What's New with Wilbur
(1.64 and before)


What's New in Version 1.64

Wilbur now prescreens the results of a near search so only those files that actually meet the near criteria are presented in the file list. In previous versions all files that contained both words of a near search were put in the file list, but the contents pane would only display matches where the words were actually near. This modification removes the confusion that this could cause, but it can take quite a bit longer to do the actual screening. Clicking in either Wilbur result pane will halt the screening process and leave all unscreened files in the list in a manner similar to the previous behavior.

Fixed a problem which had crept in and caused files in zip files that were in turn inside zip files to be missed if a specific extension was requested. Also fixed a problem with zip files when driveless include specifications were used and the current directory was not the root directory.

Minor modification to allow single words in MSWord tables to be indexed.

Added automation support for containsHit function to permit automation clients to make use of near search prescreening.

Improvements were made to the status line during indexing. The stop button should also be more responsive allowing indexing to be stopped within a few seconds.

What's New in Version 1.63

Minor modifications to facilitate the use of Wilbur on CD-ROM distributions. Click here for details of using Wilbur on a CD-ROM.

Improved error messages displayed when a file cannot be opened for content viewing.

A single quote character turns out to be a legitimate file name character. Wilbur will now allow these in include and exclude paths, but it can no longer be used for quoting in those paths. (double quote can still be used for quoting)

A GetRank method was added the the OLE Automation SearchResults object.

What's New in Version 1.62

Many accented characters were not being interpreted correctly in the new HTML parsing routine. This has been corrected.

Quoted strings in searches are now treated as if all the words in the string were separated by the <1 near operator. Thus "lazy brown dog" is now equivalent to lazy <1 brown <1 dog

RTF (Rich Text Format) files are now recognized and indexed correctly. Most formatting information is also stripped out in the viewer.

Improvements in status lines, particularly with Zip files.

Changes were made to the redistribution policy. Unregistered versions of Wilbur can now be used beyond the 30 day evaluation period as long as they are only being used to view indexes stored by licensed copies. In this case no reminder screens are displayed. Licensed copies are of course still required to create or modify indexes. This change was aimed at folks who wish to distribute indexed material on media like CD-ROMs.

What's New in Version 1.61

In removing the time limit in version 1.6, we also removed any way of registering Wilbur before the reminder screen appeared after 30 days of use. There is now a Help/Register command.

A minor change was made which gets around the annoying habit of not being able to view a file which QuickView or Word has held open.

What's New in Version 1.6

The focus of the changes in version 1.6 were in improving the indexing and searching engines.

  • The disk scanning routine was modified significantly and now no directory is ever scanned more than once, regardless of how many include statements you might have. Since most people will have several include paths, the time savings can be substantial. Note that existing indexes will have to be rebuilt before they can be used.
  • A significant change was made to the compression portion of the indexing. This reduced the virtual memory footprint at this point and in some cases leads to dramatic improvements in speed. The combination of this and the disk scanning modification reduced the time on our main test index by over a factor of two. Updates in particular were much faster.
  • Previous versions did not recover the space used for the update after a full build was done, until the next update. The build now empties the update file.
  • The indexer is now more aggressive about skipping words which appear to be just random characters in the middle of binary data. In some indexes this might significantly reduce indexed word counts.
  • Wilbur is now somewhat smarter about displaying HTML files. Files with HTM or HTML extensions will, by default, strip all HTML tags out of the viewed contents. Some basic formatting is also done and special characters are replaced. A command has been added to the View menu to allow the raw HTML to still be viewed.
  • Parenthesis have finally been added to the search strings. You can now enter search strings such as (red | green) & (blue | pink). Parenthesis can even be nested if appropriate. A bug was also fixed where a search string such as blue | red & green would effectively skip the | red part. It is hard to believe, but this bug has been here a long time.
  • A bidirectional near search has been added. Now "tom : jerry" is the same as "(tom < jerry) | (jerry < tom)" For completeness an "after" operator has also been added, so "tom > jerry" is equivalent to "jerry < tom". Note that like the original near search, these operators only affect the highlighting of words in the contents pane. All are treated as AND operators for the purpose of adding files to the file list.
  • You can now prefix a '+' sign to a word in the search dialog and this word will be used in determining which files are listed, but the word will not be searched for or highlighted in the contents view. For instance the search string "Walt +Disney" would only find files containing both Walt and Disney, but only Walt would be highlighted in the contents pane. If outline mode was on, only lines containing Walt would be shown.
  • Another silly bug fixed was one that prevented Wilbur from ever finding the first word indexed.
  • The time limits on evaluation copies have been eliminated. Now a reminder dialog appears at start up after 30 days of use, but otherwise the program is completely functional.
  • Beeps were added for the phrase not found condition in most circumstances.
  • The default include phrase for html files has been changed from htm? to htm* since the former would miss htm files.

