Welcome to our new user-engagement website, Discuss.Epiforge.com. Moving forward, this will be the best place to learn and chat about Grindstone. The older website (community.epiforge.com) is still up at the time of writing, but only temporarily and as a reference.
General
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Ease of Input: Grindstone will now confirm dialogs when the enter key is pressed while a multi-line text box has focus. A new checkbox has been added to the General tab of Options to control this behavior. Unchecking it will return Grindstone to its previous default behavior. Users may also hold down the shift key while pressing enter to insert a new line without confirming the current dialog.
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Rewind: There is a new feature available in the Grindstone menu that allows users to easily restore backups that Grindstone has been making of their databases. Previously, restoration of these backups would only occur if Grindstone encountered an error loading a database. Now, users may decide to travel back in time on their own.
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The Help menu’s Discussion Forum and View Notes for this Release options have been updated with links to this website.
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We fixed a number of minor glitches and rarely-occurring errors in this release that are not otherwise mentioned in these notes.
Project Management and Time Tracking
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Duplicate: It is now possible to duplicate work items, time slices, assignments, properties, and list values. This feature is accessible from the context menu when right-clicking on the above in a view and also in the toolbar of views. When the duplication is complete, the selection in the view will be changed to the newly created items. When a work item is duplicated, property values for the work item are copied as well, but not the work item’s associated assignments or time slices. When a property is duplicated, list values and property values for the property are copied as well.
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Easy Timeframe Editing: If, when the timeframe editor appears and is not editing a gap from the Gap Detector, the user simply selects and adds work items without ever fiddling with the time range slider below the list of work items, Grindstone will just assume the user intends that each added work item should be given an evenly divided amount of the total time. This magic will disappear if the user so much as touches either the time range sliders beneath the work items list or the manual entry date fields beneath it.
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Keyboard Navigable Welcome Back: The welcome back window will now automatically focus the first option and will check other options that get focus via use of the directional and tab keys. Now, when the welcome back window pops up and is the foreground window, users are able to more easily select an option and confirm the dialog using only the keyboard.
Grindstone Pro
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Grindstone Pro is a whole new way to show your support for Grindstone’s development even if you have no need for Grindstone Sync, and get some extras from us for doing so. Licenses are machine-specific and cost 5 USD for a month or 60 USD for the lifetime of the device.
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Grindstone Pro introduces Extensions, allowing Pro users to customize and extend the functionality of Grindstone.
We have created the following topic categories on this website to support this new feature:
- Grindstone 4 Extension Gallery - get extensions, talk about popular extensions, and to share your own extensions
- Grindstone 4 Extension Ideas - to volunteer ideas for new extensions for Grindstone 4, and comment on and express support for the ideas of others
- Grindstone 4 Extension Development - ask and answer questions about creating extensions for Grindstone 4
Grindstone Sync
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Private Clouds: It is now possible to set a custom URL for Grindstone Sync Cloud. This feature supports customers wishing to run Grindstone Sync Server internally with multiple teams. Please contact us directly if you are interested in doing this.
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Offer to Reset Synchronization: Whenever Grindstone has a problem communicating with Grindstone Sync or one of its changes is rejected, it will now offer the user the option of resynchronizing the local database. This means that whatever Grindstone Sync believes to be the state of the data will be taken as the given and any differences on Grindstone’s side will be discarded so that the two sides are in agreement again. This feature was introduced to address the issues suffered by a minority of Grindstone Sync users which have occasionally experienced synchronization loss due to rare and intermittent issues such as dropped packets.
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Manually Reset Synchronization: An option to manually reset synchronization has been added to the Grindstone Sync option in the Grindstone menu.
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We fixed a defect that could cause Grindstone to become unresponsive while using a Grindstone Sync database when the computer wakes from sleep.
Notifications
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All notifications other than those listed below will now be displayed for a maximum of ten seconds:
- offers to buy a license for Grindstone Pro or to try Grindstone Sync Cloud
- monitored views that require attention
- successful Grindstone updates
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Anouncements: Grindstone will now notify users of new posts to the Grindstone 4 Announcements category on this website.
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A No-Nag Option: There are now preferences available to disable notifications about Grindstone Pro, Grindstone Sync, and Grindstone 4 announcements if the user has a current Grindstone Pro license or is connected to Grindstone Sync. We would like to thank those of you that choose to support Grindstone’s continued development with some peace and quiet if you want it.
Crash Reporting and Diagnostics
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We dramatically improved the algorithm that generates technical details regarding unexpected errors.
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The fatal error (
) window now allows users to include their names and emails in the report sent to Epiforge so that they can be contacted regarding the issue. This feature requires manually checking a box to opt-in on a per-report basis. -
A new Saved Logged Exceptions option is available in the Diagnostic Tools option in the Grindstone menu (the Diagnostic Tools option only appears when diagnostic tools are enabled in Options).
Setup
- The uninstaller and updater binaries are now digitally signed so that all executables shipped with Grindstone 4 will now work properly with an application-level security apparatus such as Microsoft AppLocker.
