AltME groups: search

very great great news that the version  1.3  is out and that it's 
quality is very high  !!!!

From the opinion of a casual developer:  I just downloaded 1.3 and 
played around with the demos.  I have to say that I'm really impressed 
and that I think this release strengthens REBOL quite a bit.  Congratulations, 
and thanks for all the hard work to all of those involved.

Yes, demos are really nice, except Caluclator and maybe even Easy 
Vid, which is cool, but would deserve a bit more fresh look :-)

My old time friend, who tried to use rebol some few years ago, left 
it because of following reasons - weak View documentation, incomplete 
styleset, occassional View crashes. He complained about missing styles 
mainly, as as a newbie, he was not able to produce his own styles. 
He tried to look into styles source, but all those mysterious "init" 
and other things, you will agree - are not for newbies to start with. 
Then I digged out one old doc from my archive, basically describing 
View-without-VID - faces, events, their description etc. He then 
started to create his own styles, without VID. Then he left rebol.....

He tried to give a try to other environments, as Delphi etc., but 
he missed the beauty and freedom of rebol, forever :-)

So he is active for last few months once again, and once I pointed 
him to latest betas, it really made his day.

But once again I think, that from newbie rebol coder perspective, 
the most important things which should follow is - additional, more 
complex styles, docs, and SDK featuring latest developments. Hopefully 
we will get there soon, but we are almost there with 1.3 - good work 
was done!

It let's you have menus in VID. Menu-bar and others.

And you have both files in the same dir?

the menu-system is local, and the demo is remote

the only response I see is that the hilite appears above the buttons 
and menus

I tried an earlier version, and it worked as advertised

Before means: before you run the script? And the script changes it?

I just installed view and no change.

and a "dot" under the "weired" button.

I'm going to reboot my system and see if things change.

Okay, too. I'm disappointed, and I guess you, too ... Still thinking

I'll test he following: I download both scripts from rebol.org and 
try these ...

I changed it to associate with rebol, double clicked and no difference

Just tried 1.2.125.3.1 and the rebol.org scripts. I'm a little bit 
out of ideas.

Just downloaded it again, and still no go.

Just to pipe in... I too had success with earlier versions but not 
success with the latest.  None of the graphics for the menu skins 
appeared, and no menus.

You need %menu-system-demo.r and %menu-system.r

and menu-system.r to be sure

Graham, please check your inbox and come back with good news  ;-)

Sorry -- no explanation -- I see 0.1.8 when looking at both the source 
and the download on REBOL.org.  Maybe it is caching at Graham's ISP


Graham, you could try using the LDS interface to download the script:
     do http://www.rebol.org/library/public/lds-local.r
     res: lds/send-server 'get-script [menu-system.r]
     print res/data/script

Thanks.

And yet another route, in case of ISP/HTTP/caching problems, is via 
the Rebsite:

REBOL/View / desktop / goto / http://www.rebol.org/library/reb/index.r

And there's no real Search capability in there that I can find...

well, that is that - I still consider you new with rebol and you 
do it just in few days? It would take me months ;-)

It's hobbistic only. And it took quite some time.

I'm not into optimising for now I'd like to get the script refactored 
first and then profile a bit.

slow? Hmm, I have 1.8, 256MB WinXP and nothing like that?

Actually, for each window open Windows put a window icon into the 
task-bar. And currently, I think, you can't monitor the mouse ouside 
of REBOL windows without library calls. Hence the scrolling menus 
*in* the window.

it takes almost a second for any any menu to display and if you run 
your mouse up the menu then any submenus display so it takes 2-3 
seconds for it to pop up each submenu in this demo and then have 
it go away before I can do anything with the rest of the application. 
 Kinda reminisent of javascript menus...

Actually Ammon it is strange, I would expect at least some minor 
delays, as was case with older Mozillas, but 1GHz 512MB vs 1.8GHz 
256MB is not all that faster, and mine works so fast, that it is 
blink of an eye. Really I can call it realtime ...

