Amiga MA Magazine 1998 #6/amigamamagazinepolishissue1998.iso/varia/magicmenu/releasenotes

Text File | 1977-12-31 | 16KB | 433 lines

MagicMenu 2.4 (beta)
====================

- Improved overall stability under CyberGraphX; the menu rendering code was
  actually peeking Screen->BitMap instead of Screen->RastPort.BitMap, which
  among other things could screw up rendering in deep display modes. Menu
  rendering now works consistently in display depths beyond 8 bit.

- Removed references to SetABPenDrMd() where they were in the wrong place.

- The code that sends the IntuiMessage should be less timing critical and
  simpler now. It fires off the message and starts to wait for a response
  if necessary rather than allocating timer requests, message ports, etc.
  on the spot and then jumping into action.

- Removed the routine that complains about timed out IntuiMessages. It's
  nice to know that something went wrong, but not that helpful if you
  cannot do anything about it.

- Since IntuiMessage processing works differently now, MagicMenu now checks
  for pending, unreplied messages.

- The routine that displays the menu and handles the IDCMP_MENUVERIFY
  case should be better protected against Intuition state changes and
  stale pointers. There is still a catch in that the Window to receive
  the menu event may close or dispose of its menu strip before the
  event arrives. But actually, Intuition protects itself against
  such eventualities, anyway.

- For a Window without a UserPort, MagicMenu could lose memory. This
  has been fixed.

- When an IDCMP_MENUVERIFY message times out, the window to cancel
  it now properly receives its IDCMP_MOUSEBUTTONS/MENUUP and
  IDCMP_MENUPICK/MENUNULL messages (as per the RKMs). When menu
  rendering is finished the other inactive IDCMP_MENUVERIFY windows
  on the screen now receive the proper IDCMP_MOUSEBUTTONS/MENUUP
  messages.

- Changed the way BOOPSI images in menus are handled. MagicMenu no longer
  tries to remap them as if they were BitMap images. Right now it turns
  them into BitMap images and then remaps them.

- Redid the image remapping code. It no longer fiddles with the raw BitMap
  data but uses the Blitter.

- Added a patch for ObtainGIRPort() which should make all the SafeGIRPort
  patches redundant that existed just in support of MagicMenu. The patch
  checks if the screen it should work upon is currently locked by
  MagicMenu. If so, ObtainGIRPort() will return NULL. This is a little
  dangerous since some built-in Intuition classes do not protect themselves
  against ObtainGIRPort() returning NULL. I can't make the patch tell
  Intuition to wait until the screen is ready again either, as this would
  eventually deadlock Intuition.

- Changed the new 3D look text highlight colour to be more consistent with
  the way gadget text highlighting works.

- MagicMenu no longer detaches from the Shell it was started from. If
  you need such a feature, use "run >nil: MagicMenu".

- MagicMenu now works with Final Writer. Final Writer calls
  Clear/ResetMenuStrip whilst in MENUVERIFY state. Previously,
  MagicMenu did not allow this to happen, causing the verify message
  to time out.

- The phony IntuiMessages are now ExtIntuiMessages with a NULL tablet
  data pointer and proper time stamp information.


MagicMenu 2.5 (beta)
====================

- The ObtainGIRPort() patch now handles the NULL parameter case
  gracefully. Some BOOPSI gadget dispatchers actually end up invoking
  the draw method in the OM_NEW case with the GInfo pointer not
  yet initialized.


MagicMenu 2.6 (beta)
====================

- The new 3D colour mode could screw up the screen colour palette.
  The code did not check for pen allocation failures and, since the
  pen variables were unsigned, the deallocation code would end up
  freeing the same pen over and over again.

- Changed the commodities filter setup code. All the initializations
  are now done at program startup time. MagicMenu enables the filter
  later instead of building the filter when the menu comes up.

- Changed the way bevel boxes are rendered. Instead of calling
  Move..Draw..Draw over and over again it now uses RectFill()
  where possible. For vertical and horizontal lines this is
  actually faster than calling Move/Draw.

- Made small visual changes to the menu box and title bar rendering
  in new 3D look mode.

- With the non-blocking option enabled, the new 3D look menus now
  sport drop shadows.

- In non-blocking mode MagicMenu no longer uses SuperBitMap windows.

- Removed the "demo" menu from the prefs program.

- Integrated Mario's new imagery, including the new colour map
  that goes with it.


MagicMenu 2.7 (beta)
====================

- The drop shadows no longer cause windows to be moved away from
  the screen right and bottom edges.

- Disabled menus, items and subitems are no longer rendered with
  a frame in new 3D mode.

