Saturday, 11th February 2006

Programming Marathon

Phew! Well, it's been quite a manic week on the programming front, with no less than five new releases.

It all started with a complex new development of ROTunes (mentioned previously) which then led to the creation, development and writing of a new installer application for it.

Someone then pointed out a bug in ROTunes that I'd completely overlooked, which was that if you pause the music and then quit ROTunes, it left the MP3 file it was previously playing 'open'. To fix this bug I downloaded some of the available 'close files' utilities available for RISC OS. Unfortunately, all of them gave far too much information, when all I wanted was a quick summary of any files I may have left open myself - not loads of system files, which are likely to be open anyway!

Hence the inspiration for !CloseFiles, which is my own utility for closing open files. In addition to having a clean and simple interface it also has various filters so that you can tell it to ignore font and system device files - leading to a nice uncluttered display.

The first release of !CloseFiles was made a few hours after I originally had the idea to write it in the first place. Of course, it was soon pointed out to me that some of the text was being truncated because I'd created the icons a bit on the small side. Doh! I thought. Of course, not everyone uses a 1600x1200 screen mode with a desktop font size of 7pt. I immediately set about expanding all the icons slightly so that they should be viewable using 12pt Homerton text (the default desktop size). This in turn led to be giving myself a severe headache trying to calculate the required width of variable text in a variable anti-aliased font size. Font_ScanString didn't seem to want to play ball - despite me using it extensively in ROTunes to calculate column widths for the main display.

Anyone who's perused the PRM (vol.3, page 483) will see that this system call is not really for the faint-hearted, requiring the passing of data in seven registers as well as the setting of some 10 bits of one of them. All manner of combinations are possible, so what was needed was a decent 'Programmers Calculator' which would easily allow me to calculate bit patterns and binary/hexadecimal conversions without pulling too much hair out (what's left of it).

Cue, the inspiration to write !WordCalc..... Some four hours later and I make the first release, all working quite nicely and even doing a few more functions than I'd originally intended.

Now on a roll, I thought I'd better get around to updating a couple of other applications so I've also released new versions of my file checksum calculating utility !CRC and my Lottery analyser and guesser application.

And it's not even midnight yet! Yay!!

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