I recently discovered that FocusWriter was not using UTF-8 character encoding to save files on all platforms, as I had been assuming. This meant special characters (such as typographical quotes) were disappearing for some users. I have made a bugfix release that uses UTF-8 as the character encoding for opening and saving files.

Today my wife discovered a bug in FocusWriter that is probably annoying some people. When you select a wordcount based goal, or you disable the goals entirely, it respects that change for the current run of the program. Restart the program, and it’s back to a time based goal. Sorry about that! I quickly found that it was merely a syntax error, and I have made a bugfix release.

I have released FocusWriter version 1.1.0. This release includes the theme support and daily goals that I have been working on, as well as a find dialog that I wrote yesterday. It also caches the theme backgrounds to make program launching and theme switching faster. Enjoy!

It turns out that it was a lot easier to add goal support to FocusWriter than I was anticipating. It shows daily progress over 100% to encourage you to treat your daily goal as a minimum, and to go above and beyond it. In the case of a wordcount goal, it will also show you a negative percentage for those rare cases where you delete a larger block of text than you add that day, so that you can see that you went from -105% to -5%.

With both themes and goals finished, it shouldn’t be long before I make a new release. I don’t expect it to make me very long, as there are only a few things I want to finish before I do.

I’ve been working on adding theme support to FocusWriter over the last few days, and yesterday I finally finished. It took me longer than I was expecting, although I chalk that up to it being gloomy and that was strangely demotivating. Here are some screenshots of the theme interface:

Along with adding themes, I also changed the way the text scrolls by default. It used to always force the cursor to center in the screen when the user pressed a key. I found this very jarring, so I have changed it to only center the cursor when you make a change off of the screen. This way it will re-center the cursor once it reaches the bottom of the screen, but not if you go up a line and make a change. Of course, if you prefer the old way of text centering you can turn it back on in the preferences dialog.