Don Bakke
The Future is Now – Form Translucency and Animation
January 2013 was a rather busy month for new OpenInsight 10 goodness: System Monitor updates, Direct2D support, Aero Glass, TASKBARID property, and improved image support (a subject that we have already commented on.) Two other new features – the TRANSLUCENCY property and the SHOW/HIDE methods – are the focus of this article.
To be honest, I did not expect to write an article about these features. First, we do not have a generic way to make OpenInsight forms translucent nor do we have a way to make OpenInsight forms appear and hide using animation. The second reason relates back to the first: we have not added these features to our own toolkit because we have never seen a compelling purpose for them, especially seeing that they usually appear as gimmicks.
Simple Math Isn’t So Simple
As I was reviewing some of the WORKS message board posts the other day, I came across a discussion that focused on the known problems of floating point arithmetic. This has been addressed over the years within the Revelation community but it continues to haunt developers (especially those who are converting R/Basic code to Basic+ and are wondering why their math doesn’t work as well…) To summarize the problem, run the following code in Basic+:
A = 1.07625
B = 1.0762
C = A - B
The result will be:
5.00000000001055E-5
Which is the same as:
.0000500000000001055
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The Future Is Now – Launching OpenInsight Applications
Our new blog article has a two-fold purpose. First, we want to review a few of the new command line switches that will be introduced with OpenInsight 10. Second, we are pleased to announce a minor enhancement to our SRP Application Launcher tool, which nicely complements our first purpose!
Command line switches are a common feature of OpenInsight. Probably every shortcut to a production OpenInsight application uses one or more of the following switches: /AP, /UN, /PW, and /DV. Without these switches it would be hard to create an application shortcut that is unique to the end user’s system. Revelation saw fit to take this further by adding even more switches that customize the way OpenInsight applications are launched.
The Future Is Now – Advanced Support for Images
Shortly after Revelation released news of their support for alpha channel images, they released a companion article documenting other improvements to their image API. This introduced seven new properties (IMAGEALIGN, IMAGECOLORKEY, IMAGEFRAMECOUNT, IMAGEFRAMENUMBER, IMAGESIZE, IMAGESTYLE, and IMAGETRANSLUCENCY) and one new method (SETIMAGE). In like fashion we will explore some of the more advanced features of the SRP Picture control and compare them to these new properties and new method that will be introduced in OpenInsight 10.
The Future Is Now – Improved Transparency Support
When we recently wrote about our excitement over the upcoming release of OpenInsight 10, we announced that we would be publishing articles that would help current and future SRP customers enjoy many of the future advances of OpenInsight 10 with their existing OpenInsight 8 and 9 systems. In other words, the future is now. In our first article in this series we will review OpenInsight 10 improvements in the area of image transparency and explain how these can be implemented today using SRP technology.
OpenInsight 10 – Hope or Hype?
Our apologies, the title of this article is a shameless attempt to get your attention. The truth is, nothing has excited the staff of SRP more regarding the future of OpenInsight than the planned release of v10. If you are a developer or consultant for Revelation Software products and have not been keeping tabs on its progress, we highly recommend you beat a path toward the Building OpenInsight 10 blog, bookmark it, subscribe to it, or use whatever your preferred method is for staying informed. Not since the dawn of OpenInsight 4, the first 32-bit release, has there been such a milestone in the history of this venerable product.
Pulling the Rug from Beneath your Feet
Many software applications are designed to self-update. With the use of the RDKInstall function, OpenInsight applications have an easy way to add this ability. Some of our own applications that we have built make use of TIMER events, remote servers, and OECGI to make this an automated and seamless feature.
One of the dangers of self-updating tools is when the tool itself is updated in a way that prevents further self-updates (say that five times fast.) I have personally seen this happen on a number of mainstream systems. The solution always results in some kind of manual update to the self-updating technology so that it can begin to work as intended.
The Runtime Deployment Kit (RDK) attempts to avert this problem in an interesting way. When an extraction is made from a Deployment Definition, one of the entities that is placed in the SYSUPGRADE table is the %RUN% record. This is nothing more than a copy of $RDKMODULEINSTALL from the SYSOBJ system table. When the RDKInstall function is ran, it copies %RUN% into the target SYSOBJ table as $RDKMODULEINSTALL.
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