Version 5.10 Feb 19, 2024
- Addresses a critical performance problem on macOS 14.3 “Sonoma”.
- Rebuilds Mouse Prompting to improve reliability and fix bugs. Try it by enabling it in Settings : Controls : Mouse and Trackpad.
- Adds Document Bigger / Document Smaller items under Format ▶︎ Size. These items resize the entire document without requiring Select-All. They also try to keep the text centered or keep the current selection in view. ⌃⌥⌘ + and ⌃⌥⌘ – are the menu shortcuts.
- Adds a Lock Position toggle to the Focus arrow. This locks the arrow at its relative (not absolute) location. Its use is to prevent accidental touches from moving the Focus arrow. Control-click the Focus arrow or use Prompter ▶︎ Lock Focus Arrow to toggle the lock.
- Replaces the "Shift" Speed Boost key in Prompt mode with a formal “S” Speed Boost Hot Key. This affords better compatibility with system features, lowers the chance of inadvertent activation, and the Hot Key can be re-mapped or removed.
- Improves menu shortcuts in Prompt mode so they no longer flash the menu bar.
- Improves the “Contact Support” Help menu item to populate the email with information we usually ask for.
- Improves the software updater and update checking intervals.
- Fixes a bug with certain text operations inadvertently clearing the selection.
- Fixes a bug where the “What's New” window always shows up when switching between older and newer versions.
- Fixes Settings reset in the Prompter tab not updating all controls.
- Fixes the Reset… button in the Preset Sizes window not working on ancient macOS releases.
- Fixes a crash when running the pt_BR localization.
- Known regression: pt_BR localization needs updating.
- Makes other small fixes and changes.
- Improves a bunch of internals for upcoming releases.
Overview:
- Perform line-by-line and supertitle scrolling. Hold ⌥ Option and press ↓ Down Arrow or ↑ Up Arrow in Prompt mode. Go back or forward an exact number of lines, or hold the keys to skip around.
- Re-style text everywhere with the Select menu. ⌃ Control-click on styled text, then choose the menu to match it everywhere and re-style it with the Font and Color panels. You can also select text enclosed-by particular symbols (like parentheses) for quickly styling instruction.
- Invert for emphasis. Invert black and white ⇧⌘I within selections or toggle the feature on and off during typing. Invert All Colors exists alongside it under the menu.
- Numbered Bookmarks and multi-line support. Bookmarks insert at the start of a line and are automatically numbered in the menu. Add Bookmark ⌘K now adds a bookmark to every line with a selection. A new Remove Bookmark ⇧⌘K feature similarly affects multiple lines.
- New Speed tab in the Controls preferences. The tab consolidates speed adjustments and adds new options. Set a default speed, enforce the default speed when exiting Prompt mode, or make pausing the prompter set a specific speed.
- Preview window improvements. The preview now reflects what Prompt Mode looks like if you use the Prompt in a window preference. The window title indicates the output according to your settings. It also improves the Change Resolution button when resizing the second display.
- Various improvements. Cleans up interface inconsistencies, restructures the Format menu, changes Numpad 0 on extended keyboards to set speed to 0 (not 10), optimizes common functions in Edit mode, and more.
- Lots of fixes. Fixes a crash, a rare out-of-sync bug in the Preview window, a bunch of visual bugs, a bug on older macOS releases that required pressing the Mode button twice, and more.
Details:
Line Scrolling:
- Prompt mode can advance or retreat line-by-line. Hold ⌥ Option and press ↓ Down Arrow or ↑ Up Arrow in Prompt Mode. If you changed your Hot Key preferences, it matches your “Scroll Up” and “Scroll Down” Hot Keys while holding ⌥ Option.
- Line scrolling advances towards the middle of the Focus Arrow. If the Focus Arrow is not used, the feature advances lines at the top of the window or screen.
Select Menu:
- The ⌃ Control-clicking on text. menu allows you to quickly perform multiple edits or re-style a document. The menu is also available in the shortcut menu when
- Here’s now it works: select any text, then open the Select menu. The options allow you to select every occurence of text matching a property of your current selection:
- Select Text Like performs a quick find and selects all results. If case matters, hold the ⌥ Option key to change it to Select Text Exactly, which is a case-sensitive variant. For example: You can select all instances of a speaker’s name and make them UPPERCASE for maximum attention.
