Release Notes for version 1.9.9.9

Mostly a maintenance release, this version adds the ability to include images in the XML Sitemap generated.

For more details about release 1.9.9(.9) "Space Eagle" please read: Visual SEO 1.9.9.9 is "Space Eagle".

New Features:

1. Image XML Sitemap
   The XML Sitemap generator can now optionally include images (using Google's extension to the protocol, "Image sitemaps").
   In order to filter out irrelevant images used only to format pages, two ways are provided:
   • Skipping images with empty or missing ALT attribute (which according to HTML specifications should be left empty for irrelevant images).
     This is by far the fastest solution.
   • Using a reference count (since ALT attribute is often not populated for relevant images, the criteria is setting a maximum number of occurrences to discriminate relevant images, and if it is exceeded, the image is considered irrelevant).
     In case of large sites this can be significantly slower.
     
   The sitemap generation is performed anyway asynchronously in order not to freeze the UI, and can be cancelled.
   Images sitemaps also work from Tabular View, Export to sitemap. The layout of UI options has been reviewed.
2. Crawl images: the spider now crawls also images linked with A tags (other than the ones linked via IMG tag).
3. XML Sitemaps generation: now also images linked via the A tag are added to the sitemap; if they have a TITLE attribute, that is used too.
4. Crawl URL List now supports also image URLs (content not stored).
5. Images Inspector: tab "Distinct images" now also lists images not linked by IMG tags (but linked by A tags).

Usability / UX:

1. Added "Restore" context menu item to 3D pie charts, to restore the pie to its initial zoom and rotation.
2. Now when entering an activation code (aka license serial number) in case of error user gets a meaningful error message to help them understanding the error cause of the actual error.
3. Output window colorized.
4. Moved the craw status indicator from the top right corner of the tree view to the top of the crawl document page.
5. Crawl summary in Output window: now error messages and things to be noted are colorized to make them easier to spot.
6. Create Sitemap window: textbox with selected pages now read-only.
7. Create Sitemap options: simplified option wording ("Use canonical path" instead of "Use canonical path if exists").
8. Create Sitemap window: the "Export XML Sitemap..." button did not have the right shade of colour.
9. [Mac] Create Sitemap window/Export to Sitemap window: UI adjustments.
10. [Mac] Create Sitemap window/Export to Sitemap window: after having exported, the yes/no message box offering to open the newly created file had default button "No", now it's "Yes" as it is the more likely answer and cannot harm.
11. [Mac] Create Sitemap window/Export to Sitemap window: numeric up/down controls used to set priorities based on page level had an increment of 1 which made the control little usable (apart inputting the desired custom value with the keyboard). Now the default increment is 0.1 like in the Windows version.
12. [Mac] Fixed Verified Sites window layout.
13. [Mac] "Crawl View" and "Folder View" layout slightly improved for the numeric field showing the currently expanded level.

Performances:

1. [Win] Output window responsiveness slightly improved.
2. [Mac] Switching UI language is now slightly faster.
3. [Mac] User interface updates quicker during the crawl process.
4. [Mac] In "Crawl View" and "Folder View" the Expand/Collapse buttons are now 20% faster.

Various:

1. Partial support of WebP images (no visualizer yet, but they are downloaded as other images).
2. Images Inspector: image size in bytes computed also when some problem does not permit assessing the dimensions in pixels.
3. [Mac] Crawl-time tree, and "Crawl View" and "Folder View" trees: use a "globe" icon as root node.
4. [Mac] Installer: added translations for PL and RU languages.
5. [Mac] Some Mac machines could now have the Hardware Signature changed because of an internal fix on how the signature was generated.
6. [Mac] corrected spelling error in setup file.

Fixes:

1. Fixed condition that in some OS versions made the program crash (extreme case) or more commonly the program ignore an URL which contained square bracket characters.
   The problem was detected in "hreflang Analysis", but could theoretically have occurred also elsewhere.
2. Images Inspector: fixed crashing condition that could have occurred when examining a crawl session containing some images resources crawled not because pointed by an IMG tag but for other reason (e.g. image item in "Crawl URL List").
3. Fixed condition that in some OS versions made the program crash (extreme case) or more commonly made the program ignore an URL which contained square bracket characters.
4. Tabular View, export to XML Sitemap: exported sitemap tolerated pages with canonical links differing only in casing from the crawled URL.
   This was done to work around some IIS sites with wrong internal linking, but we feel it was a mistake and one should fix internal links (and the rest) before generating a sitemap.
5. [Win] Create Sitemap options, an option label did not fit the allotted space when language set to Russian.
6. [Mac] Crawl process: removed several conditions were the user interface could hang or freeze.
7. [Mac] Create Sitemap: clicking on expand/collapse or export buttons before data were loaded could have caused the program to crash.
8. [Mac] Create XML sitemap and Export to XML sitemap: default priority for Home Page was 0.1 instead of 1.0
9. [Mac] Fixed a regression causing a crash in some corner cases when attempting to show the tooltip of a grid column.
10. [Mac] Avoided a crashing condition when trying to load empty content to a grid.
11. [Mac] When displaying big data sets in Tabular View the progress bar was not appearing when loading the data.
12. [Mac] Preserve the width of the URL column in the tree of a new crawl.
13. [Mac] "Crawl View" and "Folder View", the numeric field showing the currently expanded level permitted setting values out of the min/max range.
14. [Mac] Fixed the correct Level of a node when adding it into the tree.