for every file being cataloged
is quite expensive in terms of performance. The plugins now "learns" as
it goes on each scan which types of files have available thumbnails in
Windows shell, and which have failed to produce consistently, skipping
them for the rest of scan. Performance improvement is very notable.
- The internal viewer now features a simple slideshow support.
- ISO files handling is now more robust, especially the UDF format
detection. Some non-UDF ISO files have turned out to be problematic in
previous versions.
- The popup menu in Report Generator / Printer Setup / Settings button was
not displayed correctly. Fixed.
- The sort button in Catalog Setup has had no effect on listed items. Fixed.
- Help file now switches to the default English language help file, if help
file specified in active language file is not available. The program now
also warns if unable to show help due to missing HTML Help support on the
system (old Windows systems).
- Tweaked a bit Compare functions, filename compares are case insensitive
once again, and files that have only changed in using capital case in
their filenames are tolerated as unchanged.
- IMDB plugin: adjusted for small changes on IMDB web site, preventing some
titles from detecting and downloading full size thumbnails.
Version 2010.218 - 18. February 2010
- Minor, mostly maintenance release.
- Introduced new thumbnails plugin: Windows Shell Thumbnails. This plugin
takes advantage of available Windows shell interfaces, which can be
extended with third-party thumbnail providers for additional file types.
The plugin offers WhereIsIt the same kind of access to generating
thumbnails as Explorer has, and is able to use already cached thumbnails
(Thumbs.db files) for better performance.
- Plugins debugging mode has been updated a bit, it now falls back to a
secondary location for creating a log file if program's folder is not
writeable to current user, and now always reports the exact location of
the log file at startup.
- Improved robustness of the JPEG description plugin when dealing with
certain type of invalid/corrupted JPG files.
- Configuration dialogs for several different plugins have been updated to
work around a problem with edit control when running on 64-bit versions
of Windows.
- Several other miscellaneous minor adjustments and improvements.
Version 2010.120 - 20. January 2010
- IMDB plugin: added support for importing information from international
IMDB sites in different languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian,
Portuguese).
- Added new command-line option, autoindex. Browsing catalogs in categories
view mode is not native mode, and requires data to be indexed when using
it for the first time. Autoindex option allows for this indexing to be
done automatically in the background when the program is idle, starting
immediately when catalog loads. This will shorten or eliminate the need
to wait when switching to categories view. This capability is currently
in test mode and may no longer require the switch to activate in the
future.
- Most progress windows are now equipped with icons, indicating operation
in progress.
- Plugins importing thumbnails for parent items (i.e. Folder Thumbnails
plugin) can now take in account order of listed file masks. If more than
one file is available for importing thumbnail, the one matching first
listed file mask is given priority.
- Further tweaked search thread synchronization, slightly improved search
performance.
Version 2010.104 - 4. January 2010
- Minor cumulative service release, focusing on fixing odd errors and
addressing annoyances.
- Added Locate in Catalog ribbon item and menu option when browsing catalog
by categories.
- Search by Tags option was missing from the advanced search editor menu,
and is now once again available.
- Addressed a problem on some systems where editing descriptions in the
Description Window and switching items in a very specific way would result
in one of items ending up with other's description.
- Fixed Del key interfering as a shortcut for a ribbon item when editing
text in the main window, such as editing descriptions or renaming items.
- Fixed an error being reported if creating a new catalog while no other
catalog is loaded at the time, or has been loaded before.
- Fixed an error occurring when closing a catalog in a specific way.
- Updated DcrawPlugin to the latest version of dcraw.c.
- A few other minor improvements, for example snappable listview columns
when resizing on Windows Vista and Seven.
Version 2009.1210 - 10. December 2009
- Windows 7: All major operations like disk scanning, searching and catalog
saving now show progress in application's button in the taskbar.
- All multiline descriptions were missing the last character when shown in
shortened form in all Description columns. Fixed.
- Fixed a thread synchronization issue with searching, causing rarely
occuring random catalog structure errors when actively browsing catalog
data or search results while search was still running in the background.
Build 2009.1204
- Help file has been updated for version 2009, covering new user interface.
- WhereIsIt has a new program icon.
- Hints on menus and ribbon/toolbar buttons are no longer shown if they do
not have available any additional information than already shown.
- The Export Audio CD Details button on the ribbon now has a submenu,
offering the same kind of options as in previous versions.
- Updated IMDB plugin for changed movie web pages, updated DcrawPlugin to
the latest version of dcraw.c.
- Web site has been updated for version 2009. Product information page has
new screenshots showing new user interface on Windows 7, download section
has been tidied a bit and downloads for older versions, including 3.xx,
moved to a separate Legacy Downloads page.
- Several miscellaneous fixes, adjustments and minor improvements reported or
suggested during the last beta stage.