- Select Styles Like matches style attributes like font, size, color, underline, baseline, and all other style attributes of the current selection. You can then use the Font and Color panels to change the style everywhere it occurs.
- Select Color Like matches only the color of the selection (ignoring font, size, and non-color style attributes). You can use then use the Color panel to change a color everywhere it is used.
- Select Paragraphs Like matches all properties of the currently selected paragraph. Paragraph properties are those you see in the Ruler, like alignment and tab stops, and all of the line spacing settings in the Spacing sheet. Examples: Select and change all right-aligned paragraphs. Because it matches all paragraph properties, a right-aligned paragraph with line spacing differing from your selection is considered different and will not match.
- Select Text + Style Exactly only matches text with the same content and style. It's a highly-specific choice, when particular text and style can occur elsewhere independently, but you only want to capture the matching combination.
- Invert Selection allows you to think in opposites. Say you're given a document with Brilliant Orange text and clashing ugly colors chosen in MS Word. To remove all of the ugly colors quickly, select the Brilliant Orange text with Select Color Like, then choose Invert Selection which selects everything except Brillant Orange, then open the Color Panel and set everything else to a tasteful Sky White or whatever.
- Select Enclosed-By matches all text enclosed by symbols in the current selection. For example, if you have text in parentheses (like this) select “(like this)” and choose Select Enclosed-By to select all text enclosed by parentheses. The feature is useful for finding instructions or special references.
- The matching is very specific. For example, if your text was “(like this.)” with a period next to the right-parentheses, it would try to find text surrounded by “(“ and “.)” because it views a chain of symbols as significant.
- When the symbols differ, the feature works reasonably with nested symbols. If your text is “This (is (a) test)” and you select text enclosed-by (parentheses), the feature selects “(is (a) test)”, selecting the more-encompassing outer term.
- When symbols are the same, it cannot detect nesting because every opening is also a closing. This case will be improved in future versions.
- If a document has a typo or is missing a symbol, it could return selections extending across multiple paragraphs or wherever the next occurence of its closing symbol occurs. For peace of mind, it’s sometimes better to hold the ⌥ Option key and use the variation called Line Limited, that limits the selection matching to a per-line basis.
Bookmarks Rework:
- Bookmarks are automatically numbered in menus.
- Add Bookmark ⌘K gains a corresponding Remove Bookmark ⇧⌘K menu item in the Bookmarks menu.
- Bookmarks now operate on a per-line basis and try to maintain one bookmark per line. Add Bookmark now adds a bookmark to the start of a line with a selection. Remove Bookmark removes all bookmarks on a line with a selection. This matches most real use.
- In concordance with “one bookmark per line”, Add Bookmark no longer adds a bookmark to a line that already has a bookmark (even if the bookmark is not at the start of the line). Attempting to add a bookmark to a line flashes other bookmarks on the line.
- Bookmark behavior supports multiple selections. Every line containing a selection is affected by Add Bookmark and Remove Bookmark actions, even if the line is not selected in its entirety. This makes it easy to add or remove bookmarks while editing anywhere on the line.
- When adding named bookmarks, all added bookmarks take on the same name.
- The Bookmark rework when combined with the new Select features, makes it easy to quickly bookmark sections of text that accompany a particular piece of text (a symbol, a speaker’s name, etc.) or a particular style.
- We discourage using multiple bookmarks on a line or placing bookmarks after the start of a line. These are not common uses and will not be well-supported in the future. Existing documents are not altered and you can still drag and drop or copy and paste bookmarks to any location in a document. This gives you time to transition your bookmark thinking if you used bookmarks uncommonly.
New Speed Settings:
- Consolidates all speed settings to a common tab in the Controls preferences.
- Adds a “Default speed” setting for new documents.
- Adds a “Set default speed exiting Prompt mode” checkbox. Some operators want to enter Prompt mode at the default speed more often than not. Setting the speed on exit (instead of enter) achieves this while affording changes before entering Prompt mode.
