mdw@git.distorted.org.uk Git - ssr/blob - StraySrc/SapphToys/!DrawX/!Help

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   9                         About DrawX
  10
  11 DrawX is, essentially, a pointless utility.  It displays
  12 DrawFiles in windows and allows you to scale them, and save
  13 them into other applications.  It is slightly quicker at
  14 displaying DrawFiles than Draw is, but does the job no
  15 better, and is nowhere near as good as ArtWorks.  It
  16 provides no editing or organisational facilities, and is,
  17 in short, utterly useless in itself.
  18
  19 So why have I just spent the last two days writing it?
  20
  21 DrawX is a demonstration of Straylight's development tools
  22 and libraries.  It is written entirely in ARM assembler.
  23 It uses our Sapphire library.  Its templates were created
  24 using Glass.  It shows what can be done in two days of hard
  25 work and tedious debugging with a powerful library like
  26 Sapphire.
  27
  28 It's also a way thumbing my nose at Acorn a bit for putting
  29 their DrawEx program in the C development system and trying
  30 to pretend it's a good thing to model your applications on:
  31
  32 * It only allows one view at a time, unless you hack it.
  33   Admittedly, this is a fairly good exercise.
  34
  35 * The RAM loading is done very badly, but then again, what
  36   do you expect when the documentation for xferrecv is so
  37   awful?
  38
  39 * It doesn't allow you to zoom in and out of the DrawFiles.
  40
  41 * It doesn't support Help, which Acorn insists everything
  42   must do.
  43
  44 * It's far too big.  The image is 70K (that's my hacked one
  45   which does do multiple windows).
  46
  47 DrawX deals with all of these points.  It allows any number
  48 of windows to be open.  It does all its data transfer
  49 properly.  It does do zooming, with fit-to-screen and
  50 fit-to-window options and a zoom drag box too.  It supports
  51 Help on all its windows, and for menus under RISC OS 3.10
  52 and higher.  And the final image is 48K in size
  53 (uncompressed) so it's only slightly over half the size of
  54 DrawEx.  Compressed, the image is only 28K.
  55
  56 Lastly, DrawX is a fairly good example of how to write
  57 Sapphire applications. It does everything a big application
  58 should do, only less so.  It conforms as fully to STASIS
  59 (our user interface standard) as I can make it.  In fact,
  60 it does so much that I had to change some bits of the
  61 library to allow it to work at all.  The only bad thing it
  62 does is to be all in one source file.  I never expected it
  63 to be quite as big as it is (over 2100 lines), but then
  64 again, we live and learn.
  65
  66 I hope DrawX provides you with as much usefulness as it has
  67 provided me.  That won't be too difficult.  I can't imagine
  68 ever using it at all.
  69                          _________
  70
  71                              Mark Wooding
  72                              Straylight Development Centre
  73                              23 August 1994
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