From: Justin Fletcher <justin@riscos.com>
To: regdevs@riscos.com
Subject: Developer update
X-Organization: RISCOS Ltd
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 13:05:00 +0000

Hiya,

We've been having a little feedback about the conference material now,
and I hope to be putting some new versions of things from the CD up on
the developer site as they become available.

A few things that have become apparent are :

  * Printers exhibits a few problems with configuration and printing to
    certain types of printers.
    A new version of Printers should appear some time next week, hopefully.
    You may be interested to know that response to the printing survey have
    been incredibly good.

  * The documentation included is quite bulky and quite difficult to search.
    The final version of the CD that will go out at the South East show
    contains additional 'heading overview' files, as well as the indexes to
    the Toolbox manuals. The overview files are provided in both HTML and
    in a 'raw' machine readable form in case anyone wants to write their own
    interface to them. I'd like to hope that someone will produce a freeware
    parser for this so that there can be a different front end to the manuals
    rather than just the HTML selection.

  * The PNG/ZLib stuff appears to be badly broken. The copies I'm working
    with here work fine and once I'm happy with them I'll try to put up new
    versions on the website, along with Paint and ChangeFSI if we can find
    the time.
  
As well as this, we've identified a few things you should be aware of :

  * Deprecated OS SWI calls -
      OS_ClaimScreenMemory
        This is impossible to use reliably on RISC OS 4 and should never
        be called. It's unlikely to affect much external code.
        The same applies to Wimp_ClaimFreeMemory (in this case no dynamic
        area operations can occur whilst claimed; handy).
  
  * Clipboard handling -
      We'd really like to push this as a standard feature of applications.
      The protocol has been there for years, and son-of-clipboard protocol
      for providing a clipboard holding application has been around of about
      half that time. With the introduction of the Clipboard support to the
      main applications, there should be little reason not to support it.
      Mail us if you've any queries on this front.
  
  * Error numbers -
      These should be valid. Please ensure they're valid and registered.
      Using ####, or CACK, or any other string as the error number just
      confuses applications and is likely to cause problems in future -
      certainly it makes decoding the returned number when an error
      occurs is made much more difficult if the numbers are invalid.


Please do remember that the software and information on the CD, as well as
the things discussed at the conference are NOT publicly distributable or
discussable. They are all covered by non-disclosure agreements and should be
treated as such. We have heard rumours that information from the developer
conference has been passed on to the general public. We hope that these 
rumours aren't true.

-- 
Justin Fletcher, Software engineer, RISCOS Ltd
Personal URL: http://www.thevillage.ndirect.co.uk/justin/