- Adds a “Set speed on pause” setting. Every time the prompter is paused, it sets the specified speed. This makes pause serve as both a stop and a speed-reset so that start resumes from a specific speed. This accompanies a slider so operators can make pausing set a non-default speed value (like a lower speed to allow them to manually ramp-up the speed after a pause, if desired).
- The “Speed change rate” slider and “Changing speed starts the prompter” settings functions are unchanged from previous releases.
- Removes the “Pausing the prompter sets speed to 0” preference. If it was enabled, it gets one-time migrated to “Set speed on pause: 0” in version 5.9.
Other Improvements and Fixes:
- Adds new “Invert Black and White and “Invert All Colors” menu items that only affect selection under .
- The Invert Black and White selection shortcut is now ⇧⌘I. The document-variation shortcut is now ⌥⇧⌘I. Think: Hold more keys to invert more content.
- Improves the Timer. The remaining time estimate works when scrolling backwards and paused. The timer no longer resizes as it changes.
- Improves setting colors on the Timer. The feature may temporarily override low-contrast colors on the background with higher contrast colors of its choosing.
- Improves the “Change Resolution” button in the Preview window for the second screen. The button chooses a better value for its one-click behavior. The button also has a side-menu if you wanted to choose a more-specific but also compatible resolution for the second screen. Note: If the “Displays Preferences” button appears instead, you might need to make multiple changes, usually by raising the resolution of your main display.
- Improves bookmark activation to line up closer to content.
- Improves the consistency of the Reset Ruler Tabs feature. It sometimes required selecting the whole line yourself to take effect.
- Improves edit tracking to not scroll the Preview or Talent content if a selection is already visible (useful when using the new Select menu).
- Improves the Preview window title to reflect what it is previewing. If a second display is connected, the title is annotated with “(Second Screen)”, otherwise “(Full-Screen)”.
- Changes Numpad 0 on extended keyboards to no longer set the speed to 10.
- Allows margin width to be set up to 75%, previously capped at 50%.
- Fixes a possible crash involving multiple documents.
- Fixes a bug where changing screen resolutions wouldn’t line up the focus arrow exactly between 2 screens.
- Fixes a bug with macOS Monterey and newer where using screens of similar sizes would offset the focus arrow slightly on the second display when it should not have (a different bug from the previous line).
- Fixes a rare bug where the Preview window could get out-of-sync with the second screen due to a line-wrapping error.
- Fixes a bug with the Preview window not always opening (or staying closed) on app launch.
- Fixes a drawing problem in the Preview where changing only the width margin would not draw outline borders.
- Fixes the Start and Mode toolbar buttons requiring two-clicks to function on specific older macOS releases. Rewriting these buttons changed their behavior slightly.
- Fixes the Prompt : Toolbar : Hide preference so it doesn’t grow the window when returning to Edit mode.
- Fixes the Mode toolbar item not updating on older macOS releases if the Hide Toolbar preference was enabled.
- Fixes the Bookmarks item not appearing correctly in the toolbar configuration sheet.
- Fixes certain toolbar items moving upward every time Customize Toolbar was invoked in a document window.
- Fixes other subtle inconsistencies with toolbar buttons which could arise.
- Fixes scroll bar mouse over not working correctly in Prompt mode when the window size changed.
- Fixes adding a bookmark into an empty document so it no longer messes up the font.
- Fixes a bug where entering Prompt mode could hide your document window until relaunch.
- Fixes a problem where “Create Diagnostic Report…” could hang the app for a bit while an internal operation timed out.
- Fixes the Release Notes not showing in the Help guide.
- Fixes a couple of one-off memory leaks.
- Menu housekeeping: “Spacing” moves from the Baseline submenu to the Ruler submenu (as it alters the paragraph, not the baseline). “Insert Image…” moves from the File menu to the Edit menu. “Export…” is now in its own section in the File menu. The “Properties” shortcut in the File menu is removed (it’s seldomly used and the shortcut was wonky). “Show Log” always shows up in Help menu. Restructures the Format and shortcut menus (simplifying the latter). Some other minor changes here and there.
- Visually centers the options at the bottom of the Insert Image sheet.
- Rewrote key portions of editing code for stability.
- Optimizes common functions in Edit mode, mostly noticed in larger documents.
- Fixes and improves the internals all over the place.
- Updates the End User License Agreement.
