BETA RELEASE 3 HAS BEEN DEPRECATED IN FAVOR OF BETA RELEASE 4.  PLEASE UPGRADE TO THE LATEST VERSION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. 

Introducing Civil Netizen for Mac OS X. Though we’re two weeks behind our intended release date, we were able to stamp out a lot of interoperability and Mac OS X specific bugs with that extra time. We have yet to buy our first Intel Mac, and are still working on migrating Netizen to the new Firefox 1.5 code base, so it may take one more release cycle until we support Universal Binaries.

As mentioned in my previous post, this is a REQUIRED UPGRADE. I tried to maintain network compatibility, but given all the interoperability work and bug fixes required to get this Mac version going, I had no other choice. Previous beta releases of Civil Netizen will not be able to connect and share parcels with this new release. To alleviate this hassle in the future, this release includes automatic update notification so that users can be notified of future versions.

Aside from the numerous bug fixes, this release includes new features on the Track Status page. Pickup progress and status information has been improved and we added a couple of features to help you manage your expired parcels. Also, retrying and resuming downloads of incomplete parcels is now more reliable than ever. This release also includes a minor visual refresh of Civil Netizen for Windows. We rearranged some buttons and added some color to the application pages to more closely match the layout of the new Mac release. Special thanks to James Layton for helping me debug and test this release and to Mark Mentovai for showing the way to a more sane DMG setup.

Please continue to send us bug reports if you run into any problems. As always, I’ll help you work around any problems that you may encounter or questions you may have with the software. If you have a suggestion, feel free to post it on our discussion forums, this blog entry or directly to us via the support email.

A detailed set of changes and important known issues in this release is provided below.

1. New Features in this release

Case 42: Mac OS X port
Case 250: Software Update Notification
Case 190: Partial file summary under Track Status
Case 76: Expired parcels management options

2. Bugs Fixed in this release

Case 231: Ampersands in parcel filename causes failures
Case 191: Prevent pickups of expired parcels
Case 155: Civil Netizen doesn’t run automatically after installation
Case 200: Incorrect active pickup count
Case 217: Prevent pickup retries of expired parcels
Case 207: Expored and incomplete parcels should be unpackable
Case 156: Clicking on an item in Track Status hangs the UI
Case 232: Network discovery and connection times out with no success
Case 218: Crash on pickup attempt
Case 102: Expiration status not updated in real time

3. What’s not included in this release

• Not all localized text appear on screen for tooltips and error messages
• Support for corporate firewalls is an upcoming feature that is not yet included in this release.

4. Known Issues

• Under Mac OS X, there is no way to reopen a Civil Netizen window after closing it. Clicking on the dock icon of a running instance of Civil Netizen doesn’t launch a new window and there is no “File” menu option for opening a new window. This will be implemented in the next release. For now, shut down Civil Netizen and restart it to open a window.
• Some users may experience a startup error where the application complains that a file “profileSelection.xul” cannot be loaded. This is a known problem and will be fixed in a future release
• File type associations are not yet made by the installer so double clicking on parcels (.parcel) and pickup slips (.slip) will not yield any results. We are hoping to fix this for the next release.

5. MD5 Fingerprint
CivilNetizen.beta-release-2.en-US.win32.exe:  4685bfbbda47531487b70134bbd2a714
CivilNetizen.beta-release-3.en-US.macosx.dmg:  23a03e54093222e2bc2e299b8e1c6c44