Release Notes for version 1.9.6.15

While for Windows users this is a cool maintenance release, we consider it a major milestone because it is the first public (beta) version for macOS users.

For more details about release 1.9.6 "Godot" please read: Visual SEO 1.9.6: Mac version is here!.

New Features:

• macOS version available (beta)

Usability / UX:

• Tree views (Crawl time, Crawl View and Folder View): Added "Meta Description" column.
• Pie charts: avoided that pie labels could lay over the chart.
• Crawl Progress site panel: when current crawl-delay applied is not zero, it is evidenced in red.
• Crawling UI: now the blinking red dot is at the right of the text, to appear always in the same position regardless of the text aside it.
• Tree views (Crawl time, Crawl View and Folder View): in case of multi-line titles, Title column was not easy to read; its cell contents are not vertically aligned to the top.
• Application icon revamped, using different layout and sized to better render on the Windows taskbar.

Performances:

• Crawling: slightly sped up UI responsiveness on older machines.
• Crawl progress panel now more responsive on older machines.

Various:

• EPPlus library (used to export to Excel) updated from rel. 3.0 to rel. 4.1.0
• Forced .net 4.6.1 as minimum requirement also at application level (other than setup level). If the setup requirements check failed and the program installed anyway (which shouldn't happen), user would be prompted to install .net 4.6.1
• File VisualSEO.exe is now smaller, as it is just a launcher; the main program body as been moved to a dedicated dll file. This architecture revamp should not impact normal program behaviour.
• Credits: removed MTGCComboBox, added Eto.Forms.

Fixes:

• Fixed crashing condition occasionally occurring on slower PCs when quickly scrolling the multi-column combo boxes (used in advanced crawl options to choose HTTP accept/language and user-agent).
• Fixed regression (since 1.9.5): when you close the program while still deleting a crawl session, the splash screen should appear and notify while completing the operation before closing.
  It didn't show up and the program looked frozen for a short time.
  The case is rare as normally crawl session are deleted in no time, but this could happen in case of very large crawl sets.
• Fixed regression (since 1.9.5): when you close the program and there still is a pending queue of crawled pages being saved to disk, the splash should appear and update on the number of pending items before closing.
  It didn't show up and the program looked frozen.
  The case is quite rare as normally items are saved in no time, but this could trigger in case of very large crawls.
• Crawling and UI: prevented potentially freezing condition at crawl end.
• Worked around a .net framework bug where URLs containing the percent-encoded "%2C" character (i.e. ",") where not recognized as correctly escaped and thus were escaped again by the program, resulting in fake 404 pages.
• Crawling: when user stopped crawling beforehand some pages already crawled in the parallel pipeline where not persisted nor shown in the UI; the right panel progress panel showed the correct count of visited pages, but those were then lost.
• Data Extraction: when attempting to save an unnamed expression set the focus was wrongly set on the column name instead of the expression set name.
• Data Extraction: loading an already existing expression set did not hide the two "No column added so far..." warnings.
• Data Extraction: discarding changes from an already saved expression set after having deleted all expressions/columns did not hide the two "No column added so far..." warnings.
• Setup file details, corrected copyright year and aligned notice to the one used for the installed files.
• Installed files details: corrected copyright year.
• Setup file properties: site URL property (visible from Windows "Installed programs") still had the HTTP web address. Updated with the HTTPS version.
• Setup: privacy option text updated to correctly reflect GDPR legislation (all languages).
• Minor text fixes (all languages).
• Missing translations for rare message added (all languages).