Release Notes for version 2.1.0.8

This new release is a major milestone in terms of Usability and User Experience, thanks to the new integrated help and the concomitant thorough revision of all UI elements.
For more details about release 2.1 "Chiron" please read: Visual SEO Studio 2.1: online Help.

New Features:

1. Integrated online help.
   The program now has an integrated help which constantly shows documentation for the active controls. Every single UI element is documented and explained, you can highlight its documentation by clicking on the specific control (labels, text boxes, grid cells...).
   The first time you will launch the new version of the program you will be asked if you want the independent help window to always open with it.
   A new panel in Preferences/Options permits you to change the setting, and choose a style for the help pages.

Usability / UX:

1. Added new Command Pad panel with the content of main menu File item (with the exceptions of the Exit command removed and a new View Help command added).
2. Menu Item "Manage Sessions" moved from under main menu entry "Crawl" to under menu entry "File".
3. Major revision of all texts within the program to make them clearer and uniform used notations (various languages):
   • UI: "SERP snippet emulator" renamed as "SERP preview" (all languages).
   • Start Page, link "Start new project..." re-worded as "Create new project..." (EN language).
   • Command "Pick columns" renamed as "Choose columns" (EN language only).
   • Uniformed notation for "Downlowd time" and "Download date" across the program (various languages).
   • Custom Filters: button "Edit current" (tooltip) rephrased in Italian translation.
   • Create sitemap window and Export to sitemap panel, option "Use Canonical path if exists" simplified to "Use Canonical path" (EN language only, other language translations were already more compact).
   • Crawl URL List window: tab "URLs" renamed as "URL list" for better clarity (EN language).
   • Options, Performance suggestions panel: two options texts slightly changed (EN language).
   • View Stored robots.txt: uniformed label notations.
   • View Stored robots.txt: some translations slightly fixed with plurals.
   • Links Inspector, tooltip fixed (EN language).
   • Context menus, uniformed notations (all languages).
   • Crawl summary visual graphs, letter upper-cased to uniform notation with other tabs (EN language).
   • Create XML Sitemap: column Authority localized (IT language).
   • Session right panel, uniformed session name label with main view text (FR language).
   • Session right panel, uniformed label casing.
   • Start page / Manage Sessions / Session side panel: uniformed text notations for some grid column headers (various languages).
   • Start page: uniformed text notations for some grid column headers (various languages).
   • Manage Sessions form: uniformed text notations for context menu entries and toolbar tooltips (all languages).
   • Uniformed notation used for various concepts throughout the program (various languages).
4. Links Inspector: hidden column "Destination is Index" showed for "false" value the nofollow icon; now changed with the red X icon.
5. Main views (Crawl view, Folder view and Tabular view) and "Create XML Sitemap" main window: uniformed casing of upper labels.
6. GA Suggestions: table label "Codes found:" rewritten as "Tracking IDs found:" to avoid confusion with the term "code", previously used both to indicate the "javascript source code" and the "tracking ID code".
7. URL Suggestions, reports "Duplicate Canonical tags" and "Duplicate Canonical tags (case insensitive)" (canonicalized pages grouped by canonical URL) were set as issues of type "Warning", but they actually were "Information".
8. URL Suggestions, report "Canonical not matching URL" (list of canonicalized pages) was set as issue of type "Warning", but it actually just an "Information".
9. GA Suggestions: issue type of report "Missing GA code" changed from Error to Warning for clarity sake, because - supposing the web analytics system of reference is GA - when no GA code is detected, you have to see if GTM code is detected instead (with report "No GA and no GTM code"), and if it is installed check manually on GTM dashboard if GA installation is configured.
10. GA Suggestions: issue type of report "No GA and no GTM code" changed from Warning to Error, because - supposing the web analytics system of reference is GA - we are in a sure case of error.
11. Search Results grid: mandatory columns (i.e. columns that cannot be hidden) changed with a minimal set that made more sense.
12. "Find Result" bottom panel: ensured that the mandatory columns are not initially hidden.
13. "Google Search Console Authorization" window: adjusted code request dialog layout.
14. Start Page, changed icon with a house icon to make it cleared its centrality.
15. [Win] Main menu, added some icons.
16. [Win] Take screenshot from URL, removed maximize/minimize buttons in "Insert URL" dialog window.
17. [Win] Links Inspector tab: uniformed external padding to the other document tabs.
18. [Win] Images Inspector tab: uniformed external padding to the other document tabs.
19. [Win] Start Page: upper links equally spaces for all languages.
20. [Mac] Links Inspector: added image to main C2A button, like in the Windows version.
21. [Mac] Page Links bottom panel: switch button "External" now uses the same icon used in the Windows version.
22. [Mac] All grids, export to Excel/CSV: after exporting the program asks the user if she/he wants to open the file; default button was "No", now it is "Yes".
23. [Mac] Image Inspector, layout uniformed to other tabs.
24. [Mac] UI: "Google Search Console Authorization" window, layout fixed.
25. [Mac] Check for Updates window: version fields text centered.

