Montage Changelog

What's new in Montage 3.0.559

• This is a major update that includes a number of bug fixes, functional extensions, and interface refinements. New features have been added to improve usability in general, including enhancements to Montage's drag-and-drop capabilities, metafile compaction and portability improvements, keyboard shortcuts, new icon options, plus numerous refinements to menus and various dialogs. Facilities for creating graphical montages have been significantly extended with the introduction of dynamic Internet fetching and additional wallpaper features.
• In addition to the changes summarized below, this release contains a variety of fixes that are detailed more fully in FIX: summary of bugs and problems fixed in Montage build 559, of 3/23/08. Among the more notable fixes are those relating to occasional drag-and-drop and shutdown problems, relative paths, environment variables, off-screen display issues, and preservation of mixed-case filenames.
• dynamic Internet fetching
• The new dynamic fetching capability enables missing files to be retrieved transparently across the Internet, and then retained indefinitely for future use as local files. This feature optionally applies to any sort of Shortcut target document, as well as icons and wallpaper images. Through dynamic fetching, it is possible to create and distribute graphically rich montages that incorporate large amounts of imagery without directly including the images themselves, thereby greatly reducing the size of the files that need to be distributed and avoiding potential copyright issues.
• The new Tools menu provides commands and options related to dynamic fetching, including a new analysis tool for detailed reporting on montage contents and missing/fetchable files, commands to Fetch all missing files immediately or Fetch all with prompt, options for automatic Fetch on Demand, Prompt Before Fetching, and a fetch timeout setting.
• wallpapers
• Each montage now supports up to 9 alternate wallpapers, which can be cycled through with the F3 and Shift+F3 hot keys, or accessed directly via Alt+number key. The new Wallpaper submenu of the main View menu includes commands to Insert, Append, Change, or Remove a wallpaper, and the Fit to Wallpaper option dynamically resizes the Montage Desktop window to match wallpaper image dimensions. (This setting has been added to the Graphical vs Standard group of global options.) Also, a new option to Hide Shortcuts (F4) enables you to quickly toggle the visibility of all Shortcuts, for an unobstructed view of the background image.
• Shortcuts
• A number of Shortcut refinements have been made, in addition to supporting dynamic fetching. The capability of dragging and dropping Shortcuts between montages has been enhanced to include numerous Shortcut properties that cannot be represented by standard Windows links. Also, a new global Shortcuts dialog has been introduced, accompanied by simplifications to the main View menu and Montage Options context menu. This dialog allows you to perform various actions against all Shortcuts and more easily adjust global options pertaining to icons, style settings, and tips.
• New icon related features have been added, including the Icon is Target and Image is Icon settings for deriving icons directly from target images, the new Pre-Fetch Icons option, and commands to Reset All Icons to Default and Clear Icon Cache. Options for Shortcut tips have been gathered into a more convenient tab in the new global Shortcuts dialog, and the description field in Shortcut Properties now supports an automatic ("++") substitution mechanism for augmenting tips with basic target information. A separate page of the global Shortcuts dialog is devoted to Shortcut color and style settings, most of which can also be toggled from the View menu and accompanying hot keys. The Mouseover Effect (Shift+F4) has been enhanced to display hidden titles as well as borders, and this option is now always enabled.
• The Shortcut context menu has been reorganized, adding two new submenus for Icon and Internet options. The Icon submenu includes new commands to Copy Icon Path, Show URL, Copy URL, and Fetch Icon from URL, and the former "Use Default Icon" command has been renamed Reset Icon to Default. Under the Internet submenu are commands to Show, Copy, or Fetch the URL corresponding to the Shortcut's target. Also there is a prominent Fetch Missing Target command, if the target is missing but known to be fetchable. Assorted bug fixes and small improvements to the Shortcut Properties dialog are listed in mkb00019.
• main menu and Montage Options context menu
• Main menu changes have been made under the File, View, Tools, and Help menus. The View menu has been reorganized, eliminating the obsolete Icon Size submenu, adding the new Wallpaper submenu, and assigning new hot keys to various commands and options. Save View As... has been moved from the View menu to the File menu. The new Tools menu supports dynamic fetching features (described above) plus advanced diagnostic commands that were previously under the Help menu.
• Changes to the Montage Options context menu include a number of simplifications due to the introduction of the global Shortcuts dialog, which led to the elimination of various redundant actions (Normalize Children, Minimize Children, Send Children to Back, and Close Children) and submenus under the More submenu (All Shortcuts, Shortcut Style, and Shortcut Tips). Also under the More submenu, the Background submenu includes extensions supporting new wallpaper features (described above), there is a new Internet Fetching submenu, the Advanced submenu has been moved from its previous location, and the Advanced, Auto-Detect Montages option has been moved from the menu into the Shortcuts dialog. A reorganized More, Window Type submenu adds support for 4 optional border styles.
• miscellaneous improvements
• The following list summarizes additional enhancements in this release:
• improved support of mixed case filenames in various contexts, including Montage metafile names and Desktop window titles (which were previously forced to lower case)
• to further shrink metafile size, added the new Save Command Processors option (OFF by default) and Zap command for deleting internal clutter. (Also eliminated the obsolete "Save Visible As..." command, which is no longer needed.)
• enhanced portability across different screen sizes and Windows workspace layouts, with a new option to automatically avoid off-screen window placement (enabled by default)
• for more flexibility in creating custom add-ons, added the Montage program directory to the default search path used by Montage
• changes to features that were introduced in build 526
• enhanced the ability to widen/narrow Shortcut title via keyboard Ctrl+Right/Left keys, so as to operate in units of whole words instead of individual pixels when auto-sizing is enabled
• omit Show Borders from properties affected by Standard Style / Graphical Style commands
• use a default icon for Montage's image viewer, but support new options for deriving icon from target
• revised definitions for the F2 and F3 hot keys, which are no longer needed for icon resizing
• removed the unnecessary command to launch Cosmic Montage from the Help menu
• Also see mkb00019 for further information about assorted bugs and problems that have been fixed.
• This version (build 559) was released to registered Montage users as an update to the runtime executable, MONTAGE3.EXE. For installation instructions, see notes about quick-setup and updating a previous installation of Montage.