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Pause in Action

It’s been a while since I last posted. Most of my current attention is focused on getting the next version of TextSoap out in the next few months. As many of you already know, Deja IIx is more a labor of love, but it doesn’t pay the bills.

However, once TextSoap goes out the door, I hope to have some time to finish up the remaining pieces of Deja IIx and bring it out of beta. If you come across bugs, please let me know by either leaving comments or emailing me.

And no, I am not looking to bring Deja IIx to the iPhone. I will, however, make the source available if someone wants to actually try it. 🙂

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Another step down the path

This release is a fairly minor one, but addresses a couple issues. Support for minimizing the Deja IIx window has been added, as well as the ability to automatically pause/resume Deja IIx when it is miniaturized.

There was an additional tweak that will help some folks with older video cards. For some reason, it the older cards did not display the window correctly. The new Display preference allows you to overcome this issue, although full support for transparency suffers as a result.

The one big outstanding issue is the printing. I’m still working on getting printing to match as closely as possible, the behavior on an Apple II. I sort of broke some of the printing in the process of making changes, but hope to get it back up and running again in the near future.

Latest Release: Deja IIx 2.0b7

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Inching closer to a real release

Deja IIx continues to inch ever closer to a final release. Beta 6 addresses some file issues, namely the disappearance of file 13.

As a bonus (and we all like bonuses), Deja IIx now handles aliases in the ProDOS Volumes folder. This means you can (once again) store your files wherever you want. Just create an alias to the folder (or volume) and place it in the ProDOS Volumes folder (inside the Deja IIx folder). Presto – AppleWorks will see it.

The only major outstanding issues are related to printing. Printing (to a Mac printer) is still in a state of flux, so please try not to count on the functionality just yet. I’m working on getting the Mac printer pagination to match AppleWorks’ pagination.

Latest release: Deja IIx 2.0b6

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One more thing for 2007

It’s the end of the year. After many a dry spell in progress, Deja IIx is finally in a beta state.

Occasionally I need to startup Mac OS 9 (under Classic) to see how Deja ][ would handle a particular issue. It’s interesting to compare the two:

Deja ][ was very CPU intensive. It basically took 100% of the CPU. Deja IIx only takes about 8-9%.

Deja ][ screen handling was pokey at best. Deja IIx actually presents a true Apple II screen. In fact, Deja IIx no longer patches the screen writing code in AppleWorks. Instead, it emulates the Apple IIe (hopefully the reason for this will be more apparent in 2008).

Of course, there are other goodies Deja IIx like transparency, window scaling (for those with bad eyes and big monitors). Most of the goodies stem from the changes in the Mac OS in the past ten years. It is amazing how much code was thrown out between Deja ][ and Deja IIx (OK, so I actually didn’t do a direct port — but the point remains the same). There was so much code just to bring up a dialog with gray buttons. It boggles the mind how far we’ve come.

Well, with the changing times comes one more thing before the year ends. There has always been a custom icon available for your AppleWorks folder, to let you know it was for Deja ][. Well, with Leopard and the new app icon, it was time it was updated as well. Deja IIx includes an install option (under the AppleWorks preference section) to make it easy to get (it installs in your Deja IIx folder).

Here’s a peek. And Happy New Year!

Latest Release: Deja IIx 2.0b5

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My, what big Icon(s) you have

Before the new year starts, I thought I’d squeeze in one quick release. Beta 2 has lots of goodies:

There is now a UI for adding your own keystrokes. You could do this manually before, but this UI is way easier. The new UI also allows you to reorder the keystrokes via drag-n-drop.

There is now also a UI for working with the new ProDOS Volumes. You can easily hide volumes from AppleWorks (to avoid clutter).

There’s also a number of bug fixes. A paused Deja IIx is now clearly indicated (the title bar tells you and the screen is dimmed).

Finally — Deja IIx has a new icon. It may require a tweak or two, but I think it is much more representative of what the App does than the previous icon. And in the Leopard tradition, the new icon comes in a high-resolution version. Click the icon thumbnails to see them full size.

OLD:

NEW:

Latest Release: Deja IIx 2.0b2

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Deja IIx goes beta!

Santa — all I want for Christmas is a beta release.

All the features are in and most things now work, so I’m officially changing the designation from alpha to beta.

