OXT 1.963.1 RC3

Updates on the progress of this project
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tperry2x
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Re: OXT 1.963.1 RC3

Post by tperry2x »

:mrgreen: :!:
Testing now - On behalf of everyone, thank you!
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: OXT 1.963.1 RC3

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

tperry2x wrote: Wed Dec 07, 2022 11:30 am :mrgreen: :!:
Testing now - On behalf of everyone, thank you!
Great, Thanks!

I'm testing on Ubuntu Studio (Plasma) and Elementary OS (Pantheon), two very different Desktops.
I also almost have it working on helloSystem, which is a FreeBSD distro with custom Mac-like Desktop / FileManager. FreeBSD has a Linux compatibility layer (helloSys has a Ubuntu based layer), similar to WINE for running Windows software. BTW, I intend to contribute to that project, and doing some work on its icons now, for some of the same reasons I'm working on OpenXTalk.

Things to test / note with this Linux AppImage specifically:

On first launch you may see the LC forums / revOnline account registration Stack window. Simply close the window and then relaunch the App and that should be gone from then on. You can fill it out the form if you really want but it doesn't do anything if you do. The proper way to fix this is to remove/replace that register stack (which becomes embedded into the App binary during the building) and then recompile the three IDE Engines. The more immediate and far easier fix for this AppImage version is to add a few simple shell script lines to the AppImage's 'AppRun' executable before the part were it actually loads the IDE. The IDE engines check for a license file being present every.single.time you launch the IDE, so removing that now-defunct check could reduce the IDE start-up time by potentially hundred of nanoseconds. If you have a solid state drive it's probably even less time, but hey, every millisecond counts right?

The dictionary now loads in the IDE Dictionary stack on Linux X86_64 as it should instead of launching it in the default browser app. This has been a bit slow for me when I first open the Dictionary stack as it loads the HTML/JS from a cached copy in the users home which the IDE creates if it doesn't exist already. I would like to speed this up somehow or replace it with something better (eventually). But it does load in the IDE now, now the default on X86_64.
One easy thing I could do right away is to make it so that 'internal viewing' or 'launch in external browser' is a user preference setting. I'd also like an option to flush the Dictionary cache and rebuilt it, this would helpful when working on Extensions or IDE documentation, I've had to do this manually many times since I got into Builder Language and a bunch of times while 'debranding' the Dictionary contents.

'Guides' section of the Dictionary has also been 'debranded', however the .AppImage version I uploaded yesterday did NOT have the latest version of the dictionary included, so the first thing you will see in there is "LiveCode Guides" in big black letters. That actually comes from a template (HTML) file that is used to built the page. I've already fixed that one, it should read 'xTalk Guides' in the next AppImage build, but there may be other references to 'LC' so please let me know if you find any.

Player control! Wow! I hadn't realize until recently just how very broken the Player is on Linux. It's practically unusable currently (and for a LONG time previously), but I think there's some easy things that could be done to make it more useable. Currently drag-and-drop new Players from the Tools palette doesn't work. I think that's related to the fact that on Linux the Player control uses MPlayer which by default displays no transport (Play,Pause,Stop, etc) so there's nothing to generate the preview image for the the dragging action. So a fix might be making a generic player icon image to use for the drag-image. The (old) fix for this is to use the menu to create a new player control, same as fix applies for creating new Browser Widget controls on Linux. I'd like to build a brand new Player control that uses libVLC, or maybe MPV (a still-maintained fork-of MPlayer + improvements), on Linux and I'd even like that on macOS for playing video with codecs like XviD.

Play PMD / PlaySentence music: libFluidSynth is NOT loading from the within the .AppImage on this build. I think this issue is related to the process that I used to build the AppImage from the IDE folder. The OXT FluidSynth library DOES work on Linux (and on Windows and macOS), I've tested it many times, so I'm sure I can straighten out this issue.

Extension Manager has new 'Repo' tab, it can download / install new Extensions from a repo that I setup using GitHub Pages. It just has a few widgets for now. I will be adding more resources for loading later on, but there's already way more content in there then was in the old 'Store' tab since that was first added to the IDE about 6-7 years ago.

The Message Box is still a bit wonky when you have 'Tools' and/or other palettes open and overlapping the window. It's slightly better than it was, you can actually type in the Message Box now, but I think it could be much more better. There's was another issue like related to overlapping windows on macOS, it seems that the IDE tries to do too much of these palette positioning related convenience things for the user, like moving / hiding windows out of the way which is a nice idea I guess but if it breaks text input in the msg box or something important like that then it's pretty-much worthless.

Tools palette now has a lot more options for the layout rows then previous, you can set it up to 28 and have a horizontal layout if you so desire.
Screenshot 2022-12-07 at 7.46.30 PM.png
Screenshot 2022-12-07 at 7.46.30 PM.png (319.01 KiB) Viewed 6045 times
I still have plans to build a completely new Tools palette that is entirely scalable SVG-path icon graphics, that has tabbed sections, that separates out the classic controls and the seldom used pixel painting tools, and has a scrollable widgets list (I have a bunches of widgets), but that may have to wait for OXT v2.0 (or 1.962.2 ?) development.

Using OXT with macOS-like *Nix distros has also made me want a user-preference for switching the special 'accelerator' key, by default that is 'commandKey' on macOS and 'controlKey' on Win and Linux. However, now that I'm using Unix-like OSes that are currently being built for Mac-switchers which can have the ControlKey/'Special' <-> Alternate/Option Keys already swapped or as an overlay option, so that key-combo-chords are much more Mac-User friendly (I've got 30+ years of macOS muscle memory :) I think it would be good for the user to b e. able to decide which to use. The IDE already sets this based on what platform it's running on, so would just need to modify that slightly and then add it to revPreferencesUI stack.
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