What's New in Transana 2.30?

Release 2.30 adds major functions, minor features, and a number of important bug fixes.

• Drag and Drop now works on the Mac versions of Transana.
  
  
• Multiple simultaneous transcripts for both Episodes and Clips. See "Working with Mutiple Transcripts" in the Manual for a full description of this new set of features. This feature makes it easier to look at several discrete analytic layers in your data at once.
  
  
• Added Default Filter Configurations. Anywhere there is a Filter dialog (Keyword Visualization, Maps, Graphs, Reports, and Clip Data Export,) if you create a filter configuration and name it "Default", that filter configuration will be applied automatically. This is very helpful when you are trying to refine your output and need to jump between the data and the report. You should delete the default configuration to go back to seeing everything when you are done, although you can save the final configuration under another name first if you want to keep it for later use.
  
  
• You can now move Episodes from one Series to another using Cut / Paste and Drag and Drop.
  
  
• Created "Batch Episode Creation". If you right-click a Series and choose Batch Episode Creation, you can select multiple media files, or even an entire directory with subdirectories, and Transana will create Episodes for all of the selected media files. If a media file has a corresponding RTF for TXT file, that file will be imported as the Transcript; otherwise a blank transcript will be created. See "Batch Episode Creation" in the Manual for more information on this feature.
  
  
• Automatic Transcript Selection during Clip Creation. If you do not make a transcript selection before choosing "Add Clip" or "Create Quick Clip", Transana will automatically select the text between the nearest time codes on either side of the cursor as your Clip Transcript text.
  
  
• If you select a keyword in the Data Window's Database Tree, you can create a Quick Clip from within the Transcript Window by pressing Ctrl-K or by pressing the new "Create Quick Clip" button in the Transcript Toolbar.
  
  
• An "Undo" button has been added to the Search Dialog. In addition, you can now save and load searches.
  
  
• You can now merge Clips in Transana. If you right-click a Clip in the Data Window's Database Tree and select "Merge Clips", you will be shown a list of clips adjacent to the selected clip, and you can then select one for the merge.
  
  
• When you load a clip from a Search result, Transana automatically selects the original clip in the data window, making it easier to update clips located by searching when you don't want to save your search result as a collection.
  
  
• The Video Root Directory and the Waveforms Directory are now saved as database-specific rather than as global. This allows you to specify a different set of paths for different databases, and then to change between projects (that is, databases,) without having to reset your video paths.
  
  
• You now have much greater control over the colors used in Transana's Maps and Graphs. In the Tools menu, select "Graphics Color Configuration". This interface allows you to add, edit, delete, and sort colors to be used in Transana's graphics. You can even create different color "profiles" which you can save and load.
  
  
• Increased the size of the data field for Keyword definitions from 256 characters to about 8 MB. While Keywords don't have Notes for analytic memoing as other Transana objects do, you can now use the Keyword Definition to record how your keyword definition or use changes during your analysis.
  
  
• In previous versions of Transana, you had to click outside of the text selection in the Transcript window to cancel a text selection. This proved difficult when selections were long. You can now click within a selection to cancel a transcript selection
  
  
• When adding a Transcript, if you select an RTF or TXT file to import before you have provided a Transcript ID, the root name of the import file will be suggested as the Transcript ID.
  
  
• When creating Quick Clips, there was an information message that told you when a quick clip already existed for a given selection. That message is now optional. You can choose not to have this message displayed by unchecking "Quick Clips Warning" in the Options menu. (Some users found that message problematic because it slowed down quick clips.)
  
  
• I added Media Filename as an optional data element to be included in the Series Report.
  
  
• Increased font size for Notes
  
  
• The Database Export and Database Import tools now default to the Video Root directory when the Browse button is pressed.
  
  
• I added a "Port" specification to the Username and Password screen for Transana-MU. You can now use Transana with MySQL servers running on ports other than 3306.
  
  
• RTF import times have been significantly improved. For example, one long transcript on one computer used to take 74 seconds to import, but now takes 18. Transcript load times are also improved, though this is less noticable because the times are shorter. (0.95 seconds to 0.55 seconds is significant proportionally, but is still only half a second!)
  
  
• The accented character "É" was not importing correctly during RTF import. This has been corrected.
  
  
• You can now select multiple files at once in the Batch Waveform Generator interface.
  
  
• We reversed the order of the "Video Root" and "Waveforms" directories on the Directories tab for Program Options / Preferences.
  
  
• The Mac-Intel installer has been made simpler and faster. (The process of building the Mac-PPC installer is also simpler, though the user won't notice any differences there.) Thanks Ronny!
  
  
• There is now a special Computer Lab version of Transana designed for use in computer labs. The key to this version is that users should not store data on a lab computer, but instead should use an accessible network volume (if the lab/organization supports this type of storage) or should use a portable hard drive for their data. Thus, the lab version of Transana prompts the user for the location of their video data and database files upon program startup.