The Datafile PD-CD 5

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Text File | 1994-03-12 | 13.4 KB | 305 lines

Charges -=-=-=- © 1992−4 Richard G. Hallas ____________________________________________________ Version history file ==================== * in margin indicates a major new addition. Version: Notes: 1·00 First released version. Went out on The Datafile's Cat/Demo disc 9. 1·01 Danish translation of messages file included. Many thanks to Henrik Pedersen. • Info window templates slightly altered to allow for longer Danish words. • ':' removed from 'Exchange rate:' menu item in the UK messages file. 1·02 Discovered a small bug: when the language is changed, the windows are deleted and recreated with the new messages. It seems that windows can sometimes change their handles when treated in this way, and I hadn't allowed for this. Therefore an 'Illegal window handle' error could occur. Now fixed. 1·03 Silly mistake: if Whole Hours was selected the charges would be calculated at the previous hour's rate until the hour changed, i.e. no rounding up at the half- hour mark (so 4hrs 59mins would cost the same as 4hrs 00mins). Now the hour rounds up at 30 minutes (so 4hrs 30mins counts as 5hrs). 1·13 * New feature: it is now possible to show the earnings below the icon bar icon, instead of the normal clock. This can be switched by an icon in the Options window, and is taken into account in the Settings. 1·23 * New feature: rewrite of the code to show text under the icon bar icon. This had been really annoying me because it was impossible to eliminate all the flicker. Therefore I changed the icon from being text plus sprite to just sprite-only. It still looks exactly the same, but the task draws the text itself, which makes two improvements possible: (a) now it never flickers (except in monstrously huge screen modes with 256 colours, which slow the whole machine down badly - i.e. bigger than mode 21); and (b) you can now choose the colours used for the text. Set them up in the Charges$Colours variable in the !Run file. Instructions are provided. 1·24 Tiny bug-fix: (I THINK this works, but I'm not certain...) It was sometimes possible for the menu to lose its pointer to the Info window (and perhaps the others too). Choosing the menu item still worked, but moving over the sub-menu pointer didn't. I hope this problem is now cured. It hardly ever happened in any case. 1·25 One small extra feature: if the icon bar icon is showing the earnings rather than the time, the time can be seen in an area of the Earnings window which is otherwise left blank. 1·35 * Major new feature: Job manager. This lets you save the hourly rate, whole hours setting, earnings window currencies and, of course, time worked so far on the job into separate files which Charges will maintain automatically. The default state is saved as a file called '☓', which the user doesn't see, in a new Jobs directory. The other contents of this directory are the jobs which the user defines, and these are presented in a menu. The only limit on the number of jobs that can be recorded at once is the number of files which can be saved in a directory. • Certain areas of the code have been tidied up slightly in this version, and the layout of the 'Settings' file has been revised, with many options moved over to the individual jobs file. • From this release onwards, Charges needs to write to itself frequently, and so should not be used from a protected disc. 1·36 Added extra help message for the icon bar icon. It was previously referring to the time being shown even when the earnings were being shown instead. 1·37 Small bug-fix: if the computer was turned off without quitting Charges, then the file determining the current job in use would not be updated. Now it is updated as soon as you change anything in the Job manager window. 1·47 * New feature: the exchange rate database. Now each time an exchange rate is entered, it is stored in a file, and retrieved when the currencies are changed in the Earnings window. A new Query window has also been added, so you can optionally store the change or not. The exchange rate from a currency to itself is not stored in the database, and exchange rates which are not found are automatically set to 1. The exchange rate is also set to 1 if a currency is being converted to itself. • Another change: the currencies displayed in the Conversions window have been linked to those in the Earnings window, and their menus removed. 1·48 Menu help added for RISC OS 3. 1·49 Other help text corrected to reflect the changes in the program's operation. 1·50 Improvement: Wimp_Poll has been replaced by Wimp_PollIdle, which means that Charges now takes only about a third of the processor time it took previously. • Bug-fix: somewhere along the line, the saving of the converted/earned amounts in the Conversions and Earnings windows had stopped working when the figure was dragged to a Filer window, although direct memory transfer into other applications was still fine. The problem is now fixed: for some reason I had added a superfluous RESTORE ERROR line which was upsetting the error handler. • Bug-fix: When restoring the exchange rate, rounding errors could cause it to overflow the 10-character limit. The rounding errors can still happen (I don't know how to avoid this, and the errors are insignificant anyway), but the figure can never overflow its allotted space now. 1·51 * Well, not exactly a major new feature, but it's natty and I like it! I refer to a new feature for users of RISC OS 3 only: the ability to drag a solid sprite, containing the red-bordered contents, out of the Earnings and Conversions windows. Users of RISC OS 2 just get a dotted outline, but RISC OS 3 now enables Charges to provide a full sprite, and I have designed a kind of translucent sprite which resembles the icon you're dragging away from (including the correct total it contains), but which lets you see the background through it. The overall effect is like dragging a bit of engraved perspex over the desktop, and it looks *REALLY* good, especially in the multisync screen modes! • Small bug-fix/correction: the icon which Charges uses on the icon bar has been moved out of the !Sprites file, because if the !Boot file was obeyed again when Charges was loaded, a blank version of the icon was loaded, and the number below the running program's icon could then vanish. 