How To ...

Please don’t think I’m nit-picking.

I don’t – I find your comments extremely well-informed and helpful. I did a course on web site design as well! Now just gives one error (frameborder) which you agree is arguable.

I find your comments extremely well-informed and helpful.

I still have no scroll bar in Firefox – don’t forget to remove the “position: fixed;” from the Nav.htm CSS. (^_^)

Yes, I had the same problem with Firefox – the file has been changed on the web but even using the refresh function, it still remembered the old one. You need to completely shut down Firefox (and the computer?) and start it up again to get rid of the old version.

Strange. I did a Ctrl-F5 (reload overriding cache), then I cleared the cache in the settings (simpler than a shutdown) and it still gave me the old page. I wonder if Orange cached it locally or something (’cos I fetched it a bunch of times)?
Never mind, it works now.

Next step – a favicon to give you a cute little icon in the URL bar plus in bookmarks (dunno about on a RISC OS browser…). It should be a GIF or a PNG¹ of size 16×16 called “favicon.gif”.

Then put this into your head section of the master document:

<link href="favicon.gif" rel="icon" type="image/gif">

or:

<link href="favicon.png" rel="icon" type="image/png">

If you fancy doing something awesome, like a rotating RISC OS cogwheel or somesuch, animated GIFs work too (just look at the one on my blog!). ;-)

Official W3C info is here.

¹ It looks as if MSIE (any version?) only supports .ico ? The whole thing is a semi unofficial expansion of a glorified Microsoft hack implemented (badly!) in MSIE5. That explains the typical “.ico” extension, plus the determined desire to not use any contemporary standard image format (that’s right, MSIE won’t touch GIFs or PNGs here; but since the IE9-won’t-work-on-XP-for-<lameexcuse> thing, I’ve dropped all explicit support for IE in my site designing. And a damn good thing too, it’s Quirk’s mode rendering was quirky as hell, and it’s standards compliant mode still has table formatting bugs (IE7, IE8) not to mention it is slow as hell (IE8). I’m glad not to need to start that up much these days.

Some feedback. Maybe this ought to be in Aldershot or something, not Announcements?

Ummm…. From the Printing page:

Here it is clear that the printer should be identified as a file called ‘Devices#interface0;alternate1:USB8’ which will appear in the ‘USB’ field (if you are lucky) as ‘047E:1001’. Add the necessary text to ‘File’, click ‘Set’ and then ‘Save choices’. If you are fortunate, the application !Printers will identify all this information automatically.

It would be very good if !Printers identified all of the nerdy stuff automatically. But if not, how is this “clear”? How did you get from the result of the two command lines (I note your printer appears to identify itself as an “evaluation kit”?) to such things as “interface0” and “alternate1”? Is this bog standard and what you meant is “USB8” as it is device eight? [which is a bit dangerous as I noticed with my MIDI experiments that the USB ID changes depending on order of insertion (which can depend upon other devices) – this is why the USB ID is better for identifying a specific device]

The Apps folder. Could you present a picture of a vanilla as-installed Apps? Your one looks nice, but there’s a heck of a lot of stuff in there that isn’t present in the default distros. Maybe you could have both to show “standard” and “what you can do”?

The look at the SD card could be expanded to mention double-clicking, how to copy vs move, rename files, the usual intro stuff which is quite different to Windows!
Ah, I see you have done this in the welcome page. Then you need a link!

Programming. Oh my giddy aunt – people still use ARMBE?!?! I ditched that about the same time I ditched EDLIN on that other system. (^_^) The majority of my BASIC was just written in !Edit… full applications, too, not just little things.

Text editor – search is F7? Not F4? Might also be useful to mention F3 to save.

Draw could benefit from a brief explanation of what vector graphics means. Something like “A bitmap (as created by !Paint) uses a ‘dot’, a pixel, for each part of a picture, and pictures are built up of many (perhaps millions) of these dots. A vector picture, on the other hand, describes each element as a starting point, an ending point, and maybe some points in between. While a bitmap contains dots to represent each picture, vector pictures literally contain instructions of how to draw the picture. By consequence, as vector pictures are instructions, they can be drawn flawlessly at any size. This cannot be said for bitmaps, which when scaled up look dotty and jaggedy. You might have seen this in magazines?”.

