Alarm

James Lampard wrote:

Currently I’m messing around with Alarm to make it use the desktop font in it’s icon rather than using the old system font, I’m also squashing some annoying bugs – someone’s messed up the messages file at some point (stripping some spaces from the end of some lines) resulting in silly interactive help messages.

The ‘set alarm’ window has been broken by someone to be fully open all the time; I’ve reinstated the original behaviour of toggling size based on the selection of the ‘Repeating Alarm’ icon. I’ve also added some new behaviour – whenever you toggle the window it’s automatically moved to be fully on screen.

James Are you still working on updating Alarm? The reason I ask is that I’ve made some changes to the template file to make them more user friendly. It might be worth rolling our changes in together?

Also, some of my changes are not be style guide compliant but are much better (IMO).

Let me know if you want a copy of my version of Alarm.

James Are you still working on updating Alarm? The reason I ask is that I’ve made some changes to the template file to make them more user friendly. It might be worth rolling our changes in together?

Also, some of my changes are not be style guide compliant but are much better (IMO).

From my experience Alarm is extremely uncompliant already. So you can hardly make things worse.

Let me know if you want a copy of my version of Alarm.

Erm, I’ve almost finished (although Christmas will probably get in the way of submitting the changes to ROOL.)

Unfortunately I’ve already re-designed the “Set Alarm” window, and I’ve created a library that changes dialogues that have both an action button and a wimp close button (the choices window, the set alarm window, the set clock window and the alarm going off window) to lose the close window button and have “Cancel” and “Set” buttons at the bottom of the window.

By all means feel free to send your version to “james underline lampard at talk21.com”, although it might be easier for you to wait until ROOL make available an updated version by CVS.

It’s been 7 weeks since I sent my changes into ROOL, and as there’s been no activity on cvs since November, I’ve decided to release both source and binary archives of the improved alarm on my website:

http://www4.webng.com/resurgam/ROOL/

The three zip files are the finished app, an archive of changed files and a complete source archive.

The Alarm276.ZIP file has had it’s version number bumped, but the two source archives are ‘as is’.

Summary:
  Many changes and improvements to Alarm.
Detail:
  Style guide issues:
    Fixed window menus to open at x-64,y instead of
x-64,y+32
    Pressing return in dialogue boxes causes the
default button to be pressed
    Changed 'Setup...' to 'Choices...' on iconbar
menu.
    Dialogue windows now have a Cancel button rather
than a wimp close box.

  Set Alarm window changes:
    Window redesigned.  
    Old behaviour (which was broken in 2.75) of
clicking on the "Repeating Alarm" icon expanding the
window, has been reinstated.
    Year, date, hour and minute icons are now directly
editable.
    New icons show the difference between the current
time and the alarm you are setting.

  Fixed broken messages file, added a warning to
hopefully stop it happening again.
  When the 'code' file isn't present, an error is
generated; unfortunately this was translated via
MsgTrans (the problem being the messages file hadn't
been opened yet). This has now been fixed.
  Iconbar icon now uses desktop font, and has a fixed
position on the iconbar.
  The Alarm$Options settings are saved in
<Choices$Write>.Boot.Predesk.Alarm, so the user
defined format is preserved over resets.

  Extensions to the user definede format:
    ~AH Analogue hours display.
    ~AM Analogue minutes display.
    ~AS Analogue seconds display.
    ~IN Alternating ':'/'.' indicator previously used
by HH:MM format.
    You can now include system variables in the
string. Alarm provides <Alarm$Free> which is the
current free memory in the computer.

  Error changes:
    Message_DataOpen is acknowledged straight away.
Which prevents the situation of an error occuring, the
OS running another copy of Alarm and then generating
the same error again.
    Errors 108D4 and 108D5 are ignored, as recommended
on PRM3-64
    Error windows now use the extensions provided by
RO3.5

  Choosing "Set clock..." from the iconbar menu, will
run the !TimeSetup configure plug-in if available.

Admin:
  Tested on RiscPC RO402, RiscPC RO606, Under
emulation on RO311 + universal boot & nested window
manager.
Notes:
  Changes by James Lampard.

Sorry it’s taking a while. We have some time set aside at the end of this week to deal with the backlog of submissions.