Sorry, we incorrectly said that upgrade from Mémoires has 60% discount off the full price. The upgrade ($17.95) is actually 60% of the full price of license, thus the discount is 40%.

Please accept our apologies for this mistake.

We are happy to announce Mémoires 2.0, a new major version of our journaling software!

We listened to you and implemented a lot of your suggestions in this version.

Here’s a list of changes. You can find more information on What’s New page.

• Show all entries. Your journals are now easier to browse: view all your entries in sidebar by clicking on the button or using new View menu.
• Automatically save journals. Mémoires will now automatically save your journals every 5 minutes and before closing, so you won’t lose a bit.
• Change date and time of entries. Entry title now conveniently shows date of entry creation. By clicking on it, you can change the date and time.
• Better look of search results. Search results now have the same background as normal entries list, and shows shorter date to leave more space for entry title.
• Check spelling as you type by default. While available in earlier versions, “Check spelling as you type” has been turned off by default. Now it’s on, so you can spot spelling mistakes on the fly.
• Entries are now created and sorted using correct time.
• Improved speed of browsing calendar and entries.
• Added View > Go To Today menu item.
• New application and document icons.
• Better look of entry title.
• Better look of dates with entries in calendar.
• Improved Help menu.
• Disable Entry > Remove menu item when there’s no selection.
• New crash reporter.
• Hide file extension when encrypting or decrypting file.
• Fixed rare issue with buttons appearing as pressed.
• Fixed typos in help.

Users of Mémoires 1.x can purchase an upgrade with 60% discount 40% discount (upd: sorry, I meant 60% of the price, which is 40% discount). If you bought Mémoires 1.x after December 1, 2008, you are eligible for a free upgrade, and we’ll send your new license today (if you didn’t receive it, please use lost key recovery page to get your key).

You can download Mémoires 2.0 from its product page.

We hope you’ll enjoy the new version!

When you launch BlogJet for the first time, it conveniently shows you a test post that you can publish to see if you have configured the program right. Early versions of BlogJet included the following quotation:

“Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” — Pablo Picasso

Then I found a better quote on the Web and replaced Picasso’s one with it:

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein

It turns out, Albert Einstein didn’t say that. Instead, this quote is from Leo Cherne, an American economist.

This was discovered by Ben Shoemate, and he wrote a post in his blog about it:

People use quotes as a way to strengthen their own position. If I can quote someone you respect, it adds credibility to whatever argument I’m making. Over time, the truth gets further and further away. The biggest names have always attracted people who are more than willing to put words into their mouths for their own gain – Confucious, Jesus, Aristotle, Shakespere, Einstein, and the biggest, most misquoted, of them all – God. All of them have probably been quoted more for the things they never said, than things they actually did say. I imagine this is the most disappointing part of time travel, waiting around to witness words never spoken and deeds never done.

Ben made a research to found the actual source and author. You can read more in his blog.

I’m totally agree with him, and I’m sorry that I helped spread the disinformation. Here’s the lesson: when you’re looking for a good quotation, don’t trust a few websites — do a better research.

xkcd comic

Thanks, Ben!

P.S. See also Wikipedia’s List of misquotations.

“What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.” — Walter Scott

Make a commitment to write journal regularly.

Set up a schedule that suits you and follow it. Don’t skip writing sessions if you don’t know what to write about — just start with a rough paragraph and keep developing it (see “Write” section below).

Choose tools that are convenient and inspiring.

For instance, Mémoires, our journaling software, is a simple and effective tool that keeps you focused on your journal’s content, not the application itself.

You’d want to keep your journal on your computer, and here’s why:

• it’s searchable (easy to find everything your wrote about);
• secure (no need to hide anything, just remember your password);
• editing and rewriting is easy.

However, you may need a small paper notebook when you’re away from your computer — try tiny Moleskines or Field Notes. Just remember to type entries back into your journaling software.