Various:

1. View stored robots.txt - removed useless label.
2. "Create XML Sitemap" and "Export to XML Sitemap" in Tabular View: option "Add Priority" is now not flagged by default. Google - the most diffused search engine - does not use it, and other search engines we have reason to believe they tend to discard it, so there's not point in bloating by default the XML files.
3. Create XML Sitemap: removed column Authority (hidden by default), as it provided no added value.
4. Example URL in "Crawl a Site" and "Crawl Multiple Sites" now sports https:// protocol.
5. When user invokes a command to open a new tab which is already open, if launched again against the same crawl session, now the program selects the previously opened tab instead of opening a new one.
   This happens for tabs that do not need any input parameter to open and thus the result would not change.
6. Removed old main menu entry "Help" > "Visual SEO Studio on the Web" > "Visual SEO Studio on Google+" (we simply forgot removing it time ago when G+ was dismissed).
7. About windows, icon changed to a more standard one.
8. Check For Updates windows, icon changed to a more standard one.
9. [Mac] Removed border and caption from the exception dialog.
10. [Mac] Crawl time and Crawl View: column "Crawl progressive" is now hidden by default, aligning the program behavior to the Windows version.
11. [Mac] Support for macOS dark mode.
12. [Mac] Installer package is now "notarized".

Fixes:

1. Crawl URL List: fixed crashing condition that could have triggered when crawling a list of URLs if one address pointed to an unexpected file extension.
2. Crawl XML Sitemap by robots.txt: fixed crashing condition that could have occurred when the robots.txt listed a XML Sitemap outside of its (sub)domain.
3. Readability Analysis: cell coloration for FRES (and derived formulas) column had color gradient inverted (regression since rel. 1.9.2).
4. hreflang Viewer: Test 2 "Is the HREF pointing to a visited page? " was evidenced as Warning when failed, now it is evidenced as Error (like the corresponding report in "heflang Analysis").
5. hreflang Viewer: Test 3 "Is the HREF pointing to a proper HTML page?" was evidenced as Error when failed, now it is evidenced as Warning (just because according to the specs it is technically possible, even if it is almost certainly an error).
6. hreflang Analysis: issue "hreflang to non-HTML" was evidenced as Error, now it is evidenced as Warning.
7. Images Inspector: grouped trees, context menus "Copy page URL" and "Browse page URL" were actually copying/browsing the image URL when the Content switch in the upper toolbar was set to "Destination image" (default value) instead of "Source page".
8. Images Inspector, tree views: fixed crashing condition that could have occurred in some cases when using the "Copy page URL" context menu.
9. Tabular View: some icon columns were not sortable.
10. Validation panel: in case of XML Sitemap, when the sitemap was truncated, the size field reported the hard-coded message "> 10 MB" with old protocol size limit of 10 MB (it now is 50 MB).
11. Validation panel: in case of XML Sitemap, when the sitemap was truncated, the size field reported the a message with the dimension in "MB" not localized (for some languages like French or Russian they use a different symbol).
12. XML Sitemap validation: fixed error message shown in case an XML Sitemap could not be validated because it were truncated since it exceeded the maximum of 50 MB uncompressed size permitted by the protocol (the error message had hard-coded the old 10 MB limit; notice that that was an error in the message text only, the validator already considered the new size limit).
13. Downloaded XML Sitemaps were still truncated at the old 10 MB, while now the standard permits up to 50 MB.
14. Fixed crashing bug occurred to a single user, likely when he closed the current crawl window as soon as the crawl process was terminated (a rare corner case situation).
15. Non crawled items pane: a couple of grid hidden columns were not selectable as visible. URL column made non hideable.
16. Sitemap crawling: the XML Sitemap protocol permits sitemap to list URLs within the sitemap (sub-domain); while the program already considered URL of the same domain but different subdomains (to show them as non-crawlable items because outside of the sitemap authority), it skipped URLs from outside domain. Now it considers them too so that user could pinpoint the same "outside of the sitemap authority" issue for them as well.
17. Crawl XML Sitemap: fixed error in counted pages (the sitemap was erroneously counted).
18. Fixed various typos and translations (all languages).
19. [WIN] Options, threshold for HTML Suggestions, URL Suggestions and Performance suggestions: setting a numeric slider to the maximum value, the slider thumb was concealed from the view.
20. [Win] Language switching: when the current UI language was switched, some toolbar buttons tooltips were not updating the tooltip text with the translation.
21. [Win] UI: "Page CSS/JS file" bottom panel: columns "SRC value" and "Type" (scripts grid) and "HREF value" and "Type" (CSS files grid) were not read-only.
22. [Mac] Fixed crash which occurred while crawling or analyzing links, when an absolute URL was mistakenly written with a white space within the host name (e.g. "http:// www.example.com/", notice the white space).
23. [Mac] UI: fixed tab control header border when there are no tabs.
24. [Mac] Start Page, sessions grid: when exporting to excel the grid content, column "Duration" was exported with the value of column "Completion reason".
25. [Mac] Manage Sessions view: when exporting to excel the grid content, column "Duration" was exported with the value of column "Completion reason".
26. [Mac] Session Management tab: table columns were not sortable.
27. [Mac] Start page: some columns of the Sessions table were not sortable.
28. [Mac] Readability Analysis: the two filtering options "Skip pages with less words than ..." and "Skip pages with less sentences than ..." had numeric up/down and sliders properties "maximum", "step" and "value" swapped.
29. [Mac] Readability Analysis: drop down option "Text language" was not read-only.
30. [Mac] Readability Analysis: drop down option "Filter path syntax" was not read-only.
31. [Mac] Fixed crash that could have occurred when exporting to Excel in some macOS machines due to a lack of locally supported language code sets.
32. [Mac] Readability Analysis: grid columns were not sortable.
33. [Mac] Session right pane: fields "Items" and "HTTP req." were not populated when the session was not loaded in memory (case of Manage Sessions windows).
34. [Mac] HTTP Issues panel: added column Referrer URL (decoded), aligning the application to the Windows version.
35. [Mac] Avoided a crash which could have occurred when trying to create a sitemap for URL List crawl.
36. [Mac] Avoided possible crashes in the suggestion tabs by disabling the internal tabs while loading background data.