As for resizing: I'd like to leave that untouched until some standard 
resizing schemes available for REBOL. Currently there are the two 
approaches of Romano and Cyphre, I'm a little bit in favor of Romano's 
one, but that isn't finished work, it doesn't run with newer rebols.

The style is huge (75 KB well documented source, so have of it is 
propably comments and doc strings, tabs and spaces ;-)

Ammon - if we are talking about Rebol and multitasking, I think Rebol 
is really weak here.. I know some ppl will not agree with me, but 
something is weird. Go to desktop and run separately Bubbles and 
then Particles demos. Then run them both at once. Even if they try 
to use high refresh ratio, imo it should not slow that much. And 
both demos do use separate rebol processess, imo something is wrong. 
I can run 5x video, mp3s and no apps slows down so significantly 
...

well indeed what I think is that you menu posibilities are great 
but this kind of freaky thing must be part of a more complete solution 
(more thinked and more optimized !!))

Christian - I like menus with small arrows the most :-) It looks 
really system friendly and if you reach screen size limit on Y axis, 
you correctly disply arrows - very nice. I am full for automaticion. 
That is why I alway wanted area to have automatic scrolling!

I by myself about 3 month later make a port of the cyphre menu for 
rebgui so we can now that AGG is officially involve Cyphre into an 
optimization process to achive in short code a as flexible and advanced 
menu in term of design ;)

DideC: look at Cyphre's styles. Simply put - are without scrollers 
does NOT make any sense from functionality pov. And why should programmer 
care about providing scrollers and doing recalculations?

Just wanted to say thanks to Carl and the rest of the REBOLers that 
helped with 1.3 and the community for there feedback and support. 
 Good Job!

Carl, just a thought (and see what others think) -- it's a little 
odd looking at the messages with newest on top.  Another suggestion 
would be to do newest at bottom and put an anchor at the end so that 
incoming links start reading the page at the bottom to mirror the 
AltME view...

REBOL/View 1.3 for OS X! This is a big day!!! :-) Even if it's an 
alpha. Now I only miss one thing, before I can move my development 
entirely away from Windows, and that is AltME. :-)

yes. but they had that all the time. timers are related to gui, and 
that is different on OS/X.

Robert, congrats!!!   Doing your part to bring up that 1.3 birthrate. 
 If Germans don't do something soon, I suspect the landscape of the 
future will be a bunch of German's tended to by a lot of well trained 
and well paid Malaysians.  Not that this is a bad thing, just simply 
not a very different future than everyone expected.

I even used it to get different viewtops on different computers (I 
had rebol on a usb stick, and depending on the computers name, my 
local fold showed different icons)

This is my %local/index.r  with some tests, and I hope all references 
to my icons removed

(and for call you need no /pro anymore :)

The greater the consumption, the higher the prices will rise .. and 
the sooner people will start looking for alternatives to fossil fuels 
( dead dinosaurs )

Graham -- sorry to hear about your injuries.

I can put the opposite case: my cycle odometer says I'm just coming 
up to 5,000 miles this year. With zero accidents or injuries; zero 
time stuck in traffic; total annual running costs of around USD150 
for servicing and parts; and a lot of health benfits.

In Chicago we have a mayor who is an avid cyclist. He has been repainting 
a lot of streets on the north side to give them cycle lanes. The 
problem is that many of these streets aren't wide enough for this. 
In some cases 4-lane roads were converted to 2-lane to make room 
for the bike lanes, in some cases parking was sacrificed. On many 
roads this has caused traffic to slow to a crawl. Of course these 
bike lanes are barely used, and mostly serve as a place for drivers 
getting out of their parked cars to stand. The mayor isn't affected 
by these problems though, as he is a southsider.

