Float - New Developments

Here’s an announcement that I was never expecting to make…

Back in 2003, while working on an update to my alternative interactive help client Float, the hard disc of my RiscPC crashed and all the source code went missing. The backups turned out not to be (a worthwhile lesson :-), and so all I had left was the source code to Version 0.36 and a crunched copy of the work-in-progress of version 0.40 which was being tested on the Iyonix.

Building Float also required the very definitely 26-bit BasCompress, so without a RiscPC that was kind of the end of the road – which is where things stayed for about ten years…

As a result of the work on Tokenize, plus a fair bit of reverse engineering of the crunched version of the code, I’ve now got not only all the source code back but also a way to build it once again. The result is a release candidate of Float which has the following new features:

• The code is happy on modern hardware, and the UI finally complies with the modern RISC OS 5/6 Style Guide (but it does now require the Nested Wimp).

• There’s finally a way to edit and maintain the “ignore tasks list” from the Choices dialogue box, meaning that it’s no longer necessary to hand-edit the Choices file for this fundamental feature.

• Several bugs that have been languishing in my inbox since 1999 have finally been fixed.

• The documentation has had something of an overhaul, which is ongoing.

There’s a version to download a short way down http://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/software/test/ and I’d welcome people downloading a copy and letting me know how they get on – especially on modern hardware. I’ve obviously done some testing (!), but feedback here is always useful. Once I’m happy this version is stable, I can release a proper version of Float that plugs a large gap in my software’s “ARMv7 OK” status. :-)

The test build of Float is now licensed under the EUPL, which again is something I’d not expected to see (as it’s hard to open source something if you don’t have the source code any more)!