>Oh, that cool !!! I'can easily read english, but i have a lot of
>difficulty to write in english in fact ...
>
>So i can discuss in this mailing list but you will probably have some
>difficulty to read me... Excuse me for that ...
Hi,
no problem. And you can see it from the positive side: It's a nice way to
practice English :-) (How do you think I learned English :-)
>Ok, this reply to one of my questions about the project. I was not sure
>that
>you want to make a 100% compatible application or a new one with your
>features.
>Now i know !
Yup, that's our first goal. Simply because it's easiest one and it'll at
least ensure it's useful to all HC users. We can add features any time, but
if we don't add some essential feature at the beginning it's likely it
won't get in there at all.
>Ok so... perhaps i can talk a little about me ...
>i'm a multimedia developer. I use to develop in Visual Basic, Flash, HTML,
>Director, Visual C++/MFC... in windows NT OS.
Hey, that's great! We had only one person who said he could do some
Windows programming and he's very busy. It'll also be useful when we need
to design the platform-specific aspects and how to abstract them away,
since we'll have to do it in a way that can be implemented both on Windows,
Mac and Linux. It's always good to have someone who has actually programmed
on these platforms to verify that this'll work there, too. My main source
of Windows programming knowledge is a book on the CodeWarrior CD (From Mac
to Windows).
>For my personnal usage, i have a MAC LC III, and i have programming with it
>some educational applications with Hypercard (i have all the documentation)
>and i have programming with Think C / Think Pascal and I know the macOS API
>and the use of Inside Mac documentations.. Now this computer i only used by
>my little sister to play games...
>I have also, since 3 month, a new PII 350, and i have win recently a
>codewarrior 4
>CDs for Mac/PC
That's good. That means you could compile our code on the Mac to see how
it's supposed to look and then port it to Windows.
>I'm like to do the user interface most of the time. Especialy because i
>made
>a lot of applications for the education.
>
>So i will be interest by porting the mac source code to the Wintel
>Platerform.
>On win9x or Win NT (or Linux after all !)
At the moment, I think porting would be the most important part, since
it'll be easier to fix portability problems now than later in development.
The UI is still pretty much in design phase, which means there's not much
to do right now for a programmer. Of course, if you have any ideas, write
them down, draw graphics etc. and send them to Alain, Anthony or me so they
can be put up on the web page for discussion and review (please don't send
attachments to the list).
>Perhaps can you talk to me about this two project and we will be able to
>see
>if i can help you in a way...
Well, one thing would be writing a text engine that runs both on Windows,
Linux and Mac and has no limit to text size (it'll be used for text fields
and the script editor). Since this will need to do drawing into a window
though, we'd first need an abstraction layer, that is, a couple of C++
classes that wrap around the actual Mac/Windows/Linux calls in a way that
you can use them as a "translator". The FreeCard-specific code will then
only know how to call this abstraction layer, and the abstraction layer
will make the appropriate Toolbox calls or MFC function calls. This way we
can use the same source code on all platforms.
Another thing that still needs to be sorted out is how we'll draw Windows
buttons etc. into a window, correctly overlapping. You see,
"Standard"-style buttons will look like a dialog's buttons in FreeCard (not
just a B/W rounded rectangle) on the Mac, while on Windows they're supposed
to be those standard rectangular buttons. Do you think there's a way to
draw them correctly, maybe even into an offscreen GWorld (that is, the
Windows equivalent of a GWorld)?
These three things are the main concerns right now.
Tell us what you want to do, or if you don't like any of this I'm sure we
can find something else if you tell us which area of programming you'd like
to do. I have to admit Anthony and I probably already took the most
interesting aspects.
As for coding style: Add many comments, rely only on ANSI C++ calls and
abstraction-layer classes, and don't introduce any limits besides what the
system has (e.g. using bigger values than longs is not necessary, as RAM is
currently limited to a long's size, anyway... etc.).
If you have questions, just ask :-)
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
------------------------------------------------------------
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'The Witnesses of TeachText are everywhere...'
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