If you add to that the tendency for bikes to get stolen here, the 
layout of Chicago and commuting patterns, and the efficiency of our 
public transportation, it is rare for people to use bikes here except 
for recreation and the bike messengers downtown.

It's an interesting study, how different cultures use bicycles, and 
it's impact on health and common wellbeing. Here in Denmark, every 
child own a bicycle, we have bicycle paths everywhere. You can go 
from one end of Denmark to the other on bicycle without problems. 
Well, Denmark is rather flat too, highest point around 170 meters. 
In Copenhagen, you see people on bicycle everywhere, going to and 
from work or whatever. I live in the suburbs. Yesterday night I was 
going to the monthly kick-your-friends-butt-on-a-net-café in city, 
and when the trains were late due to technical problems, I ended 
up taking the bike. It's freedom!

It'd be interesting and highly revolutionary if more cities adopted 
York's highway use hierarchy:
http://www.york.gov.uk/roads/excellence/strategy.html

(My city claims to have done -- they hired the guy who did York.....But 
the planners just don't get it, so progress is painfully sow)/

that's what I'm figuring... but I don't know if it hurts to try a 
slightly different approach than the manuals do: try to explain how 
the language works, that you have an executable, a console, the desktop, 
the various products and you do this and that to run REBOL programs.

I've worked with Wikipedia for about an hour now and it's very nice 
to work in. Layout is fairly automatic and easy to learn.

Cool Romano, will have to check out Anamonitor 3 and latest ATCP 
sometime.

I love it nice and simple like that ! Quick to load, doesn't need 
any fancy features... :)

and doesn't overload my head with yet more custom graphics, formatting, 
fonts and text that keeps changing its position as it loads.

I think this things can be made more automatic. My idea is integrating 
this launch-way into rebol. Mainly beeing able to launch index.r, 
and working in the right folder.

The iPod would certainly get students' attention.  But the Imagination 
and Cyphre demos posted there might throw them off..

Carl wrote:

Q: "So, what should be the rules? "

A: Let's lock these down as fast as possible.  It would be great 
to post this in 2005.

Q: "Perhaps a limit on the size of the script."


A: I would like to suggest it has to be a free standing script (not 
a script that grabs other scripts, or other media.  Given AGG, I 
would like to suggest 32K (32,768 bytes) total.  It can be in multiple 
files, but the combined total must not exceed this.  Compatible with 
Rebol View 1.3.


Q: "It needs to be fast to download. We can setup a demo upload/download 
area on the View desktop."


A: I suggest not doing this, but rather put this on a public website. 
 We are trying to invite new developers, the less steps the better. 
 A copy can be on the view Desktop though.


Q: "So, what deadline date? Early January? Before students return 
to school." 


A: I vote the contest ends Dec 31st 11:59.59 (this should be 11:59.60 
but Rebol has a bug representing leap seconds, which happens this 
year).


Q: Who should judge the winner? Vote of the REBOL community or RT 
worldwide staff?


A: I think the people giving the prizes should not do the voting. 
 I can suggest using someone more famous, I can get one of my friends 
like Charles Fleischer the comedian to vote, or better David Brin 
(author of Earth, the postman, Transparent Society), they would both 
enjoy doing the voting I suspect.  


Lastly, I would like to offer the following:  Prolific will put up 
a brand new Xbox 360 (when available).


Instead of having a first and second place, rather, both can pick 
which prize they want.  


So the award wording would be "Win your choice of an Apple iPod video, 
or a Microsoft Xbox 360.  Awarded to the first and second place winners."


Third place should be a choice between SDK license, or Command (and 
in fact, the first and second place winners could chose these as 
well).

