Rick's b.log - entry 2023/10/17

SimpleSeq v0.15

Today has been working on improving the UI and some visual fluff.

The main things can be demonstrated by this screenshot.

Do you see that dashed line around the check box option? Well, if you click on something or press Tab, a dashed line will appear either around the object clicked upon, or the first editable one (if there is one).

What you can do depends upon the object type:

• Check box: pressing Space will toggle the state of the check.
• Radio choice: you can press Left and Right to choose a different option.
• String: no special behaviour; when selected the caret is placed at the end.
• Selection choice: you can press Up and Down to choose a new option from the list. Doing so while holding Shift will jump ten options, and holding Ctrl instead will jump directly to the first or last entries in the list.

Pressing Tab at any point will highlight the next highlightable object (something you can change). If there are no more, the highlight will be cleared. Pressing Tab again will resume from the top of the dialogue.

There is no mechanism to highlight the buttons at the bottom, as Enter will always behave as if the Primary (blue) button had been clicked upon (except when it's doing string input), and Escape will always behave as if the Secondary (greenish) button had been clicked upon even if it isn't visible on-screen (this is why this button is almost always a "Cancel" action).

This means that it should be possible to control SimpleSeq without the use of a mouse, for those who find it's faster to use the keyboard rather than switching mental contexts between keys and mouse.

Having done this, the UI is not far off Windows 2, as demonstrated by this window screenshot.

After a lot of fiddling, I managed to get Windows 2.03 (not the /386 build) to install and run on DOSbox. I didn't have any luck with Windows 1.01, the installer just kept either going in circles asking me where to install to, or hanging with a blank screen at the point where it would likely be probing to work out the system config. You know something is ancient if DOSbox confuses it!

You've probably also noticed the other visual changes. Rounded tops to the windows (whoo!) and ever so slight rounding to the buttons.

After thinking about it a while, I decided the simplest way to deal with the title bar rounding was to draw the title bar half-height, then plot the title bar inset on both sides, so I can finish it off by plotting two circles.

As for the buttons, it was dead simple. Just draw a rectangle, then knock out the corner pixels back to the bsckground colour

No, the dialogues won't be made moveable. It's a dialogue manager, not a window manager. ☺

Oh, and to help with accuracy, you no longer need to aim for the radio button or the check box. Clicking on the associated text will also work now.

Okay then. That's going to be it for a while I think. I've run out of things to add/tweak with SimpleSeq unless I have a specific need for a new feature or a bug that needs fixed.
But, yeah, I rather recall saying something like this before. Let's see how long until v0.16...

Until then, here's v0.15!

Here's the download:

Crazy cat lady

They have also introduced a building site portapotty. Um... <shrug>

Then I saw the crazy cat lady. But, Playmobil. Postage charges, and UPS that won't leave it in the letterbox and all that bull<beep>.
So, over to Amazon. Same price. Free postage. Will be here tomorrow courtesy of the regular postie.

Of course I did...

Mew?

Speaking of cats, time to feed mine again, brew myself a nice bowl of linguine, and then spend an hour looking at the list of options on Netflix before heading to bed without having watched anything. ☺

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Rick, 17th October 2023, 21:11

Hahaha... I've just had my filetype allocation come through. So a version 0.16 is obligatory. 😂    Though I might give it a few days and do other stuff. 😉    If you want to patch it into !Boot / !Run yourself before the update arrives, it is type &1EF "SimplSeq".

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