- The drop shadows were only transparent with CyberGraphX.
  I added another patch to allow this for any Amiga (and which
  magically also boosts layer creation speed).

- One WaitBlit() was missing in the remapped image cleanup code.

- Removed the "clipping" option. It is now enabled by default in
  order to avoid big trouble on the way.

- If MagicMenu cannot reuse the patch table installed by an older
  MagicMenu version that was removed from memory just before the
  new one was run, it now complains and exits without crashing.

- I tried to make MagicMenu safer by reducing the rendering options
  to two alternatives only: you either select non-blocking or you
  don't. Both options imply clipped drawing operations, making it
  more difficult to trash memory on the way. The "direct draw"
  option is implicitely enabled for non-blocking mode and
  implicitely disabled for blocking mode. All this will slow down
  menu operations a bit, but better a little slower than a little
  sooner to crash.

- No longer fakes ClipRects and uses sleight-of-hand tricks to get
  away with it. Instead of calling SwapBitsRastPortClipRect()
  it now uses a much simpler technique to exchange the on-screen
  BitMap data and the menu imagery. This technique neither has
  nor requires the side-effects SwapBitsRastPortClipRect() has.

- Removed the CyberGraphX chunky option; it is now enabled all
  the time.

- New and improved colour remapping code. Much faster than the
  old blitter based stuff.

- All new preferences program. The prefs editor goes into
  SYS:Prefs. The new configuration files go into ENVARC:.
  Note that the new configuration files are not compatible
  with the old ones.

- Prefs program and main program now support localization.
  No catalogs are available yet, sorry.

- Non-blocking operation is now the default mode since it
  is less likely to trash memory, freeze the machine or
  crash it.


MagicMenu 2.8 (beta)
====================

- Added two more patches for WindowToBack() and
  MoveWindowInFrontOf().

- The prefs program should now consistently find the current
  preferences settings, even if MagicMenu is not running.

- Removed the ghosted text colour options. These colours are
  now connected to the background colour.

- The prefs program now has a proper version string.

- The keyboard control hotkey combination can be changed at
  run-time now.

- Resetting the preferences to defaults now properly updates
  the display and the colours.

- The layer patch was using the wrong rectangle offsets,
  causing superbitmap windows to screw up.

- The prefs program and the main program now both have
  new default minimum stack size limits. For the prefs
  program it's 10K and 8K for the main program.

- The menu image remapping routines now treat images
  properly which make use of the PlanePick/PlaneOnOff combo.

- The main program will now find the prefs program when
  it should do. Previously, it would only start the prefs
  program if the main program was run from Shell.

- The colour remapping now also takes place in selected state
  images. The same colour remapping rules are applied for the
  highlight colour that are used for the normal background
  colour.

- Added tablet input event processing. So far only one
  tablet input device is reported to work properly. If there
  are more, I would like to know :)

- Rewrote the central menu event processing loop. MagicMenu
  should now snap out of an Intuition deadlock much faster
  than before. I also removed the global menu timeout,
  which is now redundant.

- The menus no longer pop out of multicolour style back
  into old 3D style without warning.

- Starting the main program twice now brings up the
  prefs editor, just like with any other commodities tool.

- Made the drop shadow a little smaller (4x4 instead of 6x6).

- Fixed two fatal bugs in the bitmap initialization code.

- Added two more patches, this time for OffMenu() and OnMenu().

- MagicMenu now supports menu lending. For this to work, I had
  to remove the "screen with the active menu pops to front"
  feature. This screen depth arrangement also got into trouble
  with child screens, which would always get popped to the
  background.

- The prefs program now sports a "Test" button. If the main
  program is not yet running when you hit this button, the
  prefs program will try to launch it.


MagicMenu 2.9 (beta)
====================

- Moved the default imagery back into chip RAM.

- When in keyboard control mode, [Shift]+[Esc] will abort
  the entire menu operation, no matter which menu hierarchy
  you are in.

- The 3D multicolour mode now requires that the menu font is
  at least nine pixels tall. If it is smaller, you will get
  the old 3D mode.

- Reworked the menu imagery and made sure that the MX and
  checkmark images match in size.

- Multicolour ghosted text no longer gets rendered over and
  over again when moving the mouse across it.

- When running out of pens for the gradient fill slider
  the prefs editor should now back out gracefully rather than
  end up trying to load colour register -1 with greyscale
  data. This could have been the reason for the inexplicable
  prefs editor crashes.


MagicMenu 2.10 (beta)
=====================

- Default prefs project icon images now come from ENV:sys/def_pref.

