WinEd - Time for a New Release?

Discussion with a few people at the SW Show today reminded me that there’s been a test build of WinEd (“r155”) sat on my website for a few years now¹. As is the way with these things, I don’t think I’ve had a huge amount of feedback on it, so: does anyone use it? Is it stable, or are there bugs in it that need squashing? Should I look into working out where I had got with it and making it into a proper release?

IIRC one of the things that was holding me up was a desire to move the source from SVN on RISCOS.info into Git, combined with the need to do some admin before I could proceed with that. The SVN repo is looking rather poorly at the moment, so that may need to be prioritised.

¹ Well, three years.

I use it a lot.

One thing I would like it the ability to groud edit the maximum text string character length.

Sorry, we’ve been using 3.26 for a while and I had not realised you had a test build out, so I can’t give any feedback on stability.

As I’ve been doing a bit of Toolbox programming recently, I’ve really noticed how poor ResEd is by comparison with WinEd. The alignment, spacing and resizing facilities in WinEd are excellent.

A possible reason for the lack of feedback is the button “Visit website” in version 3.26, that leads to a “503 Service Unavailable” error, an error that persists in version r155 (as I found out 12 seconds ago). Apart from that, WinEd is priceless!

Definitely time! I have used WinEd r155 for about 2 years, without any problems in normal use.
I did report one small problem with a template created by RiscView last year, and identified the cause.
The current problem with the ‘Visit Website’ button is I fear a symptom of recurring problems with https://www.riscos.info website.

r155 is the version of WinEd on my machine, and I’ve been using it now and then for a couple of years without issue.

I’ve now had a look at where I was at with WinEd, and have released an updated test build. It’s the same as r155, but with a couple more bugs squashed:

• The sanity checks on the reserved fields in file headers have been reduced, so that invalid files from older third-party editors can be loaded with user agreement.
• The filetypes of possible application sprite files (those found by proximity to the templates file) are now checked before loading them, to avoid bad sprite file errors.

Copies can be found at https://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/risc-os/wined and links in the application now point here as well.

The naming of the test build has changed to using its Git commit hash instead of an SVN revision code, which should be a clue that I’ve also got around to moving the source from SVN to Git: WinEd now lives in the RISCOS.info project at https://github.com/riscos-dot-info/wined. The converted repo has actually been sat on my own machine for the past three years, since I converted all of my own SVN repositories, and the failure to get it pushed anywhere public has been one of the things stopping me from progressing development further.

There are potentially a couple more bugs to investigate before producing a new stable release, although I’m weighing up the likelihood of that actually happening soon against the benefits of just getting 3.27 (or whatever) out…

A possible reason for the lack of feedback is the button “Visit website” in version 3.26, that leads to a “503 Service Unavailable” error, an error that persists in version r155 (as I found out 12 seconds ago).

I very much doubt that has caused many problems, as it’s a result of RISCOS.info’s recent troubles and hasn’t been an issue for most of the past three years.

It looks as if, with impeccable timing, RISCOS.info has now returned at exactly the point that I’ve removed all the links from the application.

I’m happy to hear people’s views on whether to reinstate the original web links, or to retain those which point to my website. For what it’s worth, the email links have pointed to me for the past three years.

Links point to your site.

There are potentially a couple more bugs to investigate before producing a new stable release

Well, one less, now… One was simple to fix, and build 97f3a03 sorts that as well¹. Which leaves a couple of related items concerning soft-selections in the template browser, which from a quick investigation fall well inside “here be dragons” territory.

I’ve got some other things that I must look at now, but unless I hear any negative feedback I’m tempted to produce a stable build when I next get chance to do development things. In the meantime, any testing that people want to do on the new build will be very welcome!

¹ Icon dimensions in the Monitor are updated when an icon is resized using an Adjust-double-click.

I’ve got some other things that I must look at now, but unless I hear any negative feedback I’m tempted to produce a stable build when I next get chance to do development things.

Well, that didn’t happen – mainly because I had some feedback about the documentation. It hasn’t been good for a while, but I hadn’t poked it much beyond the bare minimum necessary and didn’t really want to start doing so for reasons that are probably obvious!

However… against my better judgement, I’ve now taken a look and promptly got lost down a documentation tool-shaped rabbit hole. Having re-emerged, changes to WinEd’s user guide include:

• Coverage of the thus-far undocumented alterations to Choices,
• Inclusion of the version history back to 2020 (which is where my knowledge runs out), and
• For the first time in mumble years, the plain text version of the manual contains the same details as the HTML one (and isn’t just the one from WinEd 2.87, with a note saying “out of date, please ignore”).

There’s still plenty of scope for further work, but on the basis that it’s no worse than it was before, I think the time has probably come to draw a line under it and move on. There’s a new test build (97f3a03) available for people to try, which should be identical apart from the documentation, but unless there’s any major showstoppers uncovered, I’m tempted to go for a 3.27 release in time for some event that’s happening in Yorkshire next weekend.

As ever, feedback is welcome.