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| Getting There | |
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Date: 21/12/2004 | Making things simple is well... not simple.
Anyway another Scribe test build... more fixed crashes... less bugs... maybe this will be "The One". As far as I'm concerned it's only lacking one more translation update and then I'll call it the new "stable" release for the next 6 months or so. In the mean time I'm starting the v1.88 thread, as the version history shows, and the kick things off I've added a feature. Just a little one. However everyone who has seen or heard about has suddenly become wildly enthusiastic and excited. So I await with some trepidation the response from the Scribe user community ;) And it seems I need to get out more. Because it was purely and simply inspired by Gmail's most excellent user interface. Which btw I plan to nab more nice features from. Someone was nice enough to send me an invite so I could check Scribe's POP access (which works fine). But while I was there I thought I'd poke around and see what all the fuss was about. |
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| No Gui Gets Mouse Events Right | |
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Date: 21/12/2004 | When you write a GUI library it's a matter of time before you need to track the mouse beyond the borders of your own windows. And in general you want to do this using "Mouse Capture" where by all mouse events are sent to the window that has captured the mouse for a short period. Classical examples of this are push buttons and check boxes.
The problem comes when you don't want to capture the mouse, but you still want all mouse events. Now windows (thoughtfully) has a mouse hook procedure that you can setup to capture these events and do various things. But in vanilla mode it only works when the mouse is over your windows, and not only that, when it's over the _client area_ of your windows. So basically it's pointless. For catching clicks outside your window. So what to do? Well it appears that there is a "low level" mode that the mouse hook can operate in. Great! I thought. And sure enough it works. You get all the events, everywhere. So it's sorted isn't it. Well, um. No actually. After I made this change for the rest of the afternoon I noticed that the cursor was behaving rather irractically, often "freezing" for longish periods of time (e.g. 2000ms). And sure enough, switch the Lgi mouse hook back to normal mode and the mouse freezing went away. In low level mode you must have a functioning event loop all the time otherwise the cursor will freeze. Charming. In a lot of my apps I tolerate the event loop locking up for a second or so. The user however won't tolerate the cursor locking up all the time so I had to come up with another solution. Well since none of the built in mouse hook work to my liking I created a thread that sits there polling the mouse every 50ms while I need events. I bit of overkill but it'll work fairly well. And as an added bonus it'll be very cross platform. Speaking of other platforms, X11 doesn't even have a mouse hook function so you have to poll it anyway. Windows 1 (for trying), Linux 0. A GUI should really let windows just have a flag "Want mouse events outside my area". Which gives you all mouse events, everywhere, all the time. I've been thinking about writing a GUI one day. One day. PS I wrote one in protected mode DOS using VESA that supported overlapped windows, menus, true colour etc... but that was a long time ago. :) |
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| All Car Geeks Want For Christmas... | |
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Date: 14/12/2004 | Sterio wise is:
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| Scribe Final (Really) | |
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Date: 13/12/2004 | Well we're counting down to that magical stable Scribe release (yes I know Christmas IS comming) and the translators are passing in their last edits. It's likely it'll be out by the 20th. Just in time to pop it under the tree of your Outlook stricken family members! ;)
I've also fixed one last crash bug and updated the GnuPG plugins as well. But we're really just watching and waiting for things to settle and for people to have a last chance for feedback before it's finally really actually final. We will be taking a break over the Christmas / New Year starting around the 23rd through to the 7th. So don't expect much in the way of response from us then. PayPal purchases of InScribe will still get immediate key and download information but Kagi purchasers may have to wait a little longer than normal for their key. Cheers |
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| The Sky IS Actually Falling | |||
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Date: 8/12/2004 |
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| gethostbyname_r Buglet | |
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Date: 3/12/2004 | I've been getting reports for Damn Small Linux users that Scribe can't connect to servers because the call to gethostbyname_r fails.
There is a topic here about the issue on the DSL forums if you want to post suggestions, information, test results, slander or pictures of your pets. The relevant code in Lgi is in src/common/INet/INet.cpp on line 500 or so:
Host = NEW(HostEnt);
if (Host)
{
memset(Host, 0, sizeof(*Host));
HostEnt *Result = 0;
int Err = 0;
if (gethostbyname_r(HostAddr, Host, Buf, sizeof(Buf), &Result, &Err))
{
char *ErrStr = GetErrorName(Err);
printf("%s:%i - gethostbyname_r('%s') failed (%i - %s)",
__FILE__, __LINE__,
HostAddr, Err, ErrStr);
DeleteObj(Host);
}
}
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