Iztaka: "Cyphre" demo is only 2kB so you cannot expect miracles. 
In more space is posible to do more things and 32kB is really HUGE 
script.  http://krutek.info/rebol/demonica-player.r

I have original Rebol flags (desktop size).  I will throw one in 
to the 4rth and 5th place winners. : )

I would use seperate sizes for media and script. script maybe 8k? 
its a demo, and a month. media should be more. because one feature 
is, take a photo and do crazy things with it. a photo in 32k is not 
much. a script of 32k takes some month work (its a demo, so it should 
be "this does in 32k what others do in 32k*8, and that kind of compression 
takes time)

How about not only graphics demos, but networking too? Once there 
was a contest for a mud (text-moorg) in 16k, and some entries where 
playable and interesting they said.

And there should be multiple levels, best guru, best beginner, so 
students have more hope. (and i am a graphics-beginner, so - Ha! 
;)

I vote keep it simple, and based on the feedback of this one, we 
step it up a notch next year, which can be the day after if we get 
our asses in gear and post this ASAP! LOL

Gel is 1346 bytes and the images 25k

I think 32kB all together is good. Remember that some Amiga demos 
were only 4kB with sound and graphics!

If I remember correctly, demo categories were 4k, 64k and mega-demo 
(unlimited size). Maybe for next demo contest we can have  these 
categories but this year I prefer to stick with 32k. I wonder if 
rebcode can be used or not. Although I love rebcode, it's still only 
in alpha, so it seems to be more fair when rebcode is not allowed.

I think that is the beauty of this challenge.


How little time (and code) allows u to create something wonderful..

we would have to have some security guides as to what we can do, 
and for safetely RT could host the accepted widgets.

What means os-specific? Only windows has agg-fonts, which is cool 
for demos. And mac-alpha lacks even timers.

so - if your script will run under both linux and windows, and just 
windows will look somehow prettier, than it should be tolerated. 
But e.g. OS-X still lacking timers is imo disqulifying OS-X version 
pretty much ...

btw - what is the status of OS-X version? IIRC it was high on priority 
list and it is long time since View was released last time. Is that 
so big problem to not implement timers for OS-X in half a year or 
how long it is since View release? ;-)

Kru -- where has that actually been agreed?

All I see is a set of suggestions from Reichart that Carl has commented 
on as being "good"


As far as any non-REBOL3 reader is concerned the rules are in draft 
format, suggest an "early January" deadline, and are still open to 
change via suggestions to Gabriele:
http://www.rebol.net/article/0235.html


It would be very bad X-Internet messaging marketing if a winner was 
announced while some people were not aware the contest had even started.


A fair deadline would be one month from the official announcement 
of the competition. That hasn't happened yet and as far as I know, 
it was never Carl's intention to limit entry to REBOL3 participants.

I used http://blogsearch.google.com/-- searched for REBOL and sorted 
by date to see the most recent.

GRaham said ->
http://www.compkarori.com/emr/


A free multi-user electronic medical records system - based upon 
Rebol, RebGUI, BEER, ComLib, LaTeX, Firebird etc .. currenlty in 
beta test.  This is the first release of the server exe.

shadwolf ->


can some  screenshots of the main points of the client interface 
can be added to the  website i think this will be a good promotion 
for rebgui and emr ^^

Not bad website, clean and simple.

Simetrics: Great piece of work, Francois, and nicely documented too.

As you know, REBOL.org has been using it internally to offer alternatives 
for mistyped script names, eg:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=binladen

Joe <why not a forum here on altme ?> Forums have the advantage of 
immediacy, but they are hard to keep track of or to find again after 
a few months [Can anyone *easily* retreive info from the defunct 
REBOL and REBOL2 worlds?]

The REBOL.org script discussion feature is a little-used but useful 
way of holding a highly focussed discussion (about one script) that 
will be easy to find again in the future.

It's worth experimenting with both [Altme groups and REBOL.org discussioon] 
to find the natural home for specific discussions.

Sunanda, i agree with you about the discussion forum on rebol org 
and it should be more used.

Alan, nice idea -- it would make the content more widely available 
again.

But there may be a problem....Those worlds were set up as private, 
and there was nothing in the joining conditions that said the content 
would be made available more widely.

