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It is a bit early to even have an alpha version of Keep Your Word 1.3, but the development process is moving onwards. Right now, 12 tickets (all of them new features) have been marked as “code completed”.

Right now, the new interface is still a bit messy, but here you can see some of the new features.

First, the insertion date of the words can be showed or hidden. That lets you sort the words list by that date.

Words have many new properties. For instance, they can be marked as learnt, they can be assigned two different images, and they can be assigned a numerical value from 0 to 5, that could be used as a “difficulty” measure, for instance.

Also, everytime a word is used in any of the exercise modes, the date is recorded. Which leads to the next new set of features: smart groups.

The list of properties that can be used to declare a smart group includes all the new values, so, for instance, one could be able to create a smart group with all the words that are not marked as learnt, that have not been in any of the exercise modes in the last two weeks, that are tagged with “food”, and that were assigned to the folder “Substantives”.

So, there is still a lot of work and there are a lot of refinements to do, sure, but Keep Your Word 1.3 is starting to be close.

A maintenance update has just been published. This is the changelog:

Keep Your Word 1.2.1

• Feature #133: When printing a list of words (not in Printed Test mode), the printed list is ordered according to the list sorting criteria.
• Feature #34: When dragging words from one category to another, press Option to move them instead of copying.
• Bug #134: When entering exercise mode, some menu items should not be available.
• Bug #135: Under certain conditions, the groups hierarchy can be messed up.

Just a quick note: Keep Your Word supports, after activating the proper Input Method (System Preferences-> International -> Input Menu) the entry of right to left text.

In fact, the entry of text in any of the languages supported by the system, using any of the Input Methods supported by the system should be smooth.

Mac OS X supports many different keyboard layouts and input methods, that can be activated through System Preferences -> International -> Input Menu.

For instance, my own system has activated the Spanish-ISO keyboard layout and a Yale-Cantonese input method.

So, when I am adding words to my cantonese dictionary, I can just swap from one input method to the other, changing between entering “western” and chinese characters.

However, it is a bit boring to have to click that menubar item everytime I want to change the input method (sorry, but I am definitely a keyboard person).

But Mac OS X also lets us assign keyboard shortcuts to many common operations. Like, for instance, changing the input method.

So, go to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shourtcuts and look for the “Input Menu” section, almost at the end of the list.

There, you can assign a shortcut to navigate the different Input Methods that you have previously activated.

We have just published Keep Your Word 1.2. The main new features are import and export from/to CSV and a tag browser. This is the complete changelog:

Keep Your Word 1.2

• Bug #120: Words deletion not working properly under certain conditions.
• Bug #121: Multiple words can be deleted at the same time.
• Bug #127: Word list scrolling to the position of the selected word.
• Bug #128: Changed some menu items labels.
• Bug #129: Change the "Go Back" labels.
• Bug #130: Tag navigator ordering working properly.
• Feature #95: Import words from csv.
• Feature #112: Make both A and B options in Quick Quiz mode clickable.
• Feature #114: Multiple words selection.
• Feature #115: Multiple words drag.
• Feature #119: Tag browser, management of dictionary-wide tags.
• Feature #122: Export any collection to CSV.
• Feature #125: Added menu items to open the character map and the tags navigator.
• Feature #126: Global delete. A word can be completely removed from the dictionary, even when it is deleted from a collection.

We hope you enjoy using it.

We have just uploaded a maintenance release of Keep Your Word, that fixes the following bugs:

Keep Your Word 1.1.2

Fixes two crashes:

1. Bug #116 Crash on Save As. Under certain circumstances, the app could carsh after a failed attempt to “Save As” a document.
2. Bug #113 Crash when inspecting the registration data. When trying to revieve the registration data, the application crashed.

The application should update itself, but you can also download it from this link.

Today, october 7th, Keep Your Word is featured in MacUpdate Promo.

So, if you were thinking about purchasing the app, today you can do it at the excellent price of $11.95. Go to mupromo!

A quick note to inform you that we have just released Keep Your Word 1.1.1

This is a maintance release, that does not add any new feature, but fixes a few minor bugs.

We are proud to announce the release of Keep Your Word 1.1

This is the first mayor update of Keep Your Word, and fulfills two of our internal commitments: first, to keep the development alive, releasing new versions with new features regularly, and second, to try to do it on a monthly basis.

The most important new feature is the revamped interface of the Flash Cards and Quick Quiz modes. Based on Core Animation, it adds the visual appeal that we always wanted to give to Keep Your Word. This is how 1.0 should have been.

But that is not all. This is the complete changelog:

Keep Your Word 1.1

New Flash Cards and Quick Quiz interface, based on Core Animation. Both interfaces can be navigated using the left and right arrow keys, or using the scroll bar.

• Feature #99: The content of Comments can also be one of the criteria when creating Smart Groups.
• Bug #106: Sometimes, dropping words into categories does not work as expected.
• Feature #91: Groups and Words can be edited just pressing the Intro key. Smart Groups’ names can also be edited, however, to edit a Smart Group predicate, the user has to double click it.
• Feature #100: New Flash Cards and Quick Quiz interfaces.
• Feature #105: The starting side of the Flash Cards can be modified.

Now, to start working in that sync code…

Well, it is being harder than what I thought, but finally, I have a stable version of Keep Your Word that implements the new Flash Cards interface.

Now, to add the final touches and to propagate the interface to the Quick Quiz.

We hope to be able to release Keep Your Word 1.1, that includes the new interfaces and some more improvements this friday.