Version 2009.1110 (Beta 1) - 10. November 2009
- The immediate and most notable impact of the new version 2009 is the new
ribbon based user interface. The program did away with the main menu and
main toolbar with small icons, both were replaced with a ribbon bar
featuring large, high quality icons, and a round application menu button
in the top left corner as the program command center.
- WhereIsIt now supports large, 32x32 high-quality semi-transparent icons
in all parts of user interface, particularly on ribbons and toolbars.
Over 250 new icons were designed or updated for this version.
- With the new interface, commands were reorganized for easier access in
both main ribbon and right-click context popup menus. All catalog-related
commands like creating, opening, saving and closing catalogs, as well as
basic application command were moved in the application menu, some are
also available in the small quick access toolbar in the window title.
The rest of the commands are available in the ribbon, distributed in
several logical groups accessible as ribbon tabs.
- The "Home" tab on the new ribbon bar is by default context sensitive,
available options change and adapt to currently selected item. This way,
ribbon shows only options relevant for current selection, making it fast
and easy to find the command for your task. On the other hand, changing
available commands also means some level of buttons jumping around on the
ribbon - as this can be distracting, context sensitivity is optional and
can be turned off in program's settings.
- The main ribbon bar can be put in a minimized mode, showing only a list
of available tabs and acting as a pull down window. This leaves as much
window space as possible for both main windows to work with, even more
than in previous versions with a small toolbar. Just right-click main
ribbon to select minimized mode.
- The new ribbon interface together with new status bars comes in three
basic predefined color schemes (default silver, blue and black), selectable
in program's settings.
- All remaining toolbars have a completely new implementation, they support
different appearances based on environment the program is running in, and
can be switched between small and large icon modes. Just right-click the
toolbar to make the switch.
- All popup menus support semi-transparent icons and feature a new, modern
glassy appearance that goes along with ribbon style user interface. Like
ribbon and toolbar options, all popup menu options provide popup hint
window with larger icon and quick access to each option's help page.
- Changed user interface required lots of changes to language files. Still,
existing language files are automatically converted to new format, and
as many existing translations as possible are preserved and reused on
new controls. Only minimal editing is required for language files to be
adapted for version 2009, mostly due to some new additions.
- Language files have been optimized and are considerably smaller than
before, removing lots of redundancy.
- Available options in the internal viewer can be presented either on a
ribbon bar, or on a toolbar. Just right-click ribbon/toolbar to make the
switch. Toolbar takes somewhat less space on the screen than ribbon, and
may be preferred especially for graphics viewing.
- Added new advanced search criteria: searching by item type (disks, files,
folders, disk groups, archive files, compressed files etc.) You can now
combine this criteria in your search expressions at will.
- Maximizing the search results list over the entire window area is possible
once again, using a dedicated button for the purpose on the search window
toolbar.
- Added new command line parameter, "-lang". The following parameter
specifies language file, allowing starting the program in any predefined
language. This new parameter replaces old "-English" and "-Deutsch".
- Added new command line parameter, "-newinstance". Allows running multiple
instances of the program. Note that running multiple instances is NOT
recommended for stability reasons, in certain cases can cause conflicts
between running instances, and comes with certain limitations. If you
know and understand what you are doing, it can be a time saver.
- Most popup, drop-down, and status windows are now dropping shadow, making
them easier to distinguish from the background and work with in general.
- Added new privacy options in program settings. On program exit, you can
have the program clean up all search history and several other edit boxes
with capability to remember last entered text, as well as the list of last
used catalog files.
- The description window typically docked at the right-bottom of the
program's main window now snaps down to get it temporarily out of the way
without actually closing it. Just drag the sizing bar down until it snaps
close, and use the bar again to open it back up. Of course, you can still
show and hide this window with a dedicated button on the ribbon bar.
- Removed the advanced search expression Validate button. Validation is now
automatic in real time, and the result is always available in the status
bar. You can click there for more details if search expression is found
not valid.
- Report Generator dialog layout has been redesigned a bit.
- The term "Flag" used in previous versions has been changed to "Tag". Tags
better represent the use and purpose of this feature.
- IMDB and TheTVDB plugins have been updated, both featuring better file name
filtering and title/episode detection, and offer additional features such
as assigning alias names to imported titles.
- New versioning system. As the program forked into two separate versions and
version 4.00 has been released back in 2003 for custom development clients
(now up to version 11), public shareware version needed a new designation.
Starting with this version, all released versions will be marked with
current year and build number, representing the date of release.
- Dropped support for ancient Windows 95. The new user interface uses GDI+,
only available on Windows 98 and newer.
- Addressed several miscellaneous issues occurring in previous versions.
- Known issues, to-do list: Some additional visual fine tuning like flicker
removal, adjusting help file documentation to the ribbon user interface.
Versions older than 2009