Happy New Years! I’ve been feverishly working the past week on WebnoteHappy. I just uploaded a new beta of WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0b17. I had hoped to have a final candidate release by now, but good food, I mean good apps, take time to prepare. :)

Here’s what’s new:

1. The webnotes are now stored in a database. There’s several reasons for this. One of the big reasons was to work around a rare bug with certain XML sequences. On the positive side, WebnoteHappy is now faster, should use less memory and disk space and is more scalable. So it now handles thousands of webnotes better. I had planned to move to a database later on, so this is just being moved up earlier.

The webnotes are now stored in ~/Library/Application Support/WebnoteHappy/WebnoteHappy.webnotesql. Your old webnotes if you have any currently will still be around in WebnoteHappy.webnotes.

But this brings me to something I feel strongly about: you should be able to have complete control over your information. That was one of the really nice things about the XML storage – you could read it and parse it. An application shouldn’t lock up your data – you should be able to get to out if you want. So that brings us to our next two features:

2. Export to Netscape-compatible bookmark file, which happens to be in an archaic form of HTML but has been around since the beginning of time it seems. Well, at least Internet Time. Ironically, the only documentation on the Netscape Bookmark File Format can be found on an MSDN site, since Netscape DevEdge disappeared. Nevertheless, this is the format that Safari, Camino, Firefox, OmniWeb and just about every other browser on the planet exports and imports in.

Another nice thing is about this is that you can view the exported HTML in your browser.

3. Export to XBEL. This is the XML Bookmark Exchange Language, which outputs nice XML but unfortunately isn’t used by any modern browser that I know of. The primary use will probably be for backing up your webnotes. This is also much easier to parse than the HTML format.

4. Import from XBEL. You can use this to restore your webnotes from an XBEL export. Note that this doesn’t import a webnote if one already exists with the same URL, so you won’t have duplicates.

5. Control-W / Close Window now closes whatever window has the focus, not just the main window. Thanks to Brian for reporting this.

6. WebnoteHappy is ready to be localized. If you’re interested in helping out, please let me know.

7. Longer beta period. I think the previous beta periods were a bit too short. This beta will expire at the end of January 2006.

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Please try out the new import and export features. As always, please report any bugs you find. The feature list should be complete for WebnoteHappy Lite 1.0 now.