Household Shopper began life in 1987 as a personal project to learn how to program in the programming language of Pascal. My wife wondered if I could create for her a program that would help her manage our household shopping.
Household Shopper 1.x was a crude but effective program but contained a lot of mistakes. Not bugs, the program would not lose data, but standard Macintosh interface mistakes. For example: viewing items required flipping through four “pages,” printing was only done properly on an ImageWriter II, printing was only supported in the portrait page orientation, and the disk space required to store a Category was the same whether it contained 1 item or 40.
Household Shopper 2.x conforms to the standard Macintosh interface much better. It now uses scrolling windows to display categories and items, clicking on categories and items selects and deselects in a more intuative manner, printing on IW II, IW LQ, and the Laser Writer is now correct, Multifinder is now supported, various sorts of the items is supported, larger categories (50 item instead of 40) are supported, and files are stored on disk as actual data only.
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2.01
Fixed bugs that existed when:
- Category names were sorted after the last category of a file was deleted. Problem doesn’t exist when any category other than the last one is deleted.
- A new file was created from scratch using HHS2. Problem doesn’t exist for files built using the enclosed data file or files converted using the file converter.
- A category name was changed and there were less than 5 categories in the file. This caused an address error — System Error 02.
- A category was sorted using differtent sorting criteria after items had been deleted from a category. Problem only existed if there were fewer items in the category at sort time than since selecting the category.
2.02
Fixed bugs that existed when:
- Items were deleted in some situations.
- Corrected to delete to the last item if the range specified beyond the last item.
- Corrected some conditions that caused the column lines to disappear. This was/is not a killer bug, just a visual annoyance.
- Added a routine that checks the value in the quantity field. If the quantity is zero then it is automatically set to one.
2.03
Fixed a cosmetic bug that failed to unhilite a category name if repeated selections of “Add a new category…” were made.
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2.1
Major upgrade in the user interface.
Added buttons to the screen that give better action feedback and do more tasks. Specifically, added buttons for “Delete” and item, “Print”, “New” category, and “Save”. The “Find” button was enhanced so that if the command key is pressed when clicked the “Find again” function is invoked. If the command key is pressed when the “Print” button is clicked the whole file will be printed.
The edit fields are now hidden until an item is selected or and “New” item is being added to the file.
The printout was enhanced to remove some of the clutter and to add three lines at the bottom of each category for last minute write-ins.
Lastly, the available memory line has been moved to the “Help” screen and the window banner now shows the data file name.
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2.1.1
A maintanence update to take care of some problems with loss of data.
For those who experienced strange characters appearing in the scrolling list area, the problem is solved.
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2.2
A minor but significant upgrade to the user interface.
There is no longer the, apparently confusing, "File" button. Instead the text typed into an edit field is immediately displayed in the scrolling list area.
