Tuesday 22 December 2020

A sneaky peek at what's coming in early 2021

Scrutiny and Integrity have received constant attention and frequent updates (often weekly). 

But they feel like mature applications. They sell well, are well-used, we use them to provide services and yet reported problems are very few.

Requested features / functionality have been few too and we haven't had anything major on the radar for these apps. 

However, if you've followed recent developments you'll know that the 'warnings' functionality has been progressing. 

Traditionally, links are coloured orange if there's a redirection. The redirection itself is certainly not an error and users may or may not be concerned about them. (So warnings about redirections can be switched off.)

For some time, other things have been noted and reported as 'warnings' (and listed separately from the redirections in the link inspector) and people asked for a way to view / export these warnings. Scrutiny has been gaining new ways to view warnings (eg columns in tables, a tab in the link inspector). More recently warnings (again, distinct from redirections) have been presented in their own table.

This in itself is major new functionality. It has happened incrementally in later minor releases of version 9.  Version 10 marks what has so far been more of an evolution.

It can go much further. Way back, Scrutiny had the ability to pass every page that it scanned to the w3 validator. Although it was a little clunky internally, it was a very popular feature, and therefore frustrating when w3.org released the 'nu' validator which didn't have the API that allowed us to use it in the same way as before.

Because of the way that our crawling / parsing  engine works, it's easy to spot and report a few more html validation problems. We're working hard on this now. When the v10 beta is released after the new year, it will be able to report a number of important validation problems. It won't be a full html validator just yet, but the list of problems that it can report will grow through 2021.

The html validation functionality applies to Scrutiny and Integrity Pro only.

Scrutiny version 10 will be a free upgrade from the current version, although the word is that there may be a small price increase for 2021. (hint: if you're thinking about buying, now is a good time.) 

[update 8 Jan 2021] The first public beta of v10 is available for download. Important: It will be a free upgrade. It will ask for a key. If you already have a key it will accept your existing one. Just get in touch if you get a 'too many activations' message, the key just needs resetting.

[update 29 Aug 2021] Version 10 has been through some minor point updates and is stable. The warnings functionality continues to gain new warnings and be improved. 


~ Shiela