Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
On 7 Jan 2003, at 18:48, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think that this bug does need fixing to allow different colours to be used for the scroll bars, but agree that in the case of both parameters being set to zero, the scroll bars should not be drawn (as at present) I'm not so sure - it all depens on how much software is out there that depends on this value not being used for anything other than determining whether a scroll bar should be drawn or not. If (seeing that it isn't used up to now) programs put some arbitrary value in there, just to make sure it isn't 0, these programs would look pretty strange if, in new WMAN versions, this value was taken as the paper value for the scroll bar background... Wolfgang . -- Rich Mellor RWAP Software 35 Chantry Croft, Kinsley, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, WF9 5JH TEL: 01977 610509 http://hometown.aol.co.uk/rwapsoftware
Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
Wolfgang Lenerz wrote: The only thing I know is that, if the bar colour AND the bar section colour are BOTH set to 0, then, instead of having a black bar on a black background, the scroll bar and the scroll bar section aren't drawn AT ALL. Yes, this is intentional (ee_wman_drbar_asm). I think drawing the bar black-on-black doesn't make much sense anyway. Marcel
Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
Wolfgang Lenerz wrote: I think that this bug does need fixing to allow different colours to be used for the scroll bars, but agree that in the case of both parameters being set to zero, the scroll bars should not be drawn (as at present) I'm not so sure - it all depens on how much software is out there that depends on this value not being used for anything other than determining whether a scroll bar should be drawn or not. If (seeing that it isn't used up to now) programs put some arbitrary value in there, just to make sure it isn't 0, these programs would look pretty strange if, in new WMAN versions, this value was taken as the paper value for the scroll bar background... I am currently working with a version that actually draws the background. So far I haven't experienced any problems. And besides, fixing this problem of a software is more than easy, even without the source. Marcel
Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
Wolfgang Lenerz writes: The only thing I know is that, if the bar colour AND the bar section colour are BOTH set to 0, then, instead of having a black bar on a black background, the scroll bar and the scroll bar section aren't drawn AT ALL. So the combination of these two parameters, set to 0, means that you can have a window with scroll arrows, but no scroll bar. Perhaps that is what it was intended for (?). Exactly. Please dont fix it, anyone ;) Per
Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
In a message dated 07/01/03 23:42:08 GMT Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The only thing I know is that, if the bar colour AND the bar section colour are BOTH set to 0, then, instead of having a black bar on a black background, the scroll bar and the scroll bar section aren't drawn AT ALL. So the combination of these two parameters, set to 0, means that you can have a window with scroll arrows, but no scroll bar. Perhaps that is what it was intended for (?). Exactly. Please dont "fix" it, anyone ;) I think that this bug does need fixing to allow different colours to be used for the scroll bars, but agree that in the case of both parameters being set to zero, the scroll bars should not be drawn (as at present). -- Rich Mellor RWAP Software 35 Chantry Croft, Kinsley, Pontefract, West Yorkshire, WF9 5JH TEL: 01977 610509 http://hometown.aol.co.uk/rwapsoftware
RE: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
Morning Peter, Belated Season's Greetings Same to you. Hope you got everything you wanted/needed. Thankfully, it is not snowing Norman, we need him for other and better things! But if it was, then surely there would be lots of Norman around, and I'd get more done. Bring on the clones. Clone joke : Clones are people, two ! Cheers, Norman. - Norman Dunbar Database/Unix administrator Lynx Financial Systems Ltd. mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: 0113 289 6265 Fax: 0113 289 3146 URL: http://www.Lynx-FS.com - This email is intended only for the use of the addressees named above and may be confidential or legally privileged. If you are not an addressee you must not read it and must not use any information contained in it, nor copy it, nor inform any person other than Lynx Financial Systems or the addressees of its existence or contents. If you have received this email and are not a named addressee, please delete it and notify the Lynx Financial Systems IT Department on 0113 2892990.
