Month: September 2007

There has been quite a bit of activity on the Soft Velocity blog of late. And it’s highlighted with a number of videos. These are showing particular aspects of Clarion 7.

Taking the time, I found, to watch them with Clarion 7 open so you can go and see exactly what is being talked about, is quite valuable.

With Jaymoe development, I decided to use Clarion 7 as my text editor. With a new pc in tow, running Vista, and not wanting to bring across my UltraEdit .. it has proved a success.

One detail was bugging me. Strange behaviour was occurring with the tabbing and indentation. Couldn’t for the life of me work out why the editor wanted to move my stuff around.

Of course, after watching the Tools video tonight, the issue was clear. I need to change my tabbing to "Automatic", from "Smart". And further, an F1 press for Help reveals ..

Indentation
There is three modes of indentation available in the Text Editor:

None
Set this to turn off all indentation effects.

Automatic
With Indentation set to Automatic ,the Text Editor keeps a running indent. When you press the Enter key, spaces and tabs are inserted to line up the insert point under the start of the previous line.

Smart
After a keyword statement, the next line is indented by the tab size set above. After certain keywords (break, return etc.) the next line is "non-indented".

Other rules for Smart include

• Indent statements from the CODE keyword position (default = on)

• Treats any expression that ends with a colon ":" as a label in the CODE section (default = off, where colons are treated as an actual procedure call)

• Indent a line after the Enter is pressed at the end of the line (default = on)

• Indent pasted text if several lines were pasted (default = false)

• Preferred column number (if the keyword should not be indented relative to the parent it will be placed to the preferred column, default = column 21)

• Indent comments (default = off)

There you go. Not bad. I’ll probably give it a whirl once the appgen comes along and I get full swing into embed coding.

Of course, just realised I can also Snagit ..

Ahhh, that’s why _Behaviour_ comes up misspelt in Live Writer .. it’s not the _right_ way of spelling. Ha ha.

Anyway, don’t forget to barrack for the Wallabies ..

This may be a boring post for some.

 

A Long, Boring,

Picturesque Drive

Through A Lot Of

Screens

 

Read On ..

I’m going to walk through a bunch of screenies, maybe commenting a little as we go along. Kind of like a Saturday Night Family Slideshow with friends, where the Dad thinks it’s really cool, and everyone else is throwing popcorn around, or trying to get the attention of a really cute neighbour girl.

Yes.

 

Of course, it would seem appropriate to read the readme. And you know, I actually did, but for the purposes of this comment .. pretend i said this instead .. "Readme. Pffffff."

The actual Readme. Some notes, words, that kind of thing.

Here we go. Kaboom.  It has begun. Nice to see the build number at the end of the version. Or at least, that’s what it looks like to me.

2450 Builds. Or Compiles. Compiles .. that’s a lot of compiling. Which begs the question (similar to one about a heavy rock and the Almighty), do the makers of Clarion compile the new Clarion in Clarion?

Yes, I am indeed going to go through each and every screen that I captured. Suckers!

I thought it interesting, the "REMINDER NOTE".

One of the more boring slides. No wildlife whatsoever.

Hands up if you changed this?

I wonder if anyone didn’t make the Disk Space Requirements .. ha ha.

Boom. Installing. ICSharpCode .. that sounds something like .. C .. Sharp .. Sharp Develop .. hmmmm.

Okay. Done. Let’s see what we can see. But first ..

I figure by this far down the page, it will be okay to have a slightly wider than normal piccie.

Anyway, this is the guide. It’s pretty handy, and nice that SV took the time to put it together.

What I am wondering is, did they use Doctor Explain to make the help file? Or is it just that Help and Manual output looks the same?

Here we go. The new startup splash-splash page.

Kind of blue. Which is good, helps the memory. The yellow and red .. not sure about yet. Good to see the pyramid made an appearance.

And here we are. A sight most of us have been longing for .. for .. a long time. Initial gut reaction on seeing this window, which I saw at devcon .. was .. Oh Baby Finally Yes!

Next thought was .. PROPER CODE EDITOR .. WHOOOOOOT!

Starting a new project, shades of learning how to use DirectX and MSVC++6.

