Manga

Now on !Store (and my site via beta-updater) is a new version of Manga that…

• Provides proper working support for AcornSSL (via URL module).
• Automatic cache tidy.
• Enhances support for mesolithic machines by attempting to do useful things with 10 character filename and 77 files/directory limits. Manga ought to now be useful on a generic Acorn-era RiscPC.
• Bug fixes, enhancements.

The full list of changes (since last release) are at http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/changelist.txt

Version 0.37 on my site (self-updater) and on !Store.

• Rewrote the window positioning code to get rid of the weird glitches and nonsense.

• There’s a bookmark – so that fifth toolbar button does something at least.

• No longer beeps when popping up the “I’m busy” window. I can hear some of mumble “thank god”. ;-)

There are some UI enhancements, some documented in the help, and some not. Refer to the change list at http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/changelist.txt for details of what’s new in this version.

Note: If you get Pain or crashes when ZeroPain isn’t active, it’s not Manga :-) This appears to be something in AcornHTTP or somesuch… https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/4/topics/14691

My three week summer holiday is nearly over. Where the hell did the time go?

No sooner than I’d released 0.37, I decided that this miserable rainy Saturday afternoon would be the day that I sit down and do something I’ve been planning for a long time but never actually gotten around to implementing.

Version 0.38 is available via the self-updater, not Store (just in case it blows up :-) ).

What’s new? Not a lot really.

Except you might notice a second application directory called !MangaLib. It doesn’t do much by itself.

But, then, you might find yourself looking in the big list of manga for H → Hyakumanjou Labyrinth.
And you might read a few pages.
And then try opening the menu that’s a part of the manga reader window.
And you might notice a new entry there, marked “Add to library”.
And you might decide to click it, to see what happens.

You might.

Or, alternatively, you could put the kettle on and decide that a better solution to a damp end of summer is to one-shot a hot Tetley and then go and remove the expired flowers from your marigolds.

You might.

end of summer ?

We are not even half way through the summer wine yet.

Speak for yourself John (big wink) – we just finished the second big box (of three) of DVDs last night, so approx series 24?

I took Steph to Holmfirth for a couple of days earlier this year, and it just happened to coinside with us watching the Compo’s Passing trilogy (when Bill Owen died) – was very poignant.

Sorry, I’m derailing the thread.

So, new !Manga… Yay! :) Sounds like a useful update Rick, although the quirky description left me slightly confused about the new library feature… is it basically a disc cache?

the quirky description

;-)

is it basically a disc cache?

Manga has had a disc cache since forever.
This… is more….

Emergency update to v0.39 (on both Store and self-update).

Symptom: Manga crashes when adding a new manga. [upon reloading Manga, it’s listed in your history and it subsequently works]

Problem: New code in the function to add an item to the history assumed that the available string length was 128 bytes. It wasn’t.

Fix: Simple, once it was tracked down.

Resolution: Don’t code when it’s been four hours since the last cup of tea…

Oddity: Why did this not show up the entirety of yesterday when I was working with the new library code? Hmmm…

Well… If this doesn’t break it, nothing will…

Azumi → This manga contains 6973 pages, which will require approximiately 871 to 2042 megabytes. Continue?

Hmm… Started at 3pm. After an hour nearly to the end of chapter 20. Which… scribbling on the back of an envelope, suggests another 12 hours to go…

On the bright side, it’s not One Piece. :-)

Took the better part of an entire day, because the SSL module (I presume?) freezes up for about five seconds at times when the server doesn’t bother to respond; and then there is the fetcher timeout (8 secs) plus another 5 secs delay before the auto error box closer kicks in. And it will retry.
So I’d guess each successful fetch took maybe 10-20 seconds and each failure took about a minute.

Thanks to a number of skipped pages, I needed to get Manga to download again, and again, and again. Each time it’ll skip what it has and try to download the things it’s missing.

And, at last, all ~1.4G of Azumi.

Good news. I have all 255 or so chapters that I can read at my own pace with no fetching delays.
Bad news. I’m only on chapter 35…

:-)

Observing this happening has given me some pointers to things that can be improved. Back at work now, so just got to find the time to do the modifications. But, hey, it did download all of that (eventually) and it did not blow up. Result!

On !Store and self-updater – version 0.40.

Basically:

• Numerous enhancements so the Library download works better (no more fifty billion error boxes!).

• Changes to DeskLib to allow windows to be opened centred if they are not open, or brought to the top where they are if they are open. So now opened windows in Manga will stop always jumping to the middle of the screen (useful if you’re using the selector window to browse search results or the like).

I’ve found what appears to be a bug: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure part 3, chapter 1, page 1. The window is slightly wider than the image, and this extra space is getting filled with whatever happened to be underneath the window. Hopefully it behaves the same way on your machine!

Note that I’m on 0.39, not 0.40.

Note that I’m on 0.39, not 0.40.

That’s okay, not messed with the redraw code in between. ;-)

The window is slightly wider than the image,

Easy explanation: It’s a really long title, and the Wimp won’t allow the width to be less than necessary to hold the title text.

I tried simply setting the background to white, but this caused really obvious flicker with long-scroll manga such as Release that Witch.

I then looked at Wimp_TextOp to work out the title text, and discovered that the Wimp doesn’t appear to have a ReadSysInfo (documented or private) to work out the geometry of the sprites. I’d need to get the toolsprites pointer and get the width of… everything. It was stupid.

So I took a lateral approach. In the routine that sizes the reader window, at the end I force a poll and then ask the Wimp for the window size that it actually used.
Then in the redraw, if the window is larger than we asked for it to be, it’ll have the background filled to white. If it is the size we asked for (or smaller, if the user shrunk the window size) then no clearing is performed.

I have put up a test version v0.40b at http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/m040b.zip but note that it is just the executable, you’ll need to drop it on top of an installation of v0.40, which you can get from the same base URL. ;-)

Hope this works for you now.

Rick, if you need to know the size of the titlebar then I think WimpExtend is what you’re after.
https://www.riscosopen.org/wiki/documentation/show/Extend%20Block

Easy explanation: It’s a really long title, and the Wimp won’t allow the width to be less than necessary to hold the title text.

That would certainly explain it! I mustn’t have been paying much attention because I should’ve noticed that…

I have put up a test version v0.40b at http://heyrick.ddns.net/manga/m040b.zip but note that it is just the executable, you’ll need to drop it on top of an installation of v0.40, which you can get from the same base URL. ;-)

Thanks! However, that URL only lists up to 0.39. I’ll grab it from Store instead.

Edit: I can confirm that it’s a white background now, as promised :)

Crap, I forgot to update the web page.

Still, it’s not hard to figure out… manga, version number, dot zip. ;-)

It’s a really long title, and the Wimp won’t allow the width to be less than necessary to hold the title text.

Wot?

Wot?

You probably fixed that in your Wimp years ago. ;-)

Easy explanation: It’s a really long title, and the Wimp won’t allow the width to be less than necessary to hold the title text.

You’ve set the window’s minimum width and height to 0. The PRM signals that in this case the title’s width is used as minimal width.

You probably fixed that in your Wimp years ago. ;-)

Didn’t Acorn “fix” it in the Wimp back in the late ’80s? The title length is ignored if the minimum width is set to a non-zero value, I think. If not that, then one of the values in the Wimp_CreateWindow block.

ETA: Ah, beaten to it… :-)