- Updates the Help guide, but if you made it this far, you've read most of it.
- Improves cursor behavior. The cursor now hides more appropriately, such as when using Hot Keys and when idle in Prompt mode.
- Improves the preference for tracking edits. If the preference is off, it avoids scrolling the talent content.
- Fixes app launching on macOS 10.11 “Yosemite”.
- Speculative fix for a rare crash on macOS 10.9 “Mavericks” through 10.15 “Big Sur”.
- Fixes a redraw bug.
- Makes numerous internal improvements.
Additions:
- Added “Show Prompter in Document” toggle to the Prompt menu. This reveals the focus arrow, time bar, and margins in Edit mode allowing you to better match content between mode changes. It also has a corresponding preference and is on by default.
- Prompt in a window is on by default.
- New streaming support. The operator window appears in more streaming apps.
- Added “Resize Document Prompter” and size presets under the Window menu. This sets the size of the prompter and makes it easier to work with specific resolutions, especially for streaming. The size list can be customized.
- Added a “Lock Window Resize” toggle to the Window menu. This prevents accidental window resizes in Edit mode, which has utility when streaming.
- Remade the Prompter preferences tab. It has better organization and annotation, and new settings to control “Show Prompter in Edit mode” and “Show bookmarks in Prompt mode” defaults.
- Added a margin alignment control in the Preview panel. The allows the prompter to be aligned to any edge or corner when using margins (not just center-aligned). This has utility if you mount a display next to a camera absent a mirror enclosure.
- What’s New panel that serves as a more-visual overview of recent changes.
Improvements:
- Improved window zoom behavior with dual-screen prompting. Zoom sizes your document window to match its Prompt mode size (or as close as it can).
- Improves synchronizing positions when changing modes, when the prompter content does not change size.
- Windowed prompting now (generally) leaves windows where you position them between modes unless the window changes sizes.
- Made additional optimizations in Prompt mode.
- Made window resizing smoother.
- Control-clicking the “Change Resolution” button in the Preview window (if a second screen is at too high of a resolution) shows a menu of applicable resolutions.
- Allowable width margin increased from 50% to 75%.
- Made focus arrow colors more vibrant. Note: Users need to set the focus arrow color again to get the new colors.
- The speed increment slider in the General preferences now allows for any increment between 0.1 and 1.
Fixes:
- Fixed Hot Keys so they do not trigger alongside menu shortcuts.
- Fixed the scrollbar so it shows up on mouseover in Prompt mode.
- Fixed a bug where the elapsed timer starts counting upon entering Prompt mode before prompting started.
- Fixed a subtle off-by-1 pixel bug that could crop up in unusual circumstances.
- Fixed tab stops and the “Reset Ruler” feature to use the correct tab stop defaults.
- Fixed the Font panel flashing briefly on launch. Once you notice, you can’t unsee it. Now that you can’t unsee it, you have reason to upgrade.
- Fixed various minor interface glitches on macOS 11 “Big Sur”.
- Other internal improvements and fixes. A lot of changes.
- Fixes problems changing text capitalization.
- Fixes other minor bugs.
- Improves support for macOS 10.15 “Catalina”.
- Improves prompter speed adjustments and arrow key behavior in Prompt mode. This should also improve third-party controller usage. Your may want to revisit controller configurations that use arrow keys.
- Adds a new "speed boost” feature in Prompt mode that applies when holding the Shift key. This can be useful when configuring controllers with limited buttons / behaviors.
- Adds “Straighten Quotes” and “Smarten Quotes” items to the Edit menu. These menu items change the quote style of the current selection, which is useful if you’ve been handed a document with a mix of both and you need to make things consistent.
- Fixes an issue that required clicking the Mode toolbar button or Start/Pause toolbar button twice to take effect.
- Fixes an issue where de-minimizing a document in Prompt mode without re-minimizing it to the Dock could leave it stuck with an overlay message.
- Fixes subtle problems with the case Transformations feature (capitalize, uppercase, and lowercase).
- Fixes a problem with the Find Bar “Select All” feature.
- Includes extensive under-the-hood changes to improve compatibility and fix issues.
- Updates the Preview window.
- Updates the focus arrow image and colors.