Note the ‘Awesome’ in the name means this app will truly be .. Awesome.

And here we have it. The main interface. Of course, it’s shrunk for picture taking size. Normally the main frame would be a lot larger.

Love the code coloring. Although not sure why 2 gets to be pink, and :44 doesn’t in the time. Offended much.

This was a little bit of cool. Further with ..

Choosing the File Driver.

Urg. So many useless screenshots. But I did warn you.

Waaaahooooooo. I am a success! Well, at least, my building a project was a success.

  

Okay, here’s my windows bar. The more I see the new Clarion Logo, the more I like it. Much better for when you forget to add your own. Better looking than the "it’s so eighties" blue triangle, heh heh.

Here i’ve exported the example School app in C6, and importing it into C7. "Parsing" means it’s translating it into ParselTongue, obviously because Clarion 7 was created at Hogwarts, by kids like Harry Potter. Obviously.

I really have to check out the documentation that has the shortcut keys. Cause my wonderful F7 doesn’t do what it used to .. <sniff>. At least, I think it doesn’t do .. i might be wrong.

A nice big view of the debugger. This is the C7 debugger. Been recompiled, round-ee edges and the like. Same stuff though on the inside I believe.

What is this? Why, it looks like the School app, all C7’d.

My problem is, that I obviously haven’t done some things in C6 right. There’s the background coloring issues (transparency forgotten, or something). And probably a bunch of other stuff.

A browse in the School app. I realise now, it doesn’t make much sense to look at these without some comparison.

| Last Name | First Name | Address |

———————————————-

| Andrews    | Stuart        | Xaviers Mansion |

There you go. See the difference?

Heh heh, at least I make myself laugh.

   

This is C6. Perhaps I went back and tried again.

Yes, I must have. How my memory fades with each passing day.

In the new patch (es?) for C6, this stuff is brought in. "Link Generated Manifest in Project" is pretty important for having it work in C7 I believe.

Here is me, importing in C7.

Okay, now I’m taking a gander at the Dictionary. Why did I take a screenie with nothing in it? Hmmm. That’s happened before.

Okay, here we go. You can see some of the layout. Fields, Keys, Triggers, Relations, Alias stuff .. all on the lhs .. and then tabs on the rhs, with all the wonders of the world to change. Except you can’t. Not now. Read only. READ ONLY.

And last, another different shot of the Dictionary. Here’s what a key looks like.

.Finis.

And there you have it. The most boring trip through C7 in the history of C7. Which isn’t very old. Which probably gives hope that others will come along with more boring trips. Although that might be hard, considering the number of blogs, divided by the probability of ..

Gah.

Hope someone got something out of this. Even if it’s a giggle.  

The more I think about it, the more Clarion .NET excites me.

But for the moment, I am content to gaze upon the wonderful glory of a new IDE .. Clarion 7 (Beta) has made it to my doorstep.

It was a strange surreal moment. This was no doubt due to my being up at 3 am living on caffiene and not much else. But also, it was because the email finally arrived, gtalk popped a little message up .. and I couldn”t do anything but install.

I”m not really interested in recompiling my old apps just yet. More, I wanted to just get a feel for the new IDE.

I”ve got an actual review coming. Snagit got a workout last night. But until then, here”s my prognosis.

• The IDE is good.
• The icon will take a while getting used to, simply because it”s not the blue triangle.
• The code editor is simply gold. Love it. This is where I”ll be doing my best work. And this is what I want to be really good. And it is.
• The dictionary (read only) is okay. A little slow to load certain things. I remember this was the case at the Aussie DevCon. Not sure why this is, but I”m sure the guys are well aware of it.
• I”m a fan of the ms project layout. I like all the IDE bits and piece, menus here and there, folding away, being able to walk through the files, that sort of thing. Elements that users of MS stuff have had for a while. It”s going to make Clarion such a superior product. In my opinion.
• Don”t have Vista, so can”t get a look at the Vista styles/manifests. Recompiled the School app, but didn”t notice much difference. Not sure if I did everything right though. As mentioned above, it was late. I was tired. And reading documentation is for the well-rested. Ha ha.

Anyway. Nuff said. Almost did the review right there. Ha.