With this version of Notational Velocity (version 2.0β4) I've tried to curb the ever-growing list of issues by fulfilling as many small-to-medium enhancement requests and bug fixes as possible. Contributions by others include two new localizations — Portuguese by Daniel Souza and German by Benedikt Hopmann — as well as a new icon designed by Taylor Carrigan:

Overview of New Features

Horizontal Layout

Based on how many people seemed to be forking the project and rotating the splitview, I guessed that the demand for a horizontal layout of some sort was probably not insignificant. However, simply placing a column-based list next to the editor is somewhat space-inefficient, so I tried using a more compact representation.

(So far I'd been worried that NV's "unique" style of note-entry might make an interface without a top-to-bottom order of control confusing to new users. But the demonstrated appeal of a horizontal layout in other project "forks" along with the benefit of making it optional has persuaded me of its other advantages.)

Note that when using horizontal layout, the Columns menu instead controls which properties are visible.

Internal Links Between Notes

There finally exists a kind of wiki-like linking in Notational Velocity, in the ability to turn any text into a link by placing it inside [[double square brackets]]. If that text is the title of an existing note, then clicking it will jump to that note, searching for it in the process. (The Deselect button in the search/title field will double as a back button.) If no such note exists, just press return to create one with that title, exactly as you're used to doing already. 

Furthermore, Notational Velocity will (optionally) try to auto-complete note-titles typed after the starting brackets. Hit tab or return to add the ending brackets.

Hopefully Steven Frank will appreciate this feature.

Tags

This version adds a little more support for tags — namely, it now stores and reads them using the OpenMeta specification for extended attributes when using separate files, and they're auto-completed in the tag-entry field. So with your notes folder in the right place, tags can be searched from Spotlight. And now that Dropbox will synchronize OpenMeta tags, they will correspondingly be transferred between similarly-connected copies of NV on multiple computers.

This was a bit more challenging than I thought it would be, as detecting OpenMeta-tag-changes required tracking attribute modification dates in addition to content modification dates. Unfortunately the former cannot be set from user space on Mac OS X, and thus cannot be synced by Dropbox. This effectively results in attribute modification dates being tied to a specific volume and causes alternating NV launches on other computers to detect every file as being changed. So NV consequently indexes disk-local sets of attribute modification dates by the disk's UUID.

And no, sorry, tags don't Synchronize with Simplenote yet. Yes, that feature is coming — you don't need to keep asking me for it. There will be a $350 penalty imposed by the state of New York for each offense in the blog-comments.

Strikethrough and Other Automatic Formatting

You can apply strikethrough formatting to your notes now. Moreover, when " @done" is appended to a line, NV will strike it through automatically. This is useful if you need to apply such formatting while editing a note as a separate external file.

NV will also carry leading list-bullets when performing automatic indentation; i.e., if a line starts with a bullet-type character with whitespace on both sides, then that bullet is copied upon pressing return, and Tab/Back-tab will shift it in and out. (And unlike most rich-text editors and word processors on Mac OS X, NV doesn't use any tab stops or paragraph formatting to preserve list indentation; your tabs are the real thing.)

These two features will hopefully make moving between NV and Hog Bay Software's TaskPaper that much easier.

Note-file Path Extensions

On the subject of external editing, NV now preserves a note-file's existing extension while saving, and allows you to specify an alternative default file extension for new notes.

External nv:// Link Specification

Using a simple external URL scheme you can now reference existing notes in NV, as well as create new ones with a specified title, body, and set of tags. Use Edit > Copy URL (Command-Option-C) to place such a referencing URL on the clipboard.

Read a rough specification here.

Custom Foreground/Background Colors

You can finally set custom text and background colors for the editor (for all notes). NV will choose the link-text and cursor colors automatically using a perceptual color model.

For even more fixes and changes (and there are many), read the release notes