With this world, we have the convention of marking groups as [web-public] 
or not, but the older worlds have no such convention.

So it would be very difficult to contact the original posters and 
get all their agreement.

Volker:if you mean the script to run locally-yes-I was wriiten by 
Didier and should be in the library.I guess an option would be for 
me to convert the groups to html-send to rebol.org-and then have 
the posters what they want.Only problem with that is some are no 
longer here.Just looked in the library and did not find his script.If 
you want,send me a private message and will send

and that's what there is to say about that

Has anyone looked at the online PDF proofing market? And adapted/utilised 
 pdf-maker in that way?

No. google on the term "online pdf proofing" Used by publishers and 
printing to let clients markup / approve pdfs online before going 
to press.

about PDF Maker generally, are there plans for updating it, to support 
more fonts and better image handling?

maybe I can :-) but I'm only going to study what it takes. OCR fonts 
are necessary for printing certain types of invoices and I want that 
functionality, and that would be very nice to have in my invoice 
program.

what you have to do is: extend the typesetter so that it can read 
font descriptions and build glyph width and kerning pairs tables 
(Volker has an AFM file parser); extend the dialect so that it can 
somehow recognize and load external fonts; study the PDF reference 
to see what you need to do to include the font in the PDF file (at 
the very least, you have to provide a font object; i'm not sure if 
this is sufficient, but i hope that the reader is able to load external 
fonts once you give it the font name and description; in theory you 
should embed the font into the PDF file, which usually means parsing 
the font file and so on)

it created a PDF invoice om rebol/view 1.3 for OSX just fine :-) 
I use only boxes, lines, helvetica, helvetica bold and courier though. 
no images or anything

Henrik, pdf-maker is great. I have one program that creates mailmerge 
letters from data in an object database.  It creates a pdf file, 
allowing me to check each letter before printing it.  I can also 
pick out just one letter in the file to print.  Or, if the printer 
jams, it is easy to begin anew printing just the remaining letters. 
And, of course, I can use the program on any operating system.  Nice.

I'll do some testing and get back with you.  It may take me several 
days, however, as I am in the middle of several projects right now.

louis: yes, I've used it in a few apps so far with great success, 
because it's very stable and fast. the only things I miss are better 
font handling, some better docs and importing vector drawings into 
a PDF. Getting OCR fonts in will really make it useful for me.

I'd like to announce the imminent public availability of distro-bot. 
 


A powerfull tool for version control (of scripts and any other file) 
and project distribution & packaging  

:-D

I'd like to know if any of you want to be alpha testers for the up 
and comming version, which is a result of several YEARS of fine tuning, 
 and now combining, a rich set tools.

CURRENT FEATURES (partial list):
General:
-----------------------
-non intrusive, does not force any programing onto you.

    ex:  * no need to have version in header, and can still do version 
    control

           * history format is user specified, massive configurability
-encapped (windows) application, so its easy to use.

-no external dependencies (ex: zip archive is embeded, and coded 
in rebol :-)


Automated:
-----------------------
-script versioning
-file backup (versioned)
-zip archival
-file management

-creation of "packages" (create dirs, copy files, archive, prebol, 
slim-link, encap, etc)

-header manipulation (including history, date, version, and any field 
you want to enforce)
-system calls
-file parsing, replacing info tags.

Flexible setup:
-------------------------
-cascading configuration (global, user, project, + per file)

-config locking, prevents overiding configs in cascaded setups (project 
manager can create rules which no one can break)
-command-line arguments overides for many configs

-user set configs for most if not all features (ex: history format, 
date format).

and much more

I have reached a stable state, at which I can now finish the initial 
version... but that will have to wait until I do a few other rebol 
projects first, so I'll probably play on the release on sunday, and 
provide private download links to those who want it .


if it works on your systems, you should quickly grow addicted to 
it.

ok, no hurry for me, but will be interested to test and report back 
when you have it prepared