kdd@well.UUCP (07/18/86)
[...he likes it!, Hey Mikey!...]
Just got 1.2 Beta 4, here are some initial impressions:
1. Seems a lot more stable than Beta 2, (never saw beta 3, may have been
internal?).
2. Ellipses all come out ok now, when the 'Spots' demo is opened up to full
size on a 640x400 workbench, documentation mentioned bug fixed for
ellipses with dimensions > 255.
3. Tested my program that attempts 'Mutual Exclude' gadgets, and there is
an improvement that may make it livable now, though I need to do more
testing. Apparently, when you re-select a window, the system no longer
does a RefreshGadgets() automatically. Other than that, It's hard to
tell what is different, except on my original program the Gadget gets
highlighted as background colored text on background colored 'background'
thereby making the text disappear completely. The second time I select
the gadget, (actually do a 'RefreshGadgets()), it then goes to a more
resonable looking select state. It looks like my program will do what
I originally expected it to do if I always do Refreshgadgets() twice.
From the documentation, I noticed there are several new Intuition calls
provided for Gadget handling, and a note that seems to indicate that if
I use GADGIMAGE my problems will probably go away (which is ok, I should
probably be using imaged gadgets anyway, though I thought it would be
faster to bang out 'dumb' gadgets until I get some of the more important
parts of the program going etc. My original program might get itself in
trouble by double Refresh'ing, because it is still vulnerable to any
spurious system RefreshGadget() that may occur, possibly when resizing
a window or something I haven't tried yet.
The little 'C' program I banged out to illustrate the problem still
basically does what it did originally, except for the case where you
deselect and re-select the window the gadgets are in. This tells me
that the 'SELECTED' bit on the gadget is still acting like a 'toggle'
every time RefreshGadgets() occurs, at least with the basic 'dumb'
gadgets (non-GADGIMAGE) I was using. Though this would seem to still
be a 'bug' at least as far as what the documentation says should happen,
at this point I am going to bypass the issue for now and go to GADGIMAGE
gadgets and/or explore the new gadget routines provided with Beta 4 as
they may provide all sorts of new avenues to explore for doing
MutualExclude buttons.
4. Found two (maybe 3) minor bugs. I tried doing a 'Duplicate' of the
workbench disk off of the workbench menu, it went through the motions,
but the disk would not boot. I tried again, same result. I then looked
at the disk from the workbench, (clicked on the icon) and the files
and stuff seemed to all be there. I then booted a 1.1 workbench,
(running with beta 4 kickstart still) and used the 'Duplicate' there
which worked. Not sure if this is a real bug or not, I haven't tried
it again.
I opened up a CLI from the workbench, created a ramdisk and did an
'assign c: ram:c' played around awhile, then did an 'assign c: df0:c',
deleted all the ramdisk files, and did an 'endcli'. Got a message to
the effect of 'ending CLI window' and the window never went away. Rest
of system ok though, I was able to click on the disk icon and open
other windows etc. Tried again later, but didn't bother to reassign c:
or delete the ram: files, same result.
Somebody or other's 'Dir' program that does 3 column output with
highlighted directory names etc. seems to leave extra cursors on
screen. From a previous posting in net.amiga, I get the impression
that C= is aware of this one already. No biggie, just a minor irritation.
5. The latest NotePad seems to work great. I'd say it is now good enough to
really be useful, it can handle multiple fonts in the same note with no
problems, and the word wrap seems to work ok. One thing though, it might
be nice to be able to set specific margins, as it will just use the window
for them now. If I construct a note in such a manner that I like the way
it looks and then later forget what the window size was, things are
wrapped all different to fit whatever window I have. (unless it remembers
the window size when you do a 'save', I haven't checked that). I haven't
tried printing them either since I don't do much of that, so I don't know
what the impact there is if any.
6. A previous poster claimed the FontEditor gadgets didn't work, but they did
for me. I did invoke the FontEditor from a CLI though and not the
Workbench in case that matters. Haven't played with it too awfully much
yet though.
7. Online!'s VT100 emulation still seems to have a problem with some
characters changing into 4's, but that could be Online!'s bug I suppose.
All in all, it seems like a big improvement over Beta 2, (stability) and am
going to use Beta 4 as much as possible.
Keith Doyle
ihnp4!ptsfa!well!kdd