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.

A little faster this time than last, but with a little less new features - Keepmark 1.43.0 is available since today. In this release I’ve introduced a new minimalist document list view, and to make it easier to configure the view - a new menu for its administration. I’ve simplified the management of deleted documents a little by introducing the ability to view them by deletion session, along with the ability to restore documents that have been deleted in a given session. There have also been some minor improvements.

Working further on minor improvements, there is a new view for the document list - the simplified list. It shows the least amount of document detail in the list, but thus allows many more items to be displayed on one screen. It shows a file type icon next to each item and, if there are more than one, there is also a small ‘badge’ with their number. I have also redesigned the menu for managing the list view. To keep it “compact”, I used icons instead of text (the text will only appear in the tooltip when you hover over an icon). The whole feature is shown in the screen below.

Working on Keepmark this time, I decided to focus again on smaller functionalities and improving the performance of the application - speed up a little something here, fix file accesses there…. One of the new features will be better management of deleted documents. When entering the trash, in the menu you will be able to see the latest “deletion sessions”, view the list of files that have been deleted in each one and decide whether they should be permanently deleted, or perhaps reverse the deletion operation by restoring the documents to their place.

As of today, the new Keepmark 1.42.0 is now available for download. I won’t hide the fact that I wanted to release a bit more changes in it than what went into it, but I haven’t released in a while, so it’s a good time to share what has been done so far. The main new feature is the introduction of a “context” for working on a document, where the document we are working on remains in our view, and independently of it we can browse the other documents in the repository - as you can see in the attached screenshot.