Official DDE gets autumn makeover
Posted by Steve Revill Thu, 22 Oct 2015 20:11:00 GMT
Hot on the heels of the recent launch of the three box set of books describing every aspect of the Desktop Development Tools, ROOL have put together an update of the tools themselves.
What’s inside
This latest update (DDE26) folds in a number of fixes and enhancements that came about as a result of the in-depth, line by line, archaeology involved in writing the books.
There’s a new front end tool !Xpand to reverse the operation of squeezing an application, and some long lost abilities of ModSqz to compress applications have been restored. Updates to SID, Make, and Routines also feature following comments or requests from developers.
The code and text editor SrcEdit has been updated to use the clipboard model for editing to match its little brother Edit in the system ROM. It also has updated context help to lookup the C99 library functions and newer ARMv5 instruction set.
ObjAsm’s handling of the -desktop switch now copes with a mix of RISC OS and Unix path specifications, useful expressing paths in a system agnostic way.
As promised back in February with the launch of the paper copies of the Style Guide the electronic version of this is now bundled, which can be easier to follow the page cross references by clicking on the links in the PDF.
Developer offers
Anyone who’s renewed in the last six months will receive DDE26 as a free upgrade to their registered email address in the next few days. Beyond six months, you can upgrade now at half price for £25 inc. VAT, simply email your ROOL assigned developer number starting DEV07 to the support address to check you qualify.
New developer seats cost £50 inc. VAT, with postage extra if delivered on a USB stick.
Did you know your developer number also qualifies you for 20% off the Style Guide
and 20% off the DDE books too? Take advantage of these offers by putting your DEV07 number in the notes field at checkout.
What about zero page relocation?
Since the start of July
the nightly beta versions of the OS have all taken advantage of zero page relocation to shake out latent bugs and lay the foundations for broader modernisation to RISC OS in the future. Unfortunately even the DDE has been tripped up by a few of these, and work is underway to figure out how to address these, but the magnitude of the task is a little unclear as only 1 bug report has been received. Developers are encouraged to test any of the tools in the public sources and submit their fixes to the submissions hotline and to try to characterise and report problems in the remaining closed tools to the tools support address as usual.
I wonder whether your forum post from July (“We’ve spotted a number of naughty offenders amongst the tools in the DDE”) might have resulted in fewer bug reports than usual; I assumed that you were aware of the most noticeable issues and therefore didn’t submit reports.
The most major issue for me is that DDT crashes instantly, but AMU isn’t happy either!
Please do email us with any bug reports. We think we know about the zero page naughtiness and will do our best to get those issues sorted soon. Clearly, we want to have them all fixed before the move from zero page becomes permanent.
Is the new DDE26 also included in the NutPI package? Or does this still contain a older version of the DDE?
I have a DEV01 number. No discount?