The last major release was over a year ago, I think it’s right time (although it was probably a few months ago already) to share what’s going on in the project. So, in a nutshell - despite the long break in releases, work on Keepmark was still going on. Initially, the plan was a bit different. I started by trying to rewrite the GUI of the application from JavaFx to the old swing. Why? After all, it seems more mature and stable than JavaFx, other giants developing decent products use it, additionally, I was discouraged by the fact that newer versions of JavaFx ran out of support for older Macs. So I spent 2-3 months of my work on it, and eventually decided to give up on the idea - too much work had been put into what I had created so far to do it from scratch - I would probably burn myself out completely and abandon the project. So, I decided to stay with the technology I started with here and took on another great feature that will hopefully make Keepmark even better. And here we come to what I want to show off.
I decided that Keepmark needed a better text editor. Although Keepmark is a tool for organizing documents, but creating notes and presenting content is one of its main features. So, I started working on the editor - from scratch, starting with text selection, cursor navigation, through editing history, element rendering, table handling, spell checking, to higher level elements - like handling entire markdown documents. I won’t hide, during those few months - it was a bit of painful process and many times I felt to give up on the idea as well. However, the amount of time I invested, made it harder and harder to give it up with a clear conscience. Well, and finally - it seems that everything can work out after all. I’ve reached the stage where I already have the editor plugged into Keepmark and I’m mainly concerned with finding bugs and fixing what doesn’t work. Also, this entry was created using this new editor already. At the moment, I still used many elements from the previous editor (e.g. the toolbar, or the dialogs for inserting images), but they will also change - but rather after the first release. At the moment the priority is to stabilize the editor and make it available to you as soon as possible.
Finally, a little curiosity - I attach a screenshot of what a very early developer version of the Keepmark GUI created in SWING looked like, which I started working on in the first half of last year, from which I withdrew.
