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History of builds

Cardbox 3.0 (including Cardbox Client)

This page describes recent builds of the Cardbox 3.0 software. It describes any features that have been added or changed and lists the more important bug corrections. You can use it to help you decide whether you should download the latest build of Cardbox.

NOTE: ANY PROBLEMS LISTED HERE NO LONGER EXIST!!!
Whenever we describe a problem in this list, we are describing it before it was corrected.  As long as you have a recent enough build of the program, you will not encounter the problem. Here is how to check your build number.

19-May-08 Build 4266

A minor bug has been corrected in image storage. If you stored images in a database AND some of those images were documents (as opposed to pictures) AND a document had a large area of white space AND you later rebuilt the database, then it was possible for parts of the solid white space to be replaced by solid dark rectangles. Build 4266 does not do this, and any documents that have suffered from this problem with earlier builds will have their white background restored by Build 4266.

Some minor bugs in Unicode support for validators have been corrected.

Macros can now send commands to other programs using DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange). For example, this makes it possible to write a macro that opens a PDF file in Adobe Reader and goes to a particular page or bookmark within that PDF file. An example is given here.

It is now possible to save a whole batch of images to disk using a single "Save As" command, instead of having to display and save them one at a time.

You continue to be protected against opening file: links that come from untrusted databases, but the protection now takes the form of an error message when you click on the link. Previously the link itself was disabled and not underlined, but some people found this confusing.

If you use Adobe Reader to copy text from a PDF file to the Clipboard, it sometimes marks the text as being in a Japanese character set when it isn't, causing strange results when you paste the text elsewhere. Cardbox now detects and works round this Adobe Reader bug, so that the text that is pasted into Cardbox is exactly the text that you copied from Adobe Reader.

Various minor cosmetic improvements have been made.

25-Jan-08 Build 4262

Image files in the PNG format can now be imported.

1-Dec-07 Build 4256

The uninstaller was not working on Windows XP: this has been corrected.

Wine and CrossOver: further improvements. Macros can now be used on installations that have the appropriate DLL files installed.

11-Nov-07 Build 4254

Wine and CrossOver are environments that allow Windows programs to be run on non-Windows systems - especially Linux and the Apple Macintosh. Build 4254 makes changes to Cardbox to allow it to run more smoothly in these environments. These changes do not affect Cardbox's behaviour under Windows. (Note that macros can only be used on genuine Windows systems: this is because of a bug in Wine).

18-Jul-07 Build 4252

Cosmetic change: with some scanners and some printers, compressed documents had an unwanted pale grey background which slowed down printing. This has been removed. Existing compressed documents will benefit from this change without needing to be re-compressed.

Bug removed: when switching from a user profile in which certain fields are invisible to a profile where those fields were visible, the fields did not appear on the screen until you had redisplayed the records concerned (for instance, by going to the next record(s) and coming back again). This has been corrected and the fields now appear as soon as the new profile has been activated.

Bug removed: when using the macro system's EmailSender object to send HTML-formatted emails, a full stop was sometimes omitted from the text of an email. There was approximately a 1-in-80 chance of this happening. Non-HTML emails were unaffected by this bug.

6-June-07 Build 4251

New macro features: the ListKept and ListKeptToFile methods are the equivalent for kept selections of ListIndex and ListIndexToFile. The help file contains full details, and the macro recorder has been upgraded to record these commands when appropriate.

Previously undocumented macro feature: while you are editing a record, the CursorPosition property tells the macro where you are in the current field.

Bug removed: a crash was possible if you were using formats designed for certain printers (particularly Hewlett-Packard) on a computer that had Version 5 of the Adobe PDF Writer as the default printer.

Bug removed: a crash was possible if you were using a long-running macro that used Window.NextRecord to move from one record to the next, and you were accessing a database on a server, and the network connection was fast.

8-May-07 Build 4250

Bug removed: pressing the F1 key in the Deduplicate command did not display a help page.

Bug removed: Cardbox was unable to import monochrome TIFF images containing more than 11 million pixels.

Performance: a bug in the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 2420 PCL 6 printer driver was making the Printer Settings window very slow to open (possibly taking 5 to 10 seconds). We have modified Cardbox so that it works round this bug.

Bug removed: in search commands, the macro recorder was not recording the Preview button correctly, so that the recorded macro had to be edited by hand.