What's New in Version 1.53

  • The major changes in this update have to do with zip files. The most noticeable one is that Wilbur now removes the empty directories in the temporary zip directory when it is done with them. On some machines with large cluster sizes and a large number of these directories, they could waste a significant amount of space even though empty. The original idea behind leaving them was performance, but removing them seems to have had a negligible impact.
  • In previous versions it was necessary to include "*.*" to get all files in a zip archive. This was inconsistent with the rest of Wilbur where only "*" was necessary. The single wildcard now works with zip archives as well.
  • When a zip archive had more than one file with the same name, but in different subdirectories, the temporary files were not being removed. This has been fixed.
  • There was a problem accessing files inside zip archives when their names contained spaces.
  • A couple of possible minor resource leaks were fixed.
  • The status line spelling of containing was fixed.
  • The File/Copy List Files command had a bug that caused problems under Window NT.
  • Improvements in error trapping. In particular an oddity in the Microsoft libraries meant that out of memory errors would not be caught in helper threads like indexing.
  • User break from the compression loop is now handled correctly.
  • The executable file is now slightly smaller thanks to a new version of the Microsoft compiler.

What’s New in Version 1.52

  • You no longer need quotes when entering file paths containing spaces or commas etc., but you may no longer enter more than one path in the File Include or File Exclude dialogs. Since just hitting Enter twice will bring this dialog back ready for another entry, this does not seem like a significant loss.
  • The local search in a file has been brought into closer conformance with the overall index search. In particular if numbers are not indexed, they are no longer considered valid characters in a local search. This should eliminate the problem where the word ABC is in the index, but is not found in the local search since it appears in the form ABC123.

What’s New in Version 1.5

Major Stuff: 

Memory Mapped Indexes: Rather than reading its indexes into memory, Wilbur now uses a memory image of the index which stays on the disk. The important benefit of this is that startup times are drastically reduced for larger indexes. This makes using Wilbur to quickly look something up much more convenient.

 Search speeds are not significantly effected, but there are some downsides though, particularly for folks sharing the same indexes over a network. Specifically indexes cannot be built or updated if someone else is using them. Also each index is now broken into several files with different extensions which is slightly messier. To compensate Wilbur now lets you designate a specific directory where the indexes are stored by default.

 Contents Outline Mode: The file contents can now be collapsed so only lines containing the target words are shown. This mode can be quickly toggled back and forth using the number pad ‘+’ key. . By default Wilbur now starts in the outline mode, but this can be changed with an option on the File/Preferences dialog.

File Rankings: An option can now be set to have the number of occurrences (to a maximum of 256) of each word in each file saved in the index. A corresponding column in the file list allows files to be sorted by the frequency of hits of the target words.