This release adds the big missing feature — printing. I wrote a TimeOut Mac Print Setup app to configure your printer. There are three different results you can get from printing.

Mac Printer – this prints through the Mac print architecture. The result is printed paper or PDF (if you so choose).

RTF Clipboard – this takes the print results and copies it to the clipboard.

Save to RTF – this takes the print results and allows you to save them to an RTF file.

The new Deja IIx Printer supports Bold, Underline, Superscript, Subscript, Italic (SC1/SC2) and Strikethrough (SC3/SC4). There is a mechanism for mapping characters per inch to actual Mac fonts and size. And you can specify different font/size mappings depending on the final results — so you can have one set of font mapping for printing and another when copying the results to the clipboard and even another when saving it to a file.

You can look at Deja IIx-PrinterCodes.plist in the Deja IIx support folder. I’m still working on an interface to allow you to edit these more easily — but that’s definitely a beta thing.

Latest Release: Deja IIx 2.0b1

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Here comes Santa Claus

It’s like Christmas in December!

After many months, I finally had a chance to do some work on Deja IIx. Check out the release notes for all the details.

The biggy: Transcendental functions work again. Yes, you get transcendental functions again and you don’t have to give up the TimeOut Calculator for it. I’ve made some changes so that inverse uppercase displays correctly in the WP (when you use ctrl-T).

Other goodies, PageUp/PageDown/Home/End are all mapped to the AW equivalents. Home/End follow the PC metaphor of beginning/end of line (rather than the Mac’s beginning/end of document).

A bunch of User Interface changes to simplify things.

Drawing of the text display is handled a little differently than before. This results in a small increase in the percent of the processor that gets used (tops off around 14% or less when idle), but still a lot less than the 99% that the Deja ][ 1.2 uses when idle.

Most (non-graphics) TimeOut apps should work.

I’ve tested it under 10.3.9, 10.4.11, and 10.5.1.

Soon, I might even call this a beta!

Latest Release: Deja IIx 2.0a24

Happy Holidays!

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Finally?

Yes, I think I have finally conquered the bank-switching issues that were causing lots and lots of problems. Previous attempts accomplished about 90% of what I needed, but getting that last 10% to work definitely took another 90% of the time.

I’ve also disabled to Native patching of the SANE math code used in AppleWorks. Apparently there is a format that is not currently supported and thus returns incorrect results (particularly for TimeOut Measurements). I hope to either support the unknown format (assuming I can find documentation) or allow users to toggle the native code on and off.

Again, you can use the auto-update feature or download using the link on the right.

Latest Release: Deja IIx 2.0a20

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HIRES Root beer for all

I was almost ready to give up. After hours and hours of walking through code, I just could not find what I knew to be a very subtle change that was causing Deja IIx to fail (when the original Deja ][ did not).

I decided to spend a few more hours on it. In the course of things to come, I ended up more accurately emulating the Language card bank switching (which turns out wasn’t the problem). I also managed to find some PDF’s that include the original Apple II reference manuals (boy I could have used those a while back).

So, what was this elusive bug? It turns out that TimeOut (and possibly AW) were expecting the Hi-Res pages to get switched in/out correctly, not for graphics, but for data management. I had forgotten to process the Hi-Res bank-switching correctly.

Time working on this bug : several days
Lines need to be added : about 10
Knowing this bug is squashed : Priceless

Latest version is available with link on upper right of blog. If you have 2.0a17, you can use the check for updates to automatically update your software.

Latest version: 2.0a18

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Come Scale Away..

Another release is here and scaling is back (at least for the time being). In fact, you can scale from 1.0 -> 2.0x in virtually any increment.

Added Sparkle for easy, auto-updating.
You can now toggle the DebugMode on/off w/o restarting.
Selecting the AppleWorks is done under its own tab in preferences.
And fixed some resizing issues for a future OS release. 🙂

Known issues:

There are a couple very strange bugs lurking. If Deja IIx crashes, you’ve likely found the bug.

Trying to use TimeOut Utilities for anything but Configuring can cause Deja IIx to crash.
Removing changed files from a desktop with many files may cause a crash as well.

You can download the latest release with the new permanent link on the right column.

Latest version: 2.0a17