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1) The new tabbed-dialog development environment is nearly complete.
The buttons from the "layout tools" stack have been moved to the
properties palette and are automatically shown if multiple controls
are selected. The color and font chooser dialogs also now work on
all selected controls when multiple controls are selected.
2) A "tooltip" property for buttons and fields that shows a short help
message when the mouse remains motionless on the control for a short
time.
3) Graphic objects now have "label" and "showName" properties. They
also now support text font and style properties. These features makes
it much easier to build flowcharts and other labeled diagrams.
4) Buttons and graphics now support multi-line text labels. You can
set them using the new properties dialog, putting \n in-line where
you want the line breaks to be.
5) Buttons have a "hiliteIcon" property which allows them to show a
different icon depending on whether they're hilited or not.
6) The WIN32 engine now supports printing.
7) The WIN32 engine now supports all color depths (1, 4, 8, 16, 24,
and 32).
8) The "open file" command now accepts the modifiers "binary" and
"text" as in "open file whatever for binary read". By default, the
WIN32 engine opens files in "text" mode, which means cr-lf pairs are
translated to a single linefeed on read, and vice versa for write.
UNIX engines are unaffected (there is no difference between the two
modes on UNIX systems). As in 2.1A1, path delimiters are maintained
internally as the UNIX-standard / character and this is how they
currently appear in the file selector. Paths are translated back to
the DOS standard \ character when files are opened.
9) Putting a line starting with a - character in the button contents
will cause a menu separator to be draw when the contents are used to
create a menu panel. We're researching syntax for other related
features such specifying mnemonics, whether the button should be a
toggle or check box, and whether the button should be hilited
(checked) or not. Any suggestions would be welcome.
=======================================================================
Be sure to read the important warnings and installation instructions
in the file README.2.1A2. Only the tools stack (mctools.mc) has been
updated for this release: you should use the home and help stacks from
the 2.0 release with 2.1A2.
While a few features remain to be implemented before 2.1 goes to beta
test, 2.1A2 is of at least usable quality, and now's the time to voice
any opinions you have about the overall design of 2.1. The next
release scheduled is beta 1, after which adding features or making
major changes to the interface will become increasingly difficult.
-- *************************************************************** Scott Raney raney@metacard.com http://www.metacard.com Tcl and ksh: syntactic gymnastics MetaCard: it does what you think