Continue reading: How to write a journal →

Website

We are pleased to announce the new Coding Robots website. It has a fresh modern design, better usability, and improved load speed. If you’re reading this through RSS, check it out!

Forums

We are also resurrecting the old forums in a new format. It appears, switch to Google Groups was a mistake: some users were complaining that groups were not as convenient to use as forums, discussions slowed down, plus there were a lot of spam. (I wrote a forum topic about this).

Welcome back to the old new forums at http://forum.codingrobots.com!

Blog and Twitter

Usually, we published a couple of posts per month in our blog. Starting today, we’ll be blogging more on various topics in our niche: blogging, writing journals, design, and more. If you haven’t subscribed to our RSS feed (or by email) yet, do it now, so that you don’t miss anything interesting. We also have a Twitter account you can follow — http://twitter.com/codingrobots.

Enjoy

Take a look at our website, and if you find any mistakes or bugs, please let us know.

Thank you for staying with us!

P.S. We have some t-shirts for you.

Update: The new version 1.2.43 has been released to address a bug that prevented 1.2.42 from working on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Please download it. Sorry!

We are happy to announce the availability of the new version of Mémoires.

Release notes:

• Default font selection in Preferences.
• Better look in Leopard:
  - The bottom of the main window looks like iCal’s.
  - Left panel becomes gray when the main window is inactive.
  - Improved journal icon (now full-size 512x512).
  
• Faster startup.
• Importing from the latest versions of MacJournal and Journler.
• Fixed searching for license in selected message in Mail on Leopard.
• Fixed warning messages in Console for updater.
• Fixed memory leaks.
• Corrected mistakes in the English help file.
• Updated localizations.

You can get it from http://www.codingrobots.com/memoires/

Thanks to everyone for reporting bugs and suggesting features! Also thanks to translators for a quick response.

Sadly, blogging APIs have never been the first-class citizens in blog engines. Sure, most people just use web interfaces to post to their blogs, but there are a lot of people who prefer desktop applications like BlogJet.

WordPress 2.6 is going to join Movable Type in discriminating against blog clients—they are going to disable XML-RPC APIs by default. Users will have to enable them manually. (Movable Type requires you to use special API key instead of your password.)

Daniel Jalkut, developer of MarsEdit, the excellent blog client for Mac OS X, has a good post on this in his blog:

In my opinion, an entire class of problems with WordPress (and other blogging systems) stems from this interface bifurcation. Establishing a single interface to WordPress would be comparable to the “pin code + card” interface at your bank. You pass through it by car, on foot, and even at the counter when they ask you to swipe before doing any transaction. If you’ve only got one “real API” that touches the critically important data, then you’ve only got one door to secure. Furthermore, when all views into the blog are required to share the same API, suddenly none of them is deprived of functionality that the other has. Imagine if the API that the web interface uses to access all features of a blog could be just as easily employed by MarsEdit or any other application you authorized. The end result would be lots less work “playing catch up” for the XMLRPC and Atom developers, and more time focusing on innovative and cool features for all blog users.

Read it now and come back.

Did I mention that most blogging clients (except for one) are made by tiny software companies, and that they spend a huge amount of time answering to support emails from their users who have various problems configuring their server software?

We do our best to make our software as easy to configure and use as possible: just enter your blog address, login, and password, and let the program do configuration as needed. Disabling API by default will throw this work away; it’s a way to increase the number of support requests, therefore, the amount of time we spend on support rather than perfecting our software.

Time to move on and develop other types of software? Or make our own blog engines? ;)

P.S. I have nothing against WordPress developers; actually they have one of the best implementations of the API, and I want to thank them for their work. However, I do not understand how disabling API will increase WordPress security.

Update: WordPress developers handled this issue with care: WP provides a meaningful error message and instructions on how to enable API. Thanks again, guys!

Downloaded Firefox 3? Miss something?

Here it is: the updated BlogJet This! extension for Firefox 3.