Aquileo | Recent changes to updates

Aquileo | Weekly round-up: 10-Sep-2003

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 11:34:51 -0000

Nothing much to report on the core stuff as it's all
running together quite happily at the moment. That's
not to say nothing's been happening, of course. The
Common Control project is up and running (again) - a
page on the site will follow shortly - with the Imagelist,
Listview and Treeview controls between 80 and 99%
complete, and the RichEdit control about 50%
complete. These are nice in many respects, not least as
it means we're no longer stuck with using the godawful
Microsoft OCXs, but also I've done my best to ensure
they're XTK dependency-free as well! =)

The RichEdit control will shortly find a home in the simple
debugger (SDB) object, which will allow iceFire 2.1-style
colourful debug information; the listview has already
gone into the new Tracker application. I'll be posting
more about all of these non-stardust systems in the
j:system project here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsystem

Aquileo | Weekly round-up: 28-Aug-2003

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 08:52:45 -0000

I'm trying to get these round-ups to actually appear
weekly, as opposed to the ad-hoc nature they're
currently running to, so from now on I'll be posting
weekly round-ups on or around Wednesday. Probably.

Okay, a quick summary of what's been happening these
last few days:

I'd wanted to get Dev. Release 1 out this week but
the 'subscript error' bug in Alpha 9 has meant holding fire
on releasing it until this could be solved, or controlled at
the very least. I've now been able to replicate the
problem (source seems to be the Network shelf addon)
on a Win98 box so it shouldn't be too hard to fix.
Testing on the Win98 box also showed up some problems
with the early startup process and XTK detection.
These have now been resolved, although it's a bit of a
hack, so I'll be looking to tidy this code up in time for
dev #1 as well.

The ISimpleEventHandler interface has been reworked
and is now called INotificationHandler instead - quite a
bit has changed here (for the better) and you can read
more about this in a separate update.

Finally, some good news - iceFire shelf AddOns are now
supported in the menubar! They sit quite happily
alongside their newer IShelfAddOn-based counterparts;
just drop them into the AddOns folder and they'll be
loaded up automatically. Hoorah!

Aquileo | Mid-week round-up: 20-Aug-2003

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 10:39:12 -0000

We're all struggling to go indoors to work these days
(mental note: sort out that wireless LAN asap) what
with the largely unseasonal (i.e. it's hot and sunny)
weather we've been having in the UK recently, so
today's mid-week round up is just a short one to say
that I added the code for the menus last night.

This is exactly the same code as that used in both
iceFire and Dockbar (and therefore will automatically pick
up your current colour definitions if you have any).

I've added very rudimentary menus to the tasks plugin
so at least it's partly functional, however stan's not
happy with the way the subsystem exports its details
(he rewrote it a couple of nights ago and is still not
happy with it) so we'll probably see some changes to
that soon.

It'll be Menu City over the next few days, with
everything from icons on the desktop to the various
addons getting them, which should give everything a
much more polished appearence.

Aquileo | Weekend round-up 17-Aug-2003

Sun, 17 Aug 2003 22:03:04 -0000

Plenty of progress made with Alpha 6 uploaded and
Alpha 7 coming along well. The biggest changes to a7
are as follows:

- Desktop icons reworked. These now follow the more
traditional approach (with the caption displayed
underneath the icon itself). For the time being the
mouse-over text has been disabled, although this may
well return in the future.

- Menu bar started. This is one of the biggest
improvements so far. At the moment only the clock and
shelf are working, however the shelf has been radically
improved with a new AddOn interface (although we'll get
support for icefire [p9] AddOns in as well). Three
AddOns are currently implemented, two - Test and Net -
are only dummy ones at the moment; the other one -
Volume - is partly implemented (see below).

- Mixer objects. To be part of the forthcoming media
kit, you can retrieve details of the audio mixers installed
and for each mixer retrieve details of the various source
and destination lines associated with it. For each line
the associated controls can be retrieved and these can
be manipulated directly. The Volume shelf AddOn uses
these objects to replicate the systray volume control by
querying the current state of the Master Mute control
and changing its icon accordingly.

Aquileo | Shelf AddOn interface

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 13:11:04 -0000

I've created a new interface - IShelfAddOn - based on
cm's IProject9AddOn interface used in iceFire R2.1.

This new interface bring with it two major
improvements. Firstly, the Menu() method is no longer a
function that expects an XMenu object - instead it's just
a basic Sub. This removes the dependency on the
interface kit XMenu objects (as we're trying to move
away from them completely now anyway) and also adds
more flexibilty as the AddOn can now do other
processing rather than simply provide a menu. In short,
now when the user right-clicks an AddOn, all the shelf
needs to do is call the Menu() sub for the appropriate
AddOn; the AddOn itself can determine what it wants to
do in response to the action. The second improvement
is support for multiple instances within single AddOns.
The functionality here is very similar to working with
Windows Control Panel applets: assuming the AddOn
responds to Loaded() with an X_OK status, the shelf will
then query the AddOn's AddOnCount property - the
AddOn should use this property to return the number of
instances (icons) it supports - from here on the shelf will
query the Flags, Icon and Tooltip properties once for
each instance (the new Index parameter indicates which
instance is being queried).

Aquileo | MenuBar

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 10:44:02 -0000

The menubar (first implemented in alpha7) gives a
Mac/Amiga look to stardust (you can see a concept shot
of it here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/cpeel2300/pix/jsystem/me
nubar2.jpg).

Aquileo | Tray plugin

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 10:57:42 -0000

Provides access the the systray content - in a plugin.

Aquileo | External objects

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 06:12:28 -0000

This item is a catch-all for items created or developed
under the stardust moniker but are intended for wider
use (i.e. they're not stored in the \stardust\ folder).

Aquileo | tray.subsystem

Fri, 08 Aug 2003 06:08:32 -0000

The tray.subsystem not unsurprising manages systray
items. It can work in two modes: native and mixed.
Native mode is when stardust is the user's default shell
and therefore allows the tray.subsystem freedom to
create it's own tray handling window; mixed mode is
when stardust is run over the top of another shell
(effectively as just-another-application) in which
circumstances the tray.subsystem will attempt to use
geo's modified 'trayspy' utility to mirror the systray
content.

Aquileo | Console

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 10:36:21 -0000

The console isn't a subsytem, instead it's pretty much a
standalone component that can be added to any
project. You'll need the form that hosts the console
itself (eventually I'd like this to be replaced by an api-
generated window) and the mConsole.bas module. You'll
also need to reference xen.dll so you get the
IMsgHandler interface. The console itself features a
limited number of built-in commands that provide version
info about the console itself and rudamentry o/s and
environment information (screen size, pwd, etc.) - the
console can be extended by adding a handler (which
implements the IMsgHandler interface), this then
receives a message when the console starts, ends, and
whenever the user enters a command.