1·52 A tiny amendment: having seen some more documentation for the DragASprite module, I found out it was possible to specify a sprite area instead of just the wimp sprites. Therefore, two sprites have been moved out of the '!Sprites' file into Charges' own sprite area file, 'Sprites'. 1·53 Two small changes, one cosmetic: • Only one copy of Charges is now allowed to be running at once, since having more than one running would result in all the data being written into the directory of the most recently-loaded copy. • If RISC OS 3 is in use, the wimp sprite 'gright' is used instead of the textual '⇨' arrow for pop-up menus. Although the windows are set up to use a special sprite area, this still works because if the required sprite is not found in the special pool under RISC OS 3, it checks the wimp sprite pool (which is where 'gright' is located). Templates modified to facilitate this new feature. 1·54 Two more small changes, one of them rather important: • Bug-fix: When I changed the Wimp_Poll to Wimp_PollIdle in version 1·50, I forgot to alter the part of the code which resets the clock when you click ADJUST on the icon. This sometimes caused the clock to restart from an arbitrary value after you had reset it, which was far from helpful! • The templates have been altered slightly to make the menu 'buttons' look better when used with the 'gright' sprite in RISC OS 3 (as opposed to the '⇨' text in RISC OS 2). 1·64 * Now supports RISC OS 3 desktop save. • Bug-fix: Faulty reason code in wimp messages amended. • Important bug-fix: If the icon bar icon was set to show earnings (rather than the time), it wasn't getting updated unless the Earnings window was open. Thanks to Nigel Gatherer for spotting this one. 1·65 The check-pattern masked dragging sprites have been altered (i.e. the masked and solid pixels have been reversed) to make them work correctly if Michael Rozdoba's excellent Desktop+ module (which gives similar translucent drags throughout all the desktop) is running. Previously, Charges and this module both masked out alternate pixels, so if you dragged the earnings or conversions icon, all you saw was a dotted red border. 1·66 Minuscule changes to templates file and icon bar icon to make them look right with Acorn's NewDesk. 1·67 Finally got round to reading the RISC OS 3 Style Guide. Charges followed very closely anyway, but I've changed a few things to make it comply even better, and I've given the Info window a 3D look to match the rest of the program. NB Colons have now disappeared from all label icons, as per the Style Guide. The two labels in the Earnings window now look much better with NewDesk. Made a couple of changes to the !Run file. 1·70 * Version 1·70 represents a fairly major revision of layout, both in terms of the appearance of some windows and also of the overall operation of the program in some respects; from a user's point of view, it should look slightly more 'finished off', and conforms a little more closely to the style guidelines. There are also a couple of very minor bug fixes. * If you are using a version of the wimp which supports outline fonts across the desktop, Charges will now detect this font and use it for the icon bar icon, even though this is drawn "manually" by the program. You can still alter the colours used for this text by amending the system variable in the !Run file. NB The outline font is also used in the translucent dragging sprites. • Revision of error handler for the new versions of the Wimp. (Updated "LoadHelp" program similarly.) • Corrected a very small omission in the logic concerning the Job manager. Not a bug as such; just a completion. (Delete button was not unshading when a new job was created.) • Wording change: "OK" replaced by "Set". Also changed all instances of "icon-bar" to "icon bar", and removed some captials. All per new Style Guide, with which I tend to agree about this kind of thing. • Changed slab-in colour of all buttons to grey (3) to match the new standards. • Revised some border types to match newer styles. Also revised layout of the Options window a little; slightly reduced in size. • Updated system-font £-sprites to outline font versions and removed some superfluous sprites. Also changed appearance of opton button from red square to pound sign. • Made Conversion window's arrow highlight in yellow when clicked (RISC OS 3.1 only). • Added a ptr_hand dragging pointer to the red (draggable) fields in the Earnings and Conversions windows. • The ultimate frustrating experience! I've just found out that the new Wimp does translucent solid sprite drags by default. I CLAIM HERE AND NOW: »I« WAS THE FIRST PERSON EVER TO THINK OF THIS, AND YOU SAW THE EFFECT FIRST IN CHARGES!! A similar idea subsequently appeared in Acorn User, and then Michael Rozdoba did a really excellent implementation of the effect in Desktop+. However, he masked the alternate pixels to the ones I used, with the result that if Desktop+ was running at the same time as Charges, the translucent drag fields in Charges disappeared. In version 1·65 of Charges, I spent ages redoing the sprites so that this wouldn't happen. Now I've just seen Acorn's new wimp, and found that it uses the same masked pixels as I did in the first place, so I've had to put the sprites back like they were before!!