The latest upgrade to Dr Wimp (v3.60) is due on 1st August 2001, the main improvement to the DrWimp library itself being the addition of facilities to enable font menus to be shown.

This, in fact, is a major upgrade in coding terms and I first started developing it over a year ago. It was quite straightforward to introduce font menus for use as a main menu, but it was a lot trickier to ensure that they could be created as submenus also.

However, the Dr Wimp user might be forgiven for thinking there isn't much change at all - because the end result appears as only two new wimp-functions - plus the addition of one extra parameter to an existing user-function. (I would argue that this is what Dr Wimp is all about: reducing tricky problems down to very simple user-facilities.)

Do try out font menus. I have tested it pretty well but wide usage by others is the only true test.

Although it was my original intention to confine this release to just the above introduction, a few minor bugs had been reported in other areas, so the new release also contains a few bug fixes.

(One curious apparent bug concerns the !Slider application in the Examples folder. I say "curious" because the problem doesn't occur if your RISC OS version is less than 3.50 - but it does with OS 4. More curious is that the problem has been fixed merely by moving two 'nudger' icons to different positions, without any coding changes! It looks as if some undocumented change has occurred in the OS somewhere.)

Important improvements have also been made to !Fabricate and !Fnc'n'Prc' for this release.

!Fabricate now allows you to include your own sprites and a standard 'Save' window in the automatic construction of your new skeleton applications. These improvements were suggested by users, and I was happy to provide them. !Fabricate has come a long way in the last year!

Also from a user's suggestion, !Fnc'n'Prc has been upgraded to allow you to export its function names (edited as you wish) directly to the caret of your Basic editor. It also allows you to choose between 'Faster' and 'Slower' exporting to overcome the limitation of some editors which sometimes drop characters if the exporting process is too fast.

Finally, many will be pleased to know that I have bitten the bullet and introduced a means of identifying the changes made to the manual from the previous version - at least in the Impression Publisher version. Changes are now in coloured text. The colour is applied by an Impression style, which you can use to search for the changes if you wish.

!NurseW

Download it from http://www.greywall.demon.co.uk/riscos/soft.html.

How new releases are decided

Each time a functional change is made in the DrWimp library, it means a consequential change in the manual and it also needs to be included in !Fabricate, !Fnc'n'Prc and all the applications in the Examples folder.

The coding of changes is therefore often the easy bit! Typically, it takes me four weeks to get a new release ready for uploading after I have finished the coding.

The main source of improvements is suggestions from users, and it's pleasing that I have a steady stream. This means that I am able to plan the main contents of a new release well in advance - and I have the core of the next two releases already planned...

...But they aren't set in concrete yet, and if a 'better' suggestion arrives, it will jump the queue. By "better", I generally mean a suggestion which will give benefit to more users.

Another thing that first started to be apparent to me about a year ago is that Dr Wimp is now so well established that its very large user base now contains a small layer of 'expert users'. I define these as users who are more than capable of Wimp programming 'the hard way' but who still prefer Dr Wimp for its ease-of-use and time-saving. This includes several PD authors - as you can see on my website.

This is very flattering. (It also means that if they make suggestions, they usually tell me how to do it as well!)

But you don't have to be an expert to make suggestions. Keep 'em coming!