The Joy of SEXP

The Pocket Scheme development weblog.

Mon, 09 Jul 2007

Despite the "2.0: currently under development" claim on the front page, no development has taken place on Pocket Scheme since November 2006, the date of the last posting here. (Note to self: update front page.) And now I find myself needing some new features in the summer timeframe for a new project. So the 1.x codebase will receive yet another facelift.

In for certain:

Fix notification and SIP management bugs. In 1.3 I added a semi-nifty feature whereby if Pocket Scheme finishes a lengthy computation while in the background, it notifies the user with a foreground popup. Immediately afterwards in 1.3.1 I apparently broke this feature while trying to tame the unruly SIP with some entirely too clever (read: stupid) logic. There are plenty of other ways to confuse my overly clever code, too. I think I can back off on the SIP management and recover my notification feature without having to rewrite too much window management logic.
Add simple dialog input interface, supplanting the stub dialog creation procedures in w32.dll. Currently I have both child-pane and fullscreen modal dialog support planned. Modeless dialogs (e.g. the floating "Find" command window as seen in many text editors) are not supported.
Add simple graphical output interface, supplanting the stub window creation procedures in w32.dll. Nothing fancy-- no child windows, no user input-- just enough to draw a couple of graphs on the screen.

Unlike kludgy windows created with the current FFI, which operate in the Scheme execution thread, these dialog and canvas operations work within the main UI thread. Hence they don't confuse window activation or invite busy-locking the PPC.

The new project needs other long overdue Pocket Scheme features, but I'm not confident that I can get enough test coverage on them to put them into a public release. We'll see.

posted at: 18:04 | path: | permanent link to this entry