History of builds
This page describes recent builds of the Cardbox software. It describes any features that have been added or changed and lists the more important bug corrections. You can use it to help you decide whether you should download the latest build of Cardbox.
NOTE: ANY PROBLEMS LISTED HERE NO LONGER EXIST!!!
Whenever we describe a problem in this list, we are describing it before it was corrected. As long as you have a recent enough build of the program,
you will not encounter the problem. Here is how
to check your build number.
Cardbox 3.1
7-Jan-13 Build 4406
If you designed a format with more than 2048 fields in it, then any record you saved which contained data in fields beyond the 2048th would cause problems (including possible crashes) when you viewed it. The actual data on the database were not corrupted at all: they only appeared to be.
If you are using the Cardbox Server, you must also download and install the latest update to the Cardbox Server.
The upgrade corrects this problem and there is no need to rebuild the database afterwards. You should not rebuild the database before upgrading, since this would remove the apparently corrupted records.
20-Nov-12 Build 4405
If you used File > Import > from Cardbox, and the 'from' database and the 'to' database were not both Unicode, then in fields with Manual indexing, the first word transferred to the field would be unindexed (and in fields with Auto indexing, it would be indexed).
26-Jun-12 Build 4404
If you used File > Export > Print-to-Disk with a merge block that contained a reference to the extra text field, the extra text field was not output.
23-May-12 Build 4402
Viewing a record in a format containing a merge block using the {HTML-P}, {HTML-BR} or {XML} markers would cause Cardbox to crash. This is the only bug corrected in this build, so unless you are using this specialised feature there is no particular need to upgrade from Build 4401.
9-May-12 Build 4401
Licence-free. Licences no longer need to be bought or installed.
Cardbox 3.0 (including Cardbox Client)
14-Jan-12 Build 4299
When a database is backed up automatically to Amazon S3, it is stored as a number of S3 objects. The rules for constructing the object names associated with a given database have changed slightly: they are documented here. Existing backups are unaffected.
Support for Windows 95, 98 and Me has been removed and the installer will refuse to install Cardbox on these systems.
Minor bug: If you have macros that use your identity (for instance, the "short user name") and you are using a user profile other than the master one and you edit and save the native format, the identity seen by the macros may be corrupted. This corrected itself every time you reopened Cardbox, but in any case the bug has now been eliminated.
Minor bug: In the definition of a merge block, if you turned on the "blank when non-empty" attribute, it could not be turned off. Now it can.
24-Nov-11 Build 4298
The correction in Build 4297 of the pick list formatting problem caused trouble if a pick list item had an underline in it. We apologize for this error. See the blog for details.
The Edit > Find command would crash if a single backslash was entered as a search string. See the blog for details.
27-Oct-11 Build 4297
Reading image files in TIFF format: the 16-bit monochrome format is now supported.
Some Windows installations have developed a bug which leads them to report that no mouse is present, causing Cardbox to hide its toolbar (which is useless without a mouse). We have modified Cardbox to assume that a mouse is always present.
A minor formatting problem in the presentation of pick lists defined by a validator has been corrected.
Windows 7 does not correctly set the locale of newly created threads. This means that a Cardbox macro running on a computer in the Netherlands may find itself in a U.S. English environment. We have worked round this problem.
24-Nov-10 Build 4294
Rebuild format file: With databases containing user profiles, if you rebuilt a format file then you (and anyone else who was connected to the database during the rebuild) had to close and reopen the database in order to get a working user profile again. This has now been corrected.
6-Sep-10 Build 4293
64-bit Windows: Icons for database files and format files are now displayed in Windows Explorer (previously, it displayed blank icons).
Windows XP: A bug in Windows XP prevented classical Greek from being displayed correctly. We have worked round this bug.
Validation: When the "Unique Terms" validator was used in conjunction with batch editing, the validator could sometimes make mistakes about whether or not a record was unique. This could happen if the uniqueness of records later in the edit depended on records that had been processed earlier in the edit.
10-Mar-10 Build 4292
Image handling: In Build 4291, if you started editing a record that had images attached, switched to another window, and switched back to the editing window, the image display would be incorrect (although the images themselves would not be affected). This bug has now been corrected.
22-Feb-10 Build 4291
Image handling: You can now use the standard keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+E and Ctrl+S) to start and stop editing a record while you are in the image window.
Some other minor bug corrections and improvements have also been made.
21-Nov-09 Build 4288
This build corrects some minor bugs.
5-Oct-09 Build 4283
It is now possible to extract a non-image file from a Cardbox image field by copying it to the clipboard.
Some cameras create JPEG files that do not conform to the JPEG standard because they store certain important information (such as image resolution) outside the JPEG format. Cardbox will now read these files correctly.
When running Cardbox under VMWare Fusion on MacOS, a bug in VMWare Fusion made Cardbox's Help > About Cardbox command crash. Cardbox is now protected against this bug.
Cardbox now detects and reports "disk full" errors when saving images and non-image files.
30-Jul-09 Build 4282
You can drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste non-image files into an image field, as well as importing them using the popup menu.
You can copy and paste fields that are displayed as checkboxes, radio buttons, etc.
Various other small improvements and bug corrections have been made.
16-Apr-09 Build 4281
Various minor bugs have been corrected.
17-Mar-09 Build 4277
The Non-Image Files feature has been added.
13-Feb-09 Build 4275
Macros: new options on the Image.WriteToFile method to allow resizing and recompression of the images that are output, and a new method, Image.WriteToBytes, for use in Active Server Pages (ASP).