[ql-users] New christmas WMAN
Hello everyone, after some hard work during the last two weeks the new WMAN is finally approaching completion. :-) Beta versions have been sent out to the tester and for the rest I made some snapshots which demonstrate the new system palette thing quite nicely I think. The 3 pictures all show exactly the same applications with exactly the same configuration, only a different colour scheme has been selected during the boot process. For comparison, the standard scheme looks, due to compatibility reasons, like this: http://www.kilgus.net/images/wman-trad.png The colours scheme I currently use looks like this: http://www.kilgus.net/images/wman-cway1.png And with only a couple of changed values it can look like this: http://www.kilgus.net/images/wman-cway2.png I'm especially proud of the scroll bars by the way. This was not exactly easy to do in a compatible way. Especially as I have not much clue about how application menu windows really work ;-) Well, I hope you like what you see. Have a happy holiday and a great year 2003 (with hopefully lots of pretty classic and new SMSQ applications). Marcel
Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
On Tue, 24 Dec 2002 at 20:12:51, Marcel Kilgus wrote: (ref: [EMAIL PROTECTED]) Hello everyone, after some hard work during the last two weeks the new WMAN is finally approaching completion. :-) Beta versions have been sent out to the tester and for the rest I made some snapshots which demonstrate the new system palette thing quite nicely I think. The 3 pictures all show exactly the same applications with exactly the same configuration, only a different colour scheme has been selected during the boot process. For comparison, the standard scheme looks, due to compatibility reasons, like this: http://www.kilgus.net/images/wman-trad.png The colours scheme I currently use looks like this: http://www.kilgus.net/images/wman-cway1.png And with only a couple of changed values it can look like this: http://www.kilgus.net/images/wman-cway2.png I'm especially proud of the scroll bars by the way. This was not exactly easy to do in a compatible way. Especially as I have not much clue about how application menu windows really work ;-) Well, I hope you like what you see. Have a happy holiday and a great year 2003 (with hopefully lots of pretty classic and new SMSQ applications). To a non-QPC2 user like me, the changes you made may not be obvious. How about blowing your own trumpet a little - I am sure we won't mind. The '3d' shading on boxes is obvious. Is the 3d effect on scroll bar what you are proud of? It certainly looks very effective indeed. -- QBBS (QL fido BBS 2:252/67) +44(0)1442-828255 tony@surname.co.uk http://www.firshman.co.uk Voice: +44(0)1442-828254 Fax: +44(0)1442-828255 TF Services, 29 Longfield Road, TRING, Herts, HP23 4DG
Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
Tony Firshman wrote: To a non-QPC2 user like me, the changes you made may not be obvious. How about blowing your own trumpet a little - I am sure we won't mind. Well OK, the whole story goes like this: Step one of course was to introduce advanced colour codes into WMAN, I did this quite a long time ago and is already part of current release QPCs for testing purposes. After that the system palette was introduced. Hmm, it might not be clear what a system palette really does: In principle it is a normal colour palette, i.e. you have indexes from 0 to x which all contain some colour. The difference between a normal palette and the system palette is that each index has a specific meaning, i.e. index 0 is the colour of the main window border. In principle parts of the normal palette could have been allocated for that, but I wanted to keep things separate. Applications can now use this system palette colour instead of a real colour (like red). This way the user himself can define how the borders of the application should look like just by altering the system palette. The hardest task in all this was actually to define what items should be in the system palette. In the end I very much oriented myself with TT's colour definitions for his QPAC style windows. And of course the palette must come with some default colours. This was easier, I just filled the colours so that it resembles the old white/green look. After having done this and specified the interface functions the implementation was not too difficult. Only some minor details were tricky (for example, I allowed a system palette colour to point to yet another system palette colour. By doing this an endless loop could be introduced which would make the application hang. The solution I chose was to set a maximum recursion level. But those are details that have to be taken into account) The next step of course was to build an application that uses the system palette. For this purpose I first disassembled the shown colours application and changed the appropriate bytes. That's why it always shows up in my test pictures ;-) Later I also disassembled and partly rewrote other things I use like FreeMemBt or SystemJob to use the palette. Finally as the big task QPAC2 itself got a new colourway named System palette. All the others colourways (white/green, red/black etc) are emulated to allow backwards compatibility. Compatibility was always my goal and the biggest challenge in all this. The new high colour sprites you see in the QPAC window were mostly done by Phoebus. In 4 colour mode the old ones will automatically be used (compatibility again). The '3d' shading on boxes is obvious. Yes, the 3d stuff is another big point. With only little visual effort very nice effects can be done. The problem I had to deal with is again compatibility. QL borders have the unfortunate property of having a 2:1 aspect ratio (i.e. they are always twice as thick than high). This is not ideal for 3d borders, which prefer a regular 1:1 ratio. I implemented numerous different borders and compatibility modes, have a look at http://www.kilgus.net/images/qlborder.gif Border 0 is most compatible as it represents a normal QL border. All other use non standard layouts. That means that either the border will actually have a different layout or the free space a QL border would have occupied must be filled somehow (or not). You see the choices in the chart. The implementation of all this, though very tricky in some places, was again done in a few days (all in all only a bit over 700 lines). What actually took so long was to define what is needed and how to implement it. Caused me headaches for weeks. You have probably noticed that most border styles are not used in my examples. This is because in most application there's not enough space reserved for bigger borders (or they don't make much sense like the line style borders). Therefore those are mostly for application developers who specifically take them into account in the future. Is the 3d effect on scroll bar what you are proud of? Yes. Though the old bar (fortunately!) exactly resembles a QL border the original routine did draw them using block operations. The new routine use border calls, so that the new border styles can be applied here, too. This way the 3d effect comes for free if demanded. With only one changed system palette value one could also have a 3d bar that goes into the window (lowered style), a bar that is a bit less wide (QL compatibility mode 1), a bar that has more depth (type 3) etc, everything's possible. For anybody with the sources, the file in question is ee_wman_drbar_asm. Well, at least I found that file a bit hard to read/understand enough to modify it. All in all it took me one day. By the way, did anybody ever wonder why the bar colour never seems to be used (the code always uses the window background colour)? Or does anybody even know the reason? As byproducts I also created some new SBASIC
Re: [ql-users] New christmas WMAN
Great stuff. Will definitely get used by QDT and make things even better! Thanks, as always. I could not have asked for a better Christmas present. jim On Tuesday, December 24, 2002, at 11:12 AM, Marcel Kilgus wrote: Well, I hope you like what you see. Have a happy holiday and a great year 2003 (with hopefully lots of pretty classic and new SMSQ applications). Marcel