- Updates the default style to use Helvetica Neue.
- Enhances Apply Default Style to retain distinguishing markup.
- Adds a preference under General to perform Apply Default Style to imported documents (turned on by default).
- Adds a preference under Prompt to run at a maximized window size on a single display.
- Improves the “Simplify export style” checkbox in the Export sheet to keep colored text.
- Improves set highlight color to show the highlight color being set.
- Fixes undo/redo with font size changes if the text selection was changed.
- Fixes the font size menu shortcuts to work more consistently.
- Fixes problems with the default line spacing not always being applied.
- Fixes an issue with .docx export.
- Fixes a layout exception.
- Fixes a potential crash when changing the timer font and color.
- Fixes a possible crash on quit.
- Increases the unlicensed demo time to 5 minutes.
- Uses App Notarization.
- Includes various small fixes for things like Dark Mode, updates the Help guide, and has other internal improvements.
- Adds macOS 10.14 “Mojave” compatibility and critical fixes. Accept this update before installing “Mojave”. If you install “Mojave” first, you may need to re-download Presentation Prompter from our site.
- Reworks the Preview window to be faster and use less memory.
- Making edits when using a second display is faster and smoother.
- Making changes to your document can now track in the Preview window in single-screen use.
- Makes the “Bigger” and “Smaller” font size menu items increase and decrease 10 points at a time.
- Adds page numbers to printed documents.
- Adds support to the timer toolbar to display elapsed hours.
- Fixes issues when inverting black and white colors.
- Fixes other minor bugs.
- Removes 32-bit support.
- Improves scroll performance (reduces judder on certain systems).
- Improves performance when only one screen is connected.
- Fixes a rare problem where entering Prompt mode would fail the first time it was attempted.
- Fixes a problem where menu shortcuts for bookmarks 1 through 10 were not always usable.
- Fixes a problem where the dictionary panel could appear in Prompt mode.
- Adds macOS 10.13 “High Sierra” compatibility and critical fixes.
- Adds a "Remove Underline Colors" item in the Format > Document menu to remove custom colors set for underlines in a script.
- Adds a “Second display tracks edits” setting in the General preferences to control edit tracking when a second display is connected.
- Other minor fixes and improvements.
- Talent screen follows along while editing a document.
- Arrow up and arrow down scrolls smoother when prompting.
- Double-clicking bookmarks brings up the naming window. Holding shift while double-clicking selects all text up to the next bookmark.
- Adds a Loop Document item under the Prompter menu. It does what you would expect.
- Adds a “Simplify export style” checkbox to file export. This allows one-click exports that are better suited for sharing and word processing apps without modifying the original document.
- Adds a Preview button to file export. This allows you to see the file export before saving (useful with the above addition).
- Reverts the Paste and Paste and Match Style shortcut change made in 5.3.1. If you want Paste and Match as the default, swap its shortcut with Paste in System Preferences: Keyboard: Shortcuts: App Shortcuts.
- The Preview window makes it more obvious why dual-screen options might be disabled and provides new one-click buttons to enable them when possible.
- “Hide edits from talent” now remembers the last custom image when switching options.
- Fixes an exception that could lead to a crash when using patterns in Find and Replace.
- Fixes a problem with the Find indicator getting stuck.
- About window more clearly indicates license and build information.
- Improves license handling code.
- Updates Help guide and other documents.
- Other minor changes.
- Adds macOS 10.12 “Sierra” compatibility and critical fixes.
- Adds new positioning behavior: The talent now scrolls to the operator's position when entering Prompt mode. This is the opposite of previous behavior (the operator’s position would scroll to the talent’s position). A new checkbox in the Prompt preferences named “Talent uses operator position” can be unchecked to revert to the previous behavior if desired.
- Adds a new Preview option: Hide edits from talent. When using two screens, this makes the second display say ”Standby” or appear “Blank” when in Edit mode. This obscures editing for the talent when in Edit mode, but shows the document in Prompt mode. This option is only available if the "Use second display" option above it is turned on. Custom images with company logos or other branding or messages may be shown. Use the pulldown menu next to the checkbox in the Preview window to change the image.
