Distributed BASIC updated, GoldED Studio AIX Preview

[Dietmar]

1. A new version of Distributed BASIC has been released. Distributed BASIC is a rexx-enabled BASIC interpreter. The interpreter can be used inside applications (as shared library) or as command line interpreter in a shell.

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2. A new version of GoldED will officially be launched this weekend. What's new: some eye candy (see sneak preview) and integration with the AmigaOS NDK and the MorphOS SDK, making it an ideal cross-platform development IDE.

[Dietmar]

> Bruce Lee's brother Ug comes to mind!

Bruce Lee's brother Ug is not configurable If you don't like the look, it can be configured away and be made to look like ed.

[Dietmar]

>So I can change look of all the icons in the toolbar

Yes. You can change the look in these ways: turn them off, on, replace or remove every icon, toggle to grey, display them as text, switch between two icon sets included with the editor (small and large), enable or disable gradients and finally group toolbars into registers.

> get rid of those Explorer drag bars on the side

Yes. You can turn them on, off, move them around, resize and iconify them (so that they are turned into an icon in the toolbar to be out of the way).

> [change] the Windows resize handle

Yes, for text windows. You can revert back to the system resize handle and change the scrollers back, too.

> change the icons in the prefs windows to some nice looking glowicons

Yes, all images in the editor are external files and can be replaced. Images can be turned off completely, too, in case you prefer retro dialogs. It ships with 300+ images, so you would have some work cut out for you.

> and, last but not least, can I use Non-Proportional truetype fonts with it?

Yes. But you must mean Non-Fixed-Width fonts and those are allowed for dialogs only, not for text (which is probably fine for a source code editor since you want to see source code lined up).

To sum it up, you can make it look like CED or ED or like a typical PC IDE. Since all components can be installed individually, that applies to total size, too. It varies from some hundred KB to 100+ MB with the complete SDK.

[Dietmar]

> Are informations about the needed images available?

The following information is for the next version, previous versions are different.

The images are in the "golded:etc/images/" tree. There are subfolders with self-explanatory names, like "small/color/toolbar". All are regular IFF images without a mask and were created with Personal Paint. Note that these images are cached by GoldED to avoid loading them individually. While you develop new images, turn caching off (in global options) or you will not see modified images.

The images may not have a mask because the mask is calculated automatically: Pen 0 should be viewed as background color and not be used as "grey" because gradients will shine through.

The small 16x16 images for trees are not individual images but contained in one larger picture. This is the only picture that may not be changed in size. All other images can be changed in size but in the case of toolbar images, should not, for consistency.

All images should be rendered with the colors configured in GoldED. That is a palette with 64 colors (just load one toolbar image). If you use a different palette, the images will be remapped to the pens configured in GoldED, no new pens are allocated.

I have collected most symbols in one image for convencience. If interested, you can have that as reference.

Please take into consideration that all images are copyrighted. I don't mind use as templates for new GoldED images but object to use for other programs :-)

[Dietmar]

> do you think that you will make an AmigaOS4 PPC native release of GoldED

No. One reason is that I won't buy another computer and the other reason is that a native version makes no sense because even so, with JIT on a G3, speed is more than satisfactory. On a Pegasos, it runs so fast that making it faster is a waste of time: starts in a fraction of a second, scrolls faster than one can move the mouse.

With this coming update, I have tried to take out questionable code that did cause problems with MorphOS and would quite likely cause the same problems with OS4, like the clock in the title bar or gadgets in window titles . It now runs fine on AmigaOS3 and MorphOS and UAE, I don't see why AmigaOS4 should be any different, though I haven't seen a beta.

> As there is no development IDE available yet, I think that GoldED could be very useful to developers, especially if it will integrate the NDK for AOS 4.0

If the NDK is made available freely like the NDK of 3.9, I will integrate it with GoldED's C/C++ mode just like the previous NDK or the MorphOS SDK. That would be a matter of seconds, it's just another gcc. The C/C++ mode is prepared for dealing with multiple gcc's on one computer.

I've briefly talked with one of the Friedens (Hans-Jörg?) about their new gcc debugger. GoldED can display breakpoints and would be useful as frontend to it. I might work on that aspect if the interfaces are cleanly designed and allow work without actually having the hardware.

[Dietmar]

> Is there a PHP-plugin kinda thing for Golded?

There is a syntax parser for PHP from Philippe Bourdin that can be used with GoldED's HTML mode (GoldED6 to AIX). Just don't use its installation program, that doesn't work correctly with later version. Copy the file manually, choose colors manually.