October 31, 2008

Instructions for how to help translate Purple Pen to other languages has been posted here. If you have some time and are a fluent speaker of another language, please consider helping translate Purple Pen!

October 18, 2008

The hosting for the code, bug reports, hoped-for-features of Purple Pen has been moved from SourceForge to LaunchPad.

July 8, 2008

Beta 3 of Purple Pen is ready. This release fixes a couple of nasty bugs and hopefully makes printing work well on all printers. There are also some new features: the All Controls display has several enhancements, and the new Event Audit report checks your event for many possible problems.

You can see the full list of changes and fixes here.

April 15, 2008

Beta 2 of Purple Pen has finally been released. The main new features are listed in the new item below. You can see the full list of changes and fixes here.

I hope that the new version works well for many of you. As always, please let me know what fixed and features you would like to see in the future.

February 26, 2008

Work continues on Beta 2 of Purple Pen. Hopefully it can be released in March. Stay tuned!

Here are a few of the new features that will be in Beta 2:

• You can easily change the map file associated with an event. Also, if the map file cannot be found when an event is opened, PP kindly asks you to find the map file.
• A JPEG, TIFF, or BMP file can be used instead of an OCAD map for the map file. You must specify the resolution of the bitmap and the scale of the map manually in this case.
• A new report to show the lengths of all legs.
• Control descriptions on the map now appear in black instead of purple.
• You can customize the text associated with any description symbol. This is especially useful for the special item symbols. You can also add a key at the bottom of description to show what the special item symbols denote.
• Purple Pen now correctly displays and print almost all features just like OCAD, so the Print Courses command now is recommended for use. For those few features it doesn't support, PP will detect and warn you before you print.

Please keep the feedback coming! It is very useful in deciding what features are really needed.