13-Mar-07 Build 4247

The Cardbox installer has been labelled so that Windows Vista recognises it as a program installer and asks the user for permission to run it.

26-Sep-06 Build 4238

Some minor bugs have been corrected, especially in find-and-replace.

Some SMTP servers have a bug that prevented Tools > Bulk Email from being used to send an identical email to very many recipients. A new option in Tools > Options > Email allows you to configure Cardbox to work round this bug.

Some printer drivers have a bug that allows them to get into a state where they won't allow some driver-specific settings (such as "draft mode") to be set or remembered. Cardbox has been modified to work round this bug.

11-Jul-06 Build 4236

Amazon S3: Amazon's recently launched S3 service provides fast, secure, unlimited-capacity online storage that can be accessed from anywhere on the Internet. Cardbox has now been enhanced to support this.

• The Cardbox Server can automatically back up your databases to your S3 space.
• A new command in the Professional Edition of Cardbox 3.0, Tools > Management > Amazon S3, lets you view and manage files stored on Amazon S3. You can upload files from your computer to S3 and download them from S3 to your computer.
• The Cardbox macro system has a new "AmazonS3" object that you can use for file transfer and management.

For more information on using Amazon S3 with Cardbox, open Tools > Management > Amazon S3 and press F1 for the online help.

For more information on Amazon S3 in general, and to sign up for the service, see the Amazon Web Services page.

2-May-06 Build 4233

Cardbox now includes "Getting Started", a 30-page tutorial guide that takes you on a tour of Cardbox with the help of a new set of sample databases. Use it if you've just bought Cardbox, or to teach new Cardbox users in your organisation. You can view or print "Getting Started" with the new Cardbox command Help > Getting Started.

19-Apr-06 Build 4230

Two new commands let you send emails directly from Cardbox (assuming that your system has an SMTP connection available). These are File > Send as Email, to send a selection of records in a single email to a single recipient, and Tools > Bulk Email, to send email to multiple recipients identified by multiple Cardbox records. These commands are not available in the Home Edition. For more details, open one of these commands and then press F1 for the online help.

Pressing the Maximise button on the full-screen image window takes it into "image-only" mode, in which the image occupies the entire screen with no space taken up by status bars or toolbars. To leave this mode, press the Esc key.

14-Mar-06 Build 4226

The Tools > Options command has a new Email page that lets you configure features of the EmailSender object, which is used in macros for sending emails directly from Cardbox.

EmailSender itself has been modified so that it works with SMTP-only mail servers such as McAfee Webmail.

8-Mar-06 Build 4224

For macro users, a new EmailSender object has been added. This allows you to send emails directly from Cardbox without having to use a separate email program. Full details are in the Cardbox help file, and you can find a wide range of sample macros here.

1-Feb-06 Build 4221

For advanced macro users, the ReadFileIntoBase64 and WriteFileFromBase64 methods have been added.

Some minor bugs have been corrected.

13-Jan-06 Build 4220

If you are using macros, and you assign a macro to the "Save" button in the toolbar, the menu command File > Save Record will also activate that macro. The same thing applies to the "Save As" button and the command File > Save As New.

Some minor bugs have been corrected.

6-Dec-05 Build 4217

The "file:" prefix is now accepted, to provide links from a Cardbox record to a file on your hard disk (just as "http:" provides links to Web pages). For full details, search the Cardbox help file for the word "hyperlinks": the article "Setting up hyperlinks" is the one you want.

24-Nov-05 Build 4216

You can now save documents and photographs in GIF and JPEG formats as well as the standard Windows BMP format.

4-Nov-05 Build 4213

The Setup procedure has been simplified.

14-Oct-05 Build 4208: Further macro bug correction

A further correction to the macro system was needed to make the Records.Print and Windows.Print methods work.

14-Oct-05 Build 4207: Correction of bug installed by Windows Update

In the batch of updates released by Microsoft on Tuesday 12 October 2005 and installed automatically by Windows Update, the update identified as KB896688 or MS05-052 caused Cardbox to be unable to run most macros. (Cardbox is not the only sufferer: other programs are also affected, as you can see by searching for "KB896688" in Internet discussion groups).

Build 4207 of Cardbox works round this Microsoft bug and makes the Cardbox macro system work normally again.