Indexing: 

  • Changes so file specs with no drive designation work. This allows the use of indexes on CD ROMs and other removable media where drive letters may not be known in advance. Note that for network use, Wilbur has always supported the use of UNC names.
  • A default index directory can now be set in the File/Preferences dialog. This directory will be the default location for saving and restoring indexes, although any directory can still be used.
  • A new index now has a default set of common include files. This is designed to get new users going more easily and reduce the temptation to just use *.*.
  • The results of the current search can be used as the basis of the next search. This is done by simply starting the search line with either an ‘&’ or ‘|’ character depending on whether you want the new results to be a subset of the current results or added to them. An error in the help file documentation incorrectly identified the tilde character ‘~’ as the NOT operator in searches. The correct character is in fact the caret ‘^".
  • It is now possible to specify how many characters constitute the smallest and largest words that will be indexed. These setting can be adjusted to exclude undesired words and thus reduce the size of the index.
  • A search string made up completely of invalid (too long or short or in the skip.txt file) words no longer finds all the files in the index. A completely empty search string can still be used for this purpose.
  • Due to problems with some environments, the extension for indexes has been changed to just the 3 characters "wil". Sigh... The "wilbur" extension will still work, but must be entered explicitly.
  • The dialog box which reports the results of an indexing operation now includes the option to immediately save the index.
  • This dialog also reports how long the indexing took.
  • Added percent complete to Compressing status message. Compressing can now be a significant part of the indexing operation, so some indication of progress seemed appropriate.
  • Problems that occurred with file exclusion, specifically with quote marks and zip files, have been fixed.

Contents Page: 

  • Added Edit/Export command to append selected text to Export.txt file. This is hot keyed to the Ctrl X key so collecting specific tidbits is now easy.
  • Fixed near search so it uses right number (not +1 ).
  • Failed searches now leave the last page of text in viewing area rather than just showing a blank area beyond the end of the file.
  • Fixed not being able to select last character in line without going to the next line.

Dialogs: 

  • The index dialog was changed to have separate include and exclude file pages. The multiple entries on these pages can now be selected for deleting and copying to the clipboard. The resulting clipboard information can be pasted back into include or exclude boxes in any index or just pasted into a text editor for direct manipulation. They are plain ASCII text, so the results of such editing can be copied to the clipboard and pasted back into an include or exclude list.
  • The search dialog now reports the index attributes. Specifically when the files were last indexed, what number handling is in effect, the character set being used and the minimum/maximum indexed word size.
  • Removed zip path from the index options. It is the overall preferences in the File/Preferences dialog.
  • Added minimum/maximum word length to index options.
  • Help/About box now reports the number of indexed files, bytes and unique words in the current index.

Main Window 

  • Changed registry functions to better support multiple users on single machine.
  • Fixed a problem where the Toolbar occasionally did not update its status.
  • Added a command line option which requests that search be done without search dialog. This allows word processing macros to start Wilbur and jump directly to the word without having to hit enter.
  • Fix so that aborting by shutting down wouldn't get hung up on the Indexing
  • Aborted message box.
  • Changed registration security so an unregistered and timed out program can still read (but not save or update) indexes created by it or by a registered version. This permits unregistered copies to be included with indexes on removable media.
  • Changed index and update threads to lowest priority in the hopes of reducing their impact on foreground tasks.
  • Added numerous OLE automation routines. It is now possible to start Wilbur, specify and build indexes and do searches from OLE automation compatible programming and script languages.
  • Removed the shortcut ‘X" to Export File List since it conflicted with Exit in the file menu

File List 

  • Multiple files can now be selected for the File/Export File List and the File/Copy commands.
  • Added File copy to folder command for selected files in the file list. This command allows you to select a folder to copy the selected files to.
  • If more than one file is selected, the File/Export File List command just exports the names etc. of the selected files. If only a single file is selected, the original behavior of exporting the whole list continues.
  • The file list now remembers the previous four sort orders and used them to progressively break ties in the primary sort order. This means that by sorting first on time and then on file type, the files will be listed by type and by time within each type group.
  • Fixed context menu so it opens in the right spot. It now opens where the mouse cursor is rather than a fixed spot on the screen.

Other

Due to the ever increasing size and update frequency of the support DLL’s from Microsoft, Wilbur now has the necessary routines statically linked directly in its executable. This makes Wilbur’s executable much larger, but still much smaller than the size of the old executable and the DLLs combined. This is not as esthetically pleasing as the concept of shared DLLs, but in practice will probably be faster and more convenient for the majority of users.

 

Copyright © 2004 RedTree Development Inc. All rights reserved.
Information in this document is subject to change without notice.
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