Wow. Your networking setup page is short. Here’s my guide to setting up static IP – it is about a third of the way down and accounts for 2/3rds of the content! http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20130316

Links offsite (tried OvationPro linkuseful software) should have target="_blank" following the href to open the link in a new window/tab. As it is, the site linked opens within the content frame_! Or use @target="top"@ to replace your site with that linked, but for users exploring they might find going to and fro to be a PITA so _blank is my preferred suggestion.
[seems you already do this elsewhere, so maybe it is just an oversight?]

The PRM PDFs aren’t. :-(

It would be very good if !Printers identified all of the nerdy stuff automatically. But if not, how is this “clear”?

There may, perhaps, be a touch of sarcasm here. I found it extraordinarily difficult to set up !Printers. I have a couple of network printers, carefully set up with static IP addresses (using static address reservation in the ADSL modem for their individual MAC addresses).

The HowTo is updated as of today to bring it up to speed with software released this week.

Programming. Oh my giddy aunt – people still use ARMBE?!?!

I was vociferous in getting this to be 32bitted… I will admit that I use !Zap now, almost exclusively but just very ocasionally use EDIT from BASIC.

I’ve noticed a few issues:

In the list of useful commercial applications:

• The links for Inpression are well out of date—last updated in 1996 and 2006 respectively.

In the list of the contents of the Raspberry Pi disc inage:

• PipeDream is NOT a bitmap editor! Seems to have crept down from the list above.

• Director doesn’t just “display the time”. Indeed there doesn’t seem to be a useful description of its functionality anywhere that I’ve seen.

The links for Inpression are well out of date—last updated in 1996 and 2006 respectively.

I have spoken to Richard Keefe, at the South West show, and said that there is no web address that can be quoted that gives any information about Impression-X. He hopes to get the next release out by Wakefield and he said he would then treat the creation of a web site with more urgency.

PipeDream is NOT a bitmap editor! Seems to have crept down from the list above.

Yes that’s a typo copied from above but not edited. I’ll sort this out.

Director doesn’t just “display the time”. Indeed there doesn’t seem to be a useful description of its functionality anywhere that I’ve seen.

Yes, I agree. All it does for me is display the time!

There may, perhaps, be a touch of sarcasm here. I found it extraordinarily difficult to set up !Printers. I have a couple of network printers, carefully set up with static IP addresses (using static address reservation in the ADSL modem for their individual MAC addresses).
The HowTo is updated as of today to bring it up to speed with software released this week.

Chris: Your instructions talk about setting up manually USB Printers. Does Pop UP Printers not work for you?
I realise there are problems setting up multiple drivers for the same printer (e.g. One set to default to colour another monochrome).

Director doesn’t just “display the time”. Indeed there doesn’t seem to be a useful description of its functionality anywhere that I’ve seen.

Yes, I agree. All it does for me is display the time!

With Director loaded:
Have you tried right clicking on a Filer icon?
And, with Windows open on the Desktop, have you tried right clicking on the Switcher icon? (that would be the raspberry pi icon in the bottom left hand corner ;) )
How about holding down Alt and click Menu over any window?
And clicking Menu over any Titelbar (works best over a Filer window, but any window will do)

A brief description could be:
Director is a general purpose desktop tool. It allows you to customise your desktop by creating menus of useful commands and icons to attach the menus.
Director has some other useful features such as remembering the most recently used files, adding key strokes into the keyboard buffer and to producing directory menus over drive icons.

More here: http://director.sourceforge.net/

Thanks. I’ll update it (and try !Director!). Now updated. Any further suggestions are most welcome…

I’ve used *ARMBE since the back in the days of *BE on the Beeb. I guess that once you’ve overcome the poor user interface and know the keyboard shortcuts and the important function keys, then why change.

Every now and then I retry the basic editors on !ZAP and on !StrongED, but go back to using ARMBE. Now if somebody could make the basic editors on Zap and StrongED have the functionality of Richard Russell’s BBC BASIC For Windows editor then I think that I’d finally switch ;-)

Now if somebody could make the basic editors on Zap and StrongED have the functionality of Richard Russell’s BBC BASIC For Windows editor

Why not let the developers know what you’re looking for. Then they can see if it’s feasible and if so implement it.

As it so happens I’ve done a lot of work on StrongED’s BASIC handling lately (mostly internal stuff, few user facing changes) so now would be a good time to ask.

Thanks for the information/challenge on StrongED’s basic editor functionality Fred. I’ll try and revisit the latest copy of StrongEdit and pass back some feedback, although this might not be for a few days.