I haven’t blogged for a while – I’ve been extremely busy with the development of Writing Outliner Word add-on, and today, I can finally announce this final beta release!

Beta 4 of this Word-on mostly contains improvements of existing functions, so that it’s easier to understand and use.

I’d like to thank you all people who has sent  me so much useful feedbacks, comments and suggestions (I know, not all of them have been implemented, but let’s get version 1 out first, I promise I’ll keep work on it 🙂

I’ve set the release date of version 1 to be

July 8th, 2010.

And I’ve decided to sweeten the pot with a very attractive pre-sale, here is the deal – start from now till July 7th, you can pre-order Writing Outliner for only $39.50 – 50% off of the list price.

Pre-order today!

What’s New in Beta 4?

• Complete Office 2010 (Word 2010) support. The strange problems with Word 2010 should go away now!
• Enhanced compilation (The processing of merging separate documents into a single document).
  Now ou can set your compilation options – generate TOC (table of content), apply heading styles to chapter names, etc (see screenshot below).
  The compilation has become very easy due to the UI improvements.
  
• More friendly to academic writing:
  • Fixed: In Word 2007 and above, the ‘current list’ bibliography will be lost after reopening the project.
  • The compilation now handles footnotes/endnotes well.
  • Fixed: Word documents’ footnotes/endnotes option loses after reopened.
• Better support for project-based writing:
  • All documents in the same top-level folder (such as the drafts folder) now shares the same style set.
  • New outline node type – folders. You’ll be switched to the multi-column outline will be shown when a folder is selected.
  • In addition setting target word/character counts for a single document, you can now also set target word character counts for folders.
• Enhancements of the Project Manager outline and Multi-column Outliner:
  • Print the Multi-column Outline.
  • Now the visibility, width and order of the columns are remembered even you restart Microsoft Word.
• Other usability improvements:
  • Shortcuts for toggling Project Manager Outliner, Document Properties Pane.
  • Ctrl + click to open document in new tab.
  • Use balloon hint window to show document summary when your mouse is hovered above a outline node or a document tab.
  • New ‘Keep Document Window Focused After Selecting A Document’ option.
  • Show word count (in gray color) for each document in the project outline.
• And a lot of other bugfixes and enhancements, such as problem with International character input, installation for multiple Windows users, loss of Word documents’ page setup info (margins, columns), etc.

Why Pre-order Writing Outliner Now?

• You’ll immediately get the license key which can be used to unlock the full version of Writing Outliner which will be released July 8th, 2010.
• You’ll save $39.50! (Or save $99 if you buy MindVisualizer mind mapping software as well).

Don’t miss this chance, but now!

What To Expect Next?

The cork board! With the corkboard documents in a writing project can be viewed and arranged as index cards, it’ll be a powerful tool for writers.

Since I’ll increase the price of Writing Outliner as new major features being added, so I strongly recommend you to pre-order Writing Outliner now and you’ll eligible to upgrade to future version!