Today we released a new version of Usher, with a number of bug fixes, performance improvements, and one very nice new feature.

The big news in Usher 1.1 is the new Notes field. Many users had been creating a Notes Property, but there were problems with this: it was only one line, and you couldn’t use a comma, as Usher would then split your text into separate values. In Usher 1.1, Notes is now our third information type, to go with Tags and Properties. To better reflect all three of these information types, we’ve changed Tags and Properties to Metadata throughout the program.

Notes are written in an auto-expanding free-form text field on the Metadata panel. (If you had previously created a Notes property, its text will show in the new Notes field.) As you enter text, the field will resize as necessary, and eventually, scroll bars will appear. So for all of you who felt trapped by the limitations of your one-line Notes Property, free your fingers to go crazy with the Note field’s new capabilities.

What’s really nice is that Notes is still technically a Property field, which means that text is searchable, and the expanded Notes field is usable in Smart Playlists—we’re not sure why you might want to do this (as opposed to putting such values in Tags or Properties), but you can if you want to.

The other changes in Usher 1.1 (including reduced memory usage during movie ‘crawling’) can be read about on the Usher release notes page. As always, you can download the full version from Usher’s product page, or (much easier) use the in-app update, which you can enable in Usher’s preferences.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2010 at 7:29 am by Rob Griffiths and Peter Maurer, and is filed under Products, Usher. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.