Dr Wimp p10

Stroll up the learning curve

The learning curve for Dr Wimp is neither very steep nor very long, but it exists nonetheless. Here are my tips for strolling up it smoothly and quickly.

'Visual DrWimp'?

A few people have recently asked if I have any plans to develop Dr Wimp further in the direction indicated by the !Fabricate and !CodeTemps utilities.

!Fabricate was described in more detail last time. It is a small utility program in the Dr Wimp package which produces (within a few seconds) a customised, fully working, baseline application.

!CodeTemps is more specialised and limited, and is provided solely for those times when you prefer to create windows/icons from within the program rather than the usual way of simply loading them from a template file (e.g. to stop your windows being easily altered by others perhaps). From a normal window templates file, !CodeTemps will produce the Basic code necessary to create all the windows/icons in the template file using the appropriate DrWimp wimp-function calls.

Both !Fabricate and !CodeTemps are therefore tools which produce Basic code from a visual interface, and there is clearly some interest in having other utilities of this nature to make the use of Dr Wimp even simpler than it already is.

Well, if that's what the customer wants, I will need to try to meet it.

I have to say that I have only just started to look at this and, as yet, have no firm idea how best to pursue it, other than a feeling that I would wish to proceed in parallel with continuing to develop Dr Wimp's facilities in the usual way, i.e. anything I can come up with on this 'Visual DrWimp' front would, at least for the foreseeable future, be offered as separate, optional utilities for use with the Dr Wimp package.

I would very much welcome any specific guidance you can offer on this front. What would you like to see here? How would you want it to work in practice?

Printed manual?

I know from feedback that many Dr Wimp users prefer (like me) to print a hard copy of the Impression version of the on-disc manual. It currently weighs in at about 130 pages.

For those who haven't got Impression, there is the alternative of the textfile version which, in comparison, suffers in format and I know it cannot be the easiest thing to refer to.

I have toyed with the idea of making available printed Impression versions - at cost plus a small donation to charity (like my books). There are problems though: the manual usually changes with each new release and often it's not simply a matter of issuing supplement pages. So the hard copy would have a short 'sell by' date and would start to fall behind - and costs would be based on low numbers only. My guess is a price of around £7-£8 per copy.

Is there any interest? Would an HTML version be better?

(Don't forget that the new version of Ovation Pro can load Impression files, including all the graphics - and, surely, most RISC OS users will have Impression or Ovation, won't they? And if you add the graphics and a DDF version of the Impression text, EasiWriter/TechWriter owners will be covered too. And if you want, I could convert the manual to PDF and/or Draw format, via PostScript, using RiScript. Ed.)

Demonstration/talk

If your group would like a talk-plus-demonstration of Dr Wimp, then please contact me. It is free and I am prepared to travel an hour or so's drive from Heathrow.


Source: Archive 13.10
Publication: Archive Magazine
Contributor: Ray Favre