Want to know what has changed since a previous version? This page lists those changes. You can alter the range of release notes to display if you wish.

The latest release of Simon is version 5.1.1.

• Added the promised notification features. A Notifiers window lists notifiers that have been configured, and a sheet much like the Add/Alter Test one is used to add or change notifiers. Each notifier can be used for changes, failures, or recoveries, and the same notifier can be used for several different tests if you wish. The different kinds of notifier are implemented via a plug-in architecture for easy expandability. The initial notifier kinds provided are Sound and Speech; others will be added in the future (any third-party developers interested in the API should contact us).
• Added a table listing the previous Notifications to the Monitor window.
• Added a column listing the test name to the Changes, Failures, and Notifications tables, which is useful when displaying data for multiple tests at once (by selecting more than one test, or none).
• Added a column to the Failures table to indicate the length of the downtime.
• Major changes to the Preferences window to use a toolbar instead of tab bar to select the pages, and offer a multiple-icon view like System Preferences.
• Reorganized the Preferences, and updated the Update page based on the layout used by Mac OS X's Software Update preferences.
• Implemented an extra timeout. Sometimes the data becomes "stuck", so it looks like it is being loaded, but never arrives. Simon will now wait for two minutes before giving up and declaring the site down.
• Finished the notifiers tables in the Add/Alter Test sheet, and added (+) buttons so you can easily add new notifiers.
• Improved the calculation of the next check time, so the time must be at least 10 seconds in the future, to avoid doing a check immediately after the previous one, if the frequency is low and the test takes a while (e.g. when it's down).
• The Reset command now resets the Status, Last Changed and Last Error columns as well, and those date columns now display how long ago the test was reset, if using relative times.
• Fixed a minor glitch where it was always saving the data every 10 minutes or less, irrespective of the preference setting.
• Fixed a bug where the change log wasn't being reset via the Reset command.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the change log from working in some circumstances.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes set the Next Check time a day or so ahead of where it should be after an unexpected quit.
• Minor improvements in some toolbar buttons.
• Fixed an issue where the page source would not be loaded if it contains an "extended" character; it now falls back to plain ASCII encoding, which works.
• Fixed a bug where the newest Changes/Failures/Notifications entries would be removed if more than the limit instead of the oldest.
• Now only reports errors when checking for software updates if the check was initiated manually. If an automatic check fails, it'll just try again later, so there's no need to bother you.
• Reorganized the online User Guide to make it faster to load and more logical. A recommended read. Click the question-mark button on any window (in the toolbar or elsewhere) to go to the page discussing that window.

• Added Source and Preview windows. They each contain two text areas separated by a splitter bar, plus a toolbar. The Source window has server headers in the top area, and the HTML source in the bottom part. The Preview window contains the HTML source in the top area, and a preview of the web page in the bottom. The page may not look exactly the same as via a web browser, but is close, and hyperlinks work, etc. You can use these windows to find the appropriate text to look for with the new Smart Change Detection feature, or to quickly view a changed page without having to launch or switch to your browser.
• Improved the Dock icon badge: the color of the status triangle now matches that of the most recent failure or change, and the number is the number of tests with that status. So you can now see at a glance that there are 3 sites with changes within the last day, for example. As time goes by, the color will gradually fade, or become bright red or green when a failure or change occurs.
• Changed the way changes are detected. You can now specify text to look for within the HTML source or server header data. You can check for any changes in the entire file, or just a part of it. This solves the issue of banners and other regular but non-key changes making Simon report that the page changed.
• Change detection can now be disabled or enabled for each test, so if you don't care about changes for a given site, it won't report them.
• Added tabs to the main window, with Changes and Failures as the (current) options. Failures contains the table of failures as before, and Changes contains a table listing the changes for the selected (or all) tests. So you can now track a history of changes on the site.
• Added a separate check frequency for when a site is down. So you can, for example, check the site every ten minutes when it is up, but when it has a failure, check every minute until it is back up again.
• Added tables for specifying notifiers for each test. You will be able to set up notifiers once, then choose which ones to use for each test. This feature is not completed in this beta release, but the groundwork has been laid.
• The Up Time is now expressed with two decimal places, so you can see if your site is up 99.99% or 99.95% of the time instead of just 99%.
• Added guide buttons to many windows. When clicked, they will open the Simon User Guide in your web browser directly to the section discussing the window.
• Added tool tips to all windows.
• Added preferences to control whether to display each of the date columns in the tests table using absolute or relative dates. Defaults to relative.
• Added a preference to control what happens when you double-click on a line in the tests table. The options are: preview the site, view the page source, visit the site, check the site, and alter the test configuration. The default is to preview the site.
• Added a confirmation sheet when quitting, to avoid accidentally quitting Simon. A checkbox allows you to tell it not to appear again, plus whether or not it appears can be controlled via a preference.
• Added the new standard keyboard equivalent for Hide Others, ⌘⌥H.
• Improved the saved data format to better handle switching between releases of the app. Note: do not run Simon 1.0b1 after upgrading to 1.0b2, or some values for the test configurations may be lost. This problem won't occur in the future.
• Now backs up the data when it is saved.
• Now clears the Dock icon when quitting, so the "screen turns off" to indicate that it isn't monitoring the sites.
• Added a software license agreement panel that appears when starting a new version, to cover our butts. :)
• Prepared the applications for localization. French and German, and possibly other localizations are planned for the next release.
• Added support for a Household license, where multiple users in the same household can share a license.
• Added the ability to automatically add a license from the pasteboard.
• Fixed a bug where the status icon of a test would initially be blank if it was being checked when Simon was quit.
• Fixed a crasher with deleting tests.
• Fixed a minor bug where a test that is being checked when the Dock's Pause All Testing command is chosen would continue to be checked instead of stopping immediately.
• Fixed a bug where the statistics and failures table weren't updated when the Select All command was used.

• Initial beta release.