Checkpoint Commander ^™ - Release notes

Checkpoint Commander 6.1.0 release notes

Author: Will Dickson, CCS

Version: 1.2.0

Date: 10 July 2007

Synopsis

Improved installer.
Improved audio player: more robust playback on slower machines or remote connections, and pre-cueing for gap-free changeover between tracks.
Find files or folders reports total number and size of matching files.
Result-sets may now contain multiple copies of the same file.
Better handling of folder looparound when tracking.
Performance improvements.
Better error reporting support.
Source build fixes.

System specification - hardware

Minimum supported: 200MHz CPU, 64MB RAM, lots of patience, or the minimum for your operating system (see below), whichever is greater. This may be marginal for the audio player.

Recommended: 600MHz CPU, 256MB RAM. A faster CPU is recommended if you want to play video clips (3rd-party helper application required).

System specification - operating system

Minimum supported: Windows 2000, but Windows 98 should work as well. (We can't support Windows 98 any more because Microsoft don't, so if there *are* problems then there may not be anything we can do about them.)

Recommended: Windows 2000, Windows XP or Linux (Kernel 2.6, modern glibc). Please note that more hardware may be required to support Windows XP than the other two.

Windows Vista is not supported.

Due to resource constraints we are unable to support OS X for the moment. We would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with OS X users to rectify this.

Java Version

This release requires Java 6 or better. It won't run under Java 5 or below.

Browser Version

We make a great effort to be fully standards compliant, and our interface technologies are deliberately rather minimalist. Therefore, browser-fronted Checkpoint Applications should work with any fully standards-compliant browser. Browsers are complex, full-featured applications in their own right, so in the event of rendering or other problems the most likely culprit is the settings in the browser itself.

In general it is important to keep your browser up-to-date, even more so than other applications, since it interacts so strongly with the outside 'net. Therefore we recommend that you always use the latest stable version of your preferred browser.

Opera (9.2): Supported. Please note that Opera is now available at no cost, and no longer contains adverts.
Mozilla Firefox (1.5.0.4 or better, 2.x recommended): Supported.
Konqueror (KDE): Supported.
Internet Explorer (6.x): We do not support this product and do not recommend it. However, if you must use it, anecdotal evidence indicates that it may well work.
Safari (Mac OS X): Due to resource constraints we are unable to support OS X at this time. We would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with OS X users to rectify this.
Mozilla Seamonkey (old-style Mozilla suite): Not supported, but recent builds ought to work.

Installing

To install CPC from scratch, follow the instructions inside the distribution archive.

Upgrading from 6.0.x

Simply shut down Checkpoint Commander (all running copies), and install this over the top.

Upgrading from earlier releases

Please see the Checkpoint Commander 6.0.0 release notes for details. (Checkpoint Commander 6.0.0 was a closed beta release.) Please note: this is a major upgrade, and you need to read the notes.

Known issues

CPC text editor (Windows2000 only): CPC's internal viewers prefer to use Alt+Up and Alt+Down (arrow keys) to track through whatever result set they are operating on. (Apart from the Internal HTML Viewer, which plays differently because it's running inside a browser). However, when using the Internal Text Viewer on Windows2000 these key combinations inject junk characters into the text. Workaround: Use Alt+Space and Alt+Backspace as alternatives. (These also work on the other viewers).

CPC text editor: The text editor Save as... dialog is not very tolerant of Strange Things, and in particular it doesn't appreciate the current folder disappearing while it's using it. Most users won't run into this, but if you do - well, the results are undefined. (They probably won't be very severe - say, a wierd error message - but even so.) To avoid this, don't do anything else while the dialog is open; if you need to do manipulations other than those provided by the dialog itself, close the dialog, do what you have to do, then re-open the dialog.

CPC audio player: WAV support is problematic. Because of this, the audio player is not (now) bound to WAVs by default. If you want to try anyway, just bind the audio player to the audio/x-wav MIME type under Tools|Manage MIME types & viewers. If you don't use FLAC, you may have more luck with WAVs if you disable the FLAC codec - it doesn't seem to get along with the WAV codec for some reason. To do this, edit the file kernel.map located in the lib subfolder of your Checkpoint installation. find the line which begins *-flac= and comment it out by adding a # at the start of the line. Restart Checkpoint Commander.

CPC image viewer: full-screen mode image display can be somewhat fragile; this appears to be an OS / video-driver interaction with Java itself. If you encounter problems, don't use Alt+Tab (or the equivalent on your OS) to bring up other windows while in full-screen mode. You can also try disabling image preview in CPC. However, the surest workaround is to minimise CPC. As usual, make sure your video drivers are up to date.

CPC image viewer: Please note that having large images (eg. those from digital cameras) open in multiple copies of the image viewer really chews up memory! Java limits Checkpoint Commander (and / or any other app) to quite a small memory heap size (typically 64M); if this runs out, Checkpoint Commander will stop working properly. To check memory status, use Help|Memory status. For more details, and a tweak for Sun VMs which allows for larger heap sizes, please read the user guide entry for this menu item. If CPC does run out of memory, it may stop working properly; if this happens, it's best to shut it down and restart it. You'll get an unambiguous error message if this does happen.

Linux / KDE 3.5: Java dialogs occasionally come up in "shade" mode, for no apparent reason. This can fool you into thinking that CPC has crashed. If this happens, the dialog will come up with only the title bar showing. To fix, right-click on the title bar and uncheck the "shade" option. This seems to be a bug in java.

Scalablility: The directory objects in Checkpoint Commander archives don't scale that brilliantly. As the number of entries in an individual folder becomes large, you may start to notice performance declining. For best results, try to keep the number of entries in each folder below a thousand or so. Performance is not affected (noticeably) by the total number of files in the archive as a whole: as long as you keep each folder under control you can grow the total number of files almost without limit. (Eg. the root folder contains 100 subfolders, each of which contains 100 subfolders, each of which contains 100 more subfolders, each of which contains 100 files... no problem!)

Download

Download from SourceForge.