6-Jan-09 Build 4274
A minor bug affecting user profiles: if you opened a database with a profile that made a particular field invisible, and then changed to another profile that made the field visible, the field did not always appear. Similar problems would occur in the opposite direction (visible-to-invisible).
Bugs in search-and-replace: the "turn indexing off" option did not work, and in certain specialised circumstances the "Replace All" option could result in Cardbox becoming unresponsive.
Validators: in a Unicode database, some validators that used shared validation lists did not work correctly.
Users who install Ghostscript for PDF import into image fields now have additional logging information to verify that they have set up Ghostscript correctly.
20-Nov-08 Build 4272
You can now export data in the "comma-separated" file format using a separator other than the comma. To do this, you need to record your File > Export command as a macro, and then modify the resulting macro to add an extra option to the WriteToFile command. Help > Macros and Programming gives more details.
User profiles can now control whether users are allowed to turn off validation using the Tools > Options command.
A bug has been corrected that produced confusing displays if you selected some records, sorted them, deleted them, and then immediately read in new records from a file. This bug did not affect the actual data in the database, only the appearance on the screen.
12-Nov-08 Build 4271
If you had previously installed or run a version of Cardbox earlier than Build 4264 as an ordinary user (not an administrator), and subsequently installed or ran a later build as an administrator, the Registry settings would become confused and Cardbox would not be able to open files. Build 4271 corrects this problem.
2-Sep-08 Build 4269
If you were viewing records in a particular format, and someone else on the network modified that format, you did not automatically see the changes as soon as they were saved. This bug has been corrected.
19-May-08 Build 4266
A minor bug has been corrected in image storage. If you stored images in a database AND some of those images were documents (as opposed to pictures) AND a document had a large area of white space AND you later rebuilt the database, then it was possible for parts of the solid white space to be replaced by solid dark rectangles. Build 4266 does not do this, and any documents that have suffered from this problem with earlier builds will have their white background restored by Build 4266.
Some minor bugs in Unicode support for validators have been corrected.
Macros can now send commands to other programs using DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange). For example, this makes it possible to write a macro that opens a PDF file in Adobe Reader and goes to a particular page or bookmark within that PDF file. An example is given here.
It is now possible to save a whole batch of images to disk using a single "Save As" command, instead of having to display and save them one at a time.
You continue to be protected against opening file: links that come from untrusted databases, but the protection now takes the form of an error message when you click on the link. Previously the link itself was disabled and not underlined, but some people found this confusing.
If you use Adobe Reader to copy text from a PDF file to the Clipboard, it sometimes marks the text as being in a Japanese character set when it isn't, causing strange results when you paste the text elsewhere. Cardbox now detects and works round this Adobe Reader bug, so that the text that is pasted into Cardbox is exactly the text that you copied from Adobe Reader.
Various minor cosmetic improvements have been made.
25-Jan-08 Build 4262
Image files in the PNG format can now be imported.
1-Dec-07 Build 4256
The uninstaller was not working on Windows XP: this has been corrected.
Wine and CrossOver: further improvements. Macros can now be used on installations that have the appropriate DLL files installed.
11-Nov-07 Build 4254
Wine and CrossOver are environments that allow Windows programs to be run on non-Windows systems - especially Linux and the Apple Macintosh. Build 4254 makes changes to Cardbox to allow it to run more smoothly in these environments. These changes do not affect Cardbox's behaviour under Windows. (Note that macros can only be used on genuine Windows systems: this is because of a bug in Wine).
18-Jul-07 Build 4252
Cosmetic change: with some scanners and some printers, compressed documents had an unwanted pale grey background which slowed down printing. This has been removed. Existing compressed documents will benefit from this change without needing to be re-compressed.
Bug removed: when switching from a user profile in which certain fields are invisible to a profile where those fields were visible, the fields did not appear on the screen until you had redisplayed the records concerned (for instance, by going to the next record(s) and coming back again). This has been corrected and the fields now appear as soon as the new profile has been activated.
Bug removed: when using the macro system's EmailSender object to send HTML-formatted emails, a full stop was sometimes omitted from the text of an email. There was approximately a 1-in-80 chance of this happening. Non-HTML emails were unaffected by this bug.
6-June-07 Build 4251
New macro features: the ListKept and ListKeptToFile methods are the equivalent for kept selections of ListIndex and ListIndexToFile. The help file contains full details, and the macro recorder has been upgraded to record these commands when appropriate.
Previously undocumented macro feature: while you are editing a record, the CursorPosition property tells the macro where you are in the current field.
Bug removed: a crash was possible if you were using formats designed for certain printers (particularly Hewlett-Packard) on a computer that had Version 5 of the Adobe PDF Writer as the default printer.
Bug removed: a crash was possible if you were using a long-running macro that used Window.NextRecord to move from one record to the next, and you were accessing a database on a server, and the network connection was fast.
8-May-07 Build 4250
Bug removed: pressing the F1 key in the Deduplicate command did not display a help page.
Bug removed: Cardbox was unable to import monochrome TIFF images containing more than 11 million pixels.
Performance: a bug in the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 2420 PCL 6 printer driver was making the Printer Settings window very slow to open (possibly taking 5 to 10 seconds). We have modified Cardbox so that it works round this bug.
Bug removed: in search commands, the macro recorder was not recording the Preview button correctly, so that the recorded macro had to be edited by hand.
13-Mar-07 Build 4247
The Cardbox installer has been labelled so that Windows Vista recognises it as a program installer and asks the user for permission to run it.