News

RITLabs presents a new version of The Bat!


It was not long ago that The Bat! 3.98.1 was announced. In this short period of time we’ve prepared a new version – The Bat! 3.98.4 which has some serious new functional features and some significant bugs are fixed. The list of changes is enclosed.

What’s new since 3.98.1?

[           Legend:                  ]      
[ ! Major Improvement           ]
[ + Added feature                 ]
[ * Improved/changed feature ]
[ - Bug fixed (we hope)         ]

[+] The Bat! now supports SPAD (Set Program Access and Defaults), that are "Default Programs" associations under Windows Vista.

It is difficult in today's software ecosystem to manage your default behaviors in Windows because there are so many competing applications for common tasks. Many people have multiple software programs that do the same things: browse the web, view photos, play music, watch movies, etc. Many people have great difficulty because even if they decide to try an application, it has forever taken over their system and default behaviors like double click.
Windows first attempt to solve this problem was SPAD (Set Program Access and Defaults). This gave users the ability to allow an application to try to reclaim it's once default behavior. SPAD simply allowed applications to run some registered code to get back to some state. SPAD was a big switch and set defaults for the entire computer. SPAD will still be available in Windows Vista to allow an administrator to configure the machine defaults and hide access, but will not be the primary defaults experience for users.
In Windows Vista, a new set of functionality is provided. This new set of functionality is called "Default Programs". Default Programs was designed to help users make choices about their default behaviors. A large part of this is that defaults in Windows Vista and beyond will be primarily controlled at the Per User level instead of the Per Machine level. This allows much more flexibility for the multi-user computer environment. Default Programs gives an application:

  • A simplified process for taking defaults.
  • Per user file and protocol associations.
  • Programmatic way to check for defaults.
  • Common Windows UI to reuse.
  • Advertising area within Windows.

You can read more about these mechanisms here.

[-] Fixed character loss (???? ????? ??????) in Windows editor. If you use characters which do not exist in the selected charset, e.g. you type Cyrillic characters when Latin-1 is selected for this message (this may happen when you are forwarding a message which was initially in Latin-1 and adding a comment with Cyrillic characters), the Cyrillic characters are properly displayed but when you save a message, the Cyrillic characters are lost, i.e. saved as question marks.
[-] When using manual filters with forwarding action with templates in different alphabets from the original message, there were question marks ?????.
[-] 0005261: MailTicker won't hide if you click on "Apply Changes".
[-] (#0006108) Access Violation when opening Smartpad twice during compressing folder process.
[-] Problem with Table properties dialogue in HTML editor.
[-] (#0002134) Difference between sizes of pages in multi-page dialogs.
[*] Automatic backup action is now being confirmed (once).
[-] Widths of tabs that are used in the main window (below the lists of folders and messages) was not adequate when using another language of The Bat! interface, different from Windows locale.
[-] The captions of tabs that are used in the main window (below the lists of folders and messages) might use Latin character set instead of the proper character set, when using another language of The Bat! interface, different from Windows locale.
[-] Some captions in the account properties dialog were out of bounds.
[*] Better calculation of editor controls size in Sorting Office.
[-] (#0003077) The ISO character sets include invalid characters.
[-] The number of days passed since the installation of The Bat! in the "Unregistered" screen was cropped.
[-] (#0002803) When Theme Services were disabled, a pressed button in the connection centre interface was painted with blue (cyan) dots.
[-] Fixed editor save problem (beta issue).
[*] (#0006188) Possible data loss after editing opened attachments! Now the attachments are being saved with read-only attribute files to disk, so the external editor should not allow the user to edit the file.
[-] Removed the "ServerInfo" checkbox, The Bat! always automatically determines the servers (BETA ISSUE).
[-] Fixed invalid caption placement in the Find&Replace dialog.