Page 2 of 3

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 5:28 pm
by trixie
@chris

Getting back to notifications, I wouldn't mind if AmigaGuide saw further improvemement in this department. For example, messages indicating that the user pressed the various control buttons in the window might be useful. The programmer would acquire a better control of the running client.

I mean, why on earth does the client allocate a message port if it then sends virtually nothing to it? :-)

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 6:44 pm
by chris
@ssolie

Here you go. The binaries are 68k but you get the drift.
advaghelp is a minimally altered version of Commodore's original with a printf stuck in when messages are received.
HyperApp... the same.

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:42 pm
by nbache
chris wrote:
trixie wrote:There is also one other thing I'll need to investigate further. When you open an asynchronous AG client and the user presses the "Help" button in the window, the system-provided AmigaGuide help file will get loaded, "taking over" of your client. This wouldn't be a problem but it seems that there's no way for you to resume control, apart from shutting down and restarting the client (or pressing "Retrace" manually to get back to your file). This is rather stupid, as commands sent to the client will now be executed upon the AG system help file, not the file with which you opened the client. But as I say, I'll need to give it some more testing.
That sounds like a bug too.
Even when this happens in a simple user situation (i.e. a user has opened some AmigaGuide file directly from WB and subsequently pressed Help), it is confusing behaviour. It would work a lot better if the new AmigaGuide (amigaguide.guide) was opened in a new window, asynchronously, so the old one was still there and "alive" - that way it could also receive messages from a program in your scenario.

Best regards,

Niels

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2014 11:17 pm
by trixie
@nbache

All in all, the AmigaGuide Library is another long-forgotten baby screaming for some developer love :)

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 4:38 pm
by ssolie
trixie wrote:All in all, the AmigaGuide Library is another long-forgotten baby screaming for some developer love :)
I don't know about you but I was hoping that baby would have been thrown out with the bathwater and we had moved on to HTML or similar by now... ;)

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 5:00 pm
by trixie
@ssolie

You can say that again! I've actually raised that point some time ago somewhere in these forums, but the prevailing popular opinion was that improving AmigaGuide would be a more achievable goal, compared to implementing something new from scratch.

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Thu Mar 06, 2014 5:14 pm
by chris
trixie wrote:the prevailing popular opinion was that improving AmigaGuide would be a more achievable goal, compared to implementing something new from scratch.
Definitely! I'd be happy with bugfixes as this point in time, if those aren't achievable then there's no hope of even a marginally improved AmigaGuide, let alone something new.

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2014 11:54 am
by trixie
@chris

By the way, I've come across a list of AmigaOS 3.9 bugs compiled in 2004 by James Jacobs, and for AmigaGuide.library he gives these:
amigaguide.library:

(a) A delay is required between the SetAmigaGuideContext() and SendAmigaGuideContext() calls.
(b) No AmigaGuideMsg is sent back to the launching application when the user quits an AmigaGuide which was launched via the OpenAmigaGuideAsync() function.
While I haven't personally run into (a), the (b) problem is our good old missing client-closed notification we've been discussing here. Nice to see there are other people who believe it's a bug (or rather, an unimplemented feature).

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2014 7:31 pm
by JosDuchIt
@ssolie
I was hoping that baby would have been thrown out with the bathwater and we had moved on to HTML or similar by now..
The standard buttons of Amigaguide are a plus.
If Amigaguide would have the ability to open and close chapters, sections, subsections in the "contents" page that would count as a big step forward imho.

Programming this in html again and again surely is not a step forward.

Re: OpenAmigaGuideAsync notification on close

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2014 9:08 am
by trixie
@JosDuchIt
If Amigaguide would have the ability to open and close chapters, sections, subsections in the "contents" page that would count as a big step forward imho.
I don't think AmigaGuide will be developed much further. More likely at some point it will be replaced by a sort of ebook.datatype, of which AmigaGuide will be a subclass. In the past there was a working attempt at this: Stefan Ruppert's hypertext.datatype (see Aminet). Unfortunately in 1998 the guy had no chance of smuggling this into the OS.