Version 16 takes a special position in the 20-year product history, as we have comprehensively redesigned the way the internal program architecture works.

But don't worry, the software is almost unchanged externally and can be operated as usual.

New phrase storage system

Until version 16, phrases have been stored in a simple XML-based binary file, which loaded completely into the computer memory on program launch. Whenever a small change was made, the entire phrase file with all contents had to be written to disk. This led to problems with increasingly large databases and a high number of formatted text and bitmaps.

Because of those limitations, phrases are now stored in a professional SQL database. The new PhraseExpress v16 now only loads the "table of contents" of your phrase library including the folder structure when the program is started, but not the phrase contents. The actual phrase contents are loaded at the very moment when being inserted. When a change is made, only the change itself is written to the database, but not the entire file.

The new system enable us to add exciting new features that have been exclusive to client-/server installations before:

• Comment function for individual phrases
• Restoration of previous phrase contents
• Language switching for the phrase database
• Support for large phrase contents (we test with >100.000 phrases)
• Noticeably faster batch phrase processing
• Extended statistics functions

New Sync system

Until version 16, all users accessed the same phrase file, located in a network share or in a cloud sync folder. This is extremely easy to setup and PhraseExpress merged edit changes automatically to prevent write conflicts but edit changes could not be published at a specific time. Due to the nature of peer-to-peer sharing, this lead to access collision and in the worse case to data loss. This is the burden of cloud sync. You either get a mess of duplicate files or have to discard conflicting changes.

PhraseExpress now always saves its phrase libraries locally and separately. To share phrases, one user creates a central hub file in a network or cloud sync folder and other users can connect to this hub file to join the shared data. Users can then sync their data on command when they want it. Once established, file access collisions have been minimized with a smart sync mechanism that manages and distributes edit changes by all users.

New features

• Autotext based on regular expressions (RegEx)
• Time-scheduled phrase insertion
• Phrase execution when a defined program window is opened
• Improved cloud synchronization
• Per-folder adjustable phrase sorting