Notational Velocity ALT 5.3

As usual with projects I didn’t plan to take as far as I did, my version numbering scheme is, well, stupid. With the next release I’m going to implement my own feed for automatic updates, so I’ll probably reset the versioning to something more incremental and sane. Anyway…

This version cleans up the preview panel a little, replacing the Aqua tabs with a nice HUD-style toggle button for Preview/Source. Other visual changes are quite minor, mostly related to spacing.

An interesting change is that NV ALT now reads its HTML and CSS for the preview from your user’s Library/Application Support/Notational Velocity folder, which it will create on launch if it doesn’t exist. There you’ll find template.html and custom.css. You can edit both to your heart’s content; if you mess up, just delete or rename them and they’ll be recreated.

I also fixed the Save HTML (which I’m pretty sure I broke) so that it saves full, valid XHTML documents. The Preview shows fragments, Save makes documents.

I’m experimenting with adding some JavaScript to the preview template to make sure that external links open in a browser, but internal (page anchor) links get some nice smooth scrolling action. Just for fun. The CSS has the basic definitions for you to play with, and you can see your changes by switching notes, which will regenerate the preview.

I managed to make all of the scrollbars look great, except for the Preview window. Web views are way too much trouble to re-skin, I found, so I scrapped all of those changes and went back to default toolbars. Elastic Threads has a fork of Notational Velocity that I really like which has great toolbars, but I’m betting he can’t get a web view to look good either! Too bad his source isn’t available… there’s a lot there to love.

Have fun with the customizations, if you try that out!