- Swaps shortcuts for “Paste” and “Paste and Match Style”. This means “Paste” (⌘V) does a “Paste and Match Style” operation. The option previously named “Paste and Match Style” (⌥⇧⌘V) is now named “Paste as Copied” to more accurately explain what it does. This new behavior should save many hand contortions when editing.
- Adds new shortcut: ⇧⌘U applies Transform > Uppercase to selected text.
- Improves scroll performance with images.
- Improves scroll performance on certain older hardware.
- Remembers and defaults to the last selected export format.
- Fixes an exception that could lead to a crash.
- Fixes issues where the file export options could sometimes not appear.
- Fixes the green window maximize button errantly performing “Enter Full Screen” behavior.
- Fixes the focus arrow and time bar sometimes showing up “blank” when entering Prompt mode on newer macOS releases.
- Fixes Preview window flip animations not occurring on newer macOS releases.
- Fixes issues opening documents with pure black text on a pure white background.
- Fixes subtle drawing issues when changing large text selections.
- Fixes and improves other minor things.
- Adds OS X 10.10 Yosemite compatibility. This update is required and should be installed prior to updating to Yosemite. Otherwise, close the Preview window if updating on Yosemite.
- Adds “Prompt in a window” to the Prompt preferences. This allows windowed operation when using a single screen only, useful for webcasts and other cases where additional content needs to be viewed by the operator while prompting.
- Adds two new control settings: “Changing speed starts prompter” and “Pausing the prompter sets speed to 0”. The former (on by default) automatically restarts the prompter if it is paused and the speed is changed. The latter sets the prompter speed to “0” when paused and restores the speed before pause when starting again.
- Adds Option + Number to set negative speeds when the “Number keys set speed” setting is turned on. Additionally, the backtick character ` next to the number row (on certain keyboards) will set speeds to 0 (implicit pause).
- Adds text alignment and line spacing to the default style in the preferences.
- Fixes a potential crash when using uppercase, lowercase, and capitalize from the Transformations menu and improves Unicode compatibility.
- Fixes a small memory leak when activating the application.
- Fixes changing tabs in the preferences window causing a temporary drawing glitch.
- Updates and improves 3rd party frameworks Presentation Prompter uses for various features.
- Improves other small issues.
- Fixes a crash that could occur when dragging the end margin tab to a certain point in the ruler if the “Prevent margin editing” preference was turned off.
- Fixes a memory leak with the last used document.
- Fixes a memory leak that could occur in windows containing sheets when going to Prompt mode.
- Fixes minimized windows with sheets being interactive in Prompt mode.
- Fixes QuickLook writing notifications to the Console in some situations.
- Improves QuickLook preview speed and interaction with larger Presentation Prompter documents and documents with images.
- Changes menu shortcuts for bookmarks 1-10 back to Command + Control + Number.
- Fixes and improves other small issues.
- Improves scrolling performance on OS X 10.9 Mavericks.
- Improves scrolling performance on Retina displays.
- Improves the speed when changing between Prompt and Edit mode.
- Adds support for 3+ screen configurations. Other screens can now do system video mirroring of screen 2 provided your Mac can drive 3+ displays.
- Changes the first 10 bookmarks so their menu shortcuts are Command-Number instead of Command-Control-Number.
- Fixes bookmark previous/next sometimes not working in Edit mode.
- Fixes issues where the prompter might display fragments of a line over other content.
- Fixes an issue that prevented entering Prompt mode.
- Fixes an issue where a visible scroll bar might result in the talent’s script moving slightly when changing modes.
- Fixes a drawing issue while prompting on certain Macs running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
- Fixes windowed prompting permitting documents to be opened, edited, and saved.
- Fixes a rare issue where turning on the Talent screen might make windows on the main screen needlessly center.
- Fixes a rare issue where the Talent screen might overlap content on the main screen.
- Fixes spell check, grammar check, and smart copy/paste so their states are remembered and applied to new documents.
- Fixes an issue where the Preview window might move between launches.
- Fixes an issue where the Color panel might move between launches.
- Fixes the preview toolbar button being enabled when comparing file versions.
- Fixes the style control being scrollable when it should not be in the general preferences window.
- Fixes the plain text encoding control not enabling the “Reset” button when changed in the general preferences window.
- Fixes and improves other small issues.