9-Oct-05 Build 4206: Improvements and bug corrections

Auto-rotation of photographs: Some digital cameras are able to detect whether they are taking photographs in an upright ("portrait") or horizontal ("landscape") format. Cardbox can now use this information to ensure that the photograph is displayed correctly on your screen. Previously you would have had to look at the photograph after it was imported into Cardbox and rotate it manually if necessary.

Additional commands available on networks: If you have a Client Edition or Home Edition licence and are using a database stored on a Cardbox Server then Cardbox will now let you use certain Professional Edition commands (such as user profiles and encryption) on that database even though you don't have a Professional Edition licence yourself.

Drag and drop: You can now drag-and-drop information into Cardbox from a wider variety of sources, including Outlook email attachments.

Bug corrections: If you had an image database in which you attached the same image to more than one record, then in very rare circumstances, deleting an image from one record could end up deleting that image from the database as a whole. The bug could not occur if you used Cardbox images in the usual way - that is, with one or more images attached to each record, but with each image belonging to just one record.

If you sent your printed output to the "Adobe PDF" printer, then a bug in Adobe's printer driver sometimes caused it to report that Acrobat needed reinstalling. We have programmed Cardbox to work round this bug.

Various other minor bugs have been corrected.

13-Sep-05 Build 4204: PDF import

If you download the separately available Ghostscript package, you can now import Acrobat PDF files as images into Cardbox: the quality and options are the same as if you had printed out the PDF file and scanned it in to Cardbox. The procedure for setting this up is slightly technical; but once it has been set up, importing PDF files is as easy as importing any other kind of image file. See the full instructions.

Various minor bugs have been corrected.

On a network, if you were using a Cardbox format containing printer settings, and the format had been created by someone else, and the printer driver used by the creator of the format was incompatible with the printer driver on your own computer, Cardbox was sometimes unable to print correctly. This mostly happened when using old printer drivers and could be resolved by updating to the latest driver; but Cardbox has also now been altered to eliminate this problem.

If you drew boxes round automatic-height merge blocks, and made the boxes overlap to give the appearance of a ruled form, and you displayed or printed a record that contained a very small amount of text in the merge blocks, then the boxes sometimes did not shrink to fit the reduced size of the merge blocks.

5-Aug-05 Build 4203: Bug corrections

If you were using an Extra Text field in your database design and you used Edit > Batch > Delete to delete a batch of records containing Extra Text, the space occupied by the deleted Extra Text was not always released for re-use in the database file. This had no pernicious effects except for making the database file larger than it needed to be, a situation that could be corrected by Tools > Rebuild > Database.

If the Unique Terms validator reported an error caused by another record existing with the same index term, and you corrected the problem by deleting that other record, the Unique Terms validator would not notice your deletion until you closed and reopened Cardbox (or closed and reopened the database).

If you were using printer settings other than the default ones, and you were printing across a network, and the combination of server and printer name was longer than an internal Windows limit of 30 characters, then some of your custom printer settings such as page size and orientation were reset to their default values.

28-Jul-05 Build 4202: Bug correction

Saving edited formats: A bug introduced in Build 4201 caused Cardbox to crash when you were saving an edited format if you had not accessed the Printer Settings for that format.

27-Jul-05 Build 4201: Bug corrections

Cardbox Help across the network: In June 2005 Microsoft changed Windows to make it impossible to open help files located on a computer elsewhere on the network. We have modified Cardbox to work round this restriction, so that you can still view Cardbox Help even if you have installed Cardbox centrally on your network. You can read the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles about this change at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896054/ and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/892675/ (the links to Microsoft's web site were correct at the time that we wrote this page but may change at any time).

Unicode indexing: At the request of Greek users of Cardbox, we have changed the default indexing rules for Greek text so that words appear in capitals in index preview listings: thus Κριτων will appear as ΚΡΙΤΩΝ rather than as κριτων.

Scrolling in split-screen mode: If you viewed the main record and the extra text field simultaneously in the same window, scrolling within the extra text field was unreliable.

Scrap variables (macros/programming): The Scrap array is now accessible to external programs, as a property of the Application object. Previously it was available only for macros within Cardbox.

History of selections: If you printed the contents of the History window, and you had made selections using the Preview or Preview-and-Count buttons, then the words chosen in those selections did not print out properly.