- The multicolour 3D look mode no longer requires a font of a least
  nine pixels. Now eight pixels will do (and don't you complain if the
  imagery is taller than the menu font).

- The menu image remapping code should now be much smarter for images
  that use the PlanePick/PlaneOnOff option.

- Removed the "Remove" option from the prefs program.

- The prefs editor could copy too many colours when updating
  the program settings.

- Added a "precision" slider to the prefs program. With this slider
  you can select how much error the colour allocation routine will
  tolerate when selecting the colours for the multicolour menu.

- Rewrote all the colour management routines to be as careful as
  possible when releasing the allocated pens. It looks as if not
  all system configurations will treat pen #-1 as a no-op.


MagicMenu 2.11 (beta)
=====================

- The preferences editor now opens a custom screen with 32 colours
  if it cannot get that many from the requested public screen.

- When MagicMenu has taken control of the menus, window depth
  arrangement calls are no longer ignored, but delayed until
  the menu closes. Actually, I would have to add a whole lot
  more patches to make operation halfway safe, but for now
  I'm just plastering patches onto routines which are somewhat
  likely to get triggered while the menus are up.


MagicMenu 2.12 (beta)
=====================

- The window depth arrangement patches were not installed correctly,
  causing them to do nothing in most cases.

- In non-blocking mode and when running under Kickstart 2.04 you
  would still get the shadow borders. As the drop shadows do not
  work under V37 this was not really sensible.

- Added Mario's new 4 colour images. Note that you will get these
  only with high resolution screens and fonts >= 11 points. I also
  changed the old 3D look ghosting style.


MagicMenu 2.13 (beta)
=====================

- Added a new option to the prefs program. If "Prefer screen colours"
  is enabled, MagicMenu will make up the menu colours from the screen
  user interface colours rather than using the colours you selected
  from the palette.

- Updated the WindowToFront/WindowToBack patches to delay window
  operations on the screen the MagicMenu menus are active on.

- Added more patches to SetWindowTitles and RefreshWindowFrame.
  I should also patch RefreshGList, RefreshGadget, NewModifyProp,
  ModifyProp, and about seven other routines but I guess I'd
  rather stop here. All these routines can cause deadlocks which
  MagicMenu will back out of safely. This can be a little annoying,
  but you can still change the MagicMenu operating mode for
  normal operation.

- The keyboard control commands now consistenly work when they are
  enabled and go out of the way when the are disabled.

- Changed the settings file format, this time hopefully for the last
  time.

- Added a new option to have menus open slightly delayed, or put
  another way, when you have stopped moving the mouse.

- Added another new option to turn off the frames drawn around the
  active menu item.


MagicMenu 2.14 (beta)
=====================

- Corrected the placement of the Command images in menu items and
  subitems.

- For the "old look" menus the separator bars now render in the
  correct colour.

- The old 3D look menu borders are now just one pixel thick,
  regardless of the display mode used.

- Changed the preferences data exchange interface between the
  prefs editor and the main program. Now the system should no
  longer crash if you try to change the settings of the new
  program with an old prefs editor.

- Drop shadows are now restricted to pop-up menus.

- Some menus will open faster now in non-blocking mode, as they
  will be "promoted" to simple refresh windows if possible.

- Some of the patches MagicMenu installs to protect itself are
  no longer active in non-blocking mode. This will help Workbench
  and other applications which would otherwise get caught in
  their display update work.

- Changed the alignment rules for the checkmark, Amiga key and
  submenu arrow images to match those Intuition uses (or would
  use if it could).

- With "mark submenus" disabled, MagicMenu would cease to render
  submenu indicators in multicolour 3D mode. It now works again
  as it should.


MagicMenu 2.15
==============

- An invalid hotkey specification no longer keeps the main program
  from functioning. It will complain and the feature connected with
  the hotkey will be unavailable, but the program will continue
  to run.

- Changed the default colours for the preferences editor fallback
  screen.

- Added more patches for screen depth arrangement, opening
  and closing.

- Added Mario's new artwork.


MagicMenu 2.16
==============

- The size of the menu bar is now taken from the Screen data
  structure rather than made up from the font height.


MagicMenu 2.17
==============

- The layers.library patches now jump into action only if the
  non-blocking mode and the drop shadows are enabled.


MagicMenu 2.18
==============

- Removed all the layers.library patch code. The drop shadows are
  now rendered using a much more robust technique that does not
  require any black magic at all. As such, it now also works
  under Kickstart 2.04 and is no longer restricted to non-blocking
  mode (yes kids, that's what you always wanted).


MagicMenu 2.19
==============

- The changes in 2.18 introduced bugs into the menu refresh code.
  This is what I had to fix in this version.