Paper Trail v1.2 Release Notes

Put some work in on tidying up workflows, making project planning more streamlined, and instituted stronger duplicate protection. Big round of usability and reliability improvements in general.

Submissions and activity

• Paper Trail now warns when the same project has already been submitted—or has another recorded activity—with the same market or contact.
• Existing-record notices include status, dates, version, activity type, archived state, and direct links to matching records.
• Planning another submission now lets you open the existing record, cancel, or deliberately create another.
• Follow-ups can now be marked complete or cleared, with each action recorded in the submission timeline.
• Notes and timeline entries preserve paragraph breaks and turn web addresses into clickable links.

Markets and contacts

• Creating or editing a market or contact now detects likely duplicates by name and website or submission domain.
• Archived matches can be restored instead of recreated, while an explicit option remains available when a genuinely separate record is needed.
• Reader and Editor are now dedicated destination types, with activity suggestions appropriate to each.
• Market activity counts now include submissions, queries, reader feedback, editorial work, planned activity, and archived records.
• Market and contact terminology has been clarified throughout the app.

Project Planning

• Planner navigation is now organized into Planning, Story Bible, Workspace, and Setup groups.
• Rough Outline and Detailed Outline are more clearly presented as separate, optional tools.
• Characters, Locations, Worldbuilding, Glossary, and Notes now support search.
• Recently edited records include section and position context, making similarly named records easier to distinguish.
• Reference counts now clearly describe explicit links between Planner records.
• Autosave now shows Saving, Saved, and retryable error states.
• Deleting a project now also removes its associated planning content and project-owned templates.

Dashboard and Analytics

• Dashboard recommendations and “No Activity Yet” reporting now consider every activity type and status.
• Recent Activity timestamps now display correctly in the user’s local timezone.
• The underdeveloped Market Intelligence section has been removed from Analytics.
• Analytics and dashboard language has been simplified for greater consistency.

Navigation and usability

• Browser titles now update as you move between pages and records.
• Date defaults use the user’s local calendar date instead of UTC.
• Singular and plural wording has been corrected throughout the app.
• Tags now live under Settings instead of occupying primary navigation.
• New-record screens have clearer section headings and more consistent New/Create language.
• Mobile layouts received a complete overflow and visibility check across all major pages.

Reliability and data integrity

• Deleting submissions and projects now removes their associated timeline events.
• Deleting a market removes its tag relationships without deleting historical submission records.
• Project deletion now cleans up associated Planner records in the correct dependency order.
• Duplicate detection and existing-submission matching now use shared, consistent rules throughout the app.
• Diagnostics and integrity checks have been expanded to catch broken relationships without automatically altering user data.

Pretty substantial update in my opinion, but no one asked my opinion. I would ask your opinion though! If you have an opinion, sign up for Paper Trail and use the Feedback form and share said opinion. How many times can I work the word “opinion” into this paragraph? I have no real opinion.

On a less opinionated note (adjective form doesn’t count), I think this is about as far as I go before I’ve run out of excuses and need to actually look toward the challenge of implementing a market search functionality. Then we’ll really be cooking with gas, I think.

–🦄