RISC OS Ltd is pleased to announce the availability of the release version of Select 2 for download from the Select website. The CD version will follow as soon as possible. NB this version of Select now allows for the loading of non-ROM resident shared C libraries. RISCOS Ltd does not currently support any applications which require a softloaded shared C library, but we anticipate releasing a version of the 32 bit development tools shortly. Details of the changes to this version of Select include the following:- Changes with RISC OS Select 2 (addendum for 2i3) ============================= Introduction ------------ This document is an addendum to the initial note put out for Select 2 issue 1. Refer to the original documentation for information pertaining to the initial release of Select 2. This document is intended as a quick update for users of Select 2 issue 1. New users of Select should refer directly to the Select 2i3 documentation. Where new features have been added, they will be highlighted here. Bug fixes will refer to the original features present in Select 2 issue 1. Not all fixes will be documented here. Where changes are not significant it is best to refer to the change documents directly. Graphics -------- During the testing of Select 2i1, a small misfeature was observed in the translucent sprite rendering in 16 bit screen modes. This was most apparent when dragging a sprite within the desktop. The image being dragged would have a noticable red tint when held against the background. This was due to a bit error in the processing of this channel and has been corrected for Select 2i3. The ImageFileRender component, which provides generic file rendering, was developed with the initial intention of providing a toolbox gadget for rendering such objects. This gadget has nearly reached maturity and has been included with Select 2i3. Documentation for this component will follow in a future release. A change to the JPEG information call to comply with the documentation in the PRMs was found to conflict with a number of applications who also did not follow this documentation. This change has been reversed. Sprite rendering where dithering was not requested was incorrectly given dither effect (and vice-versa) for certain rendering operations. This has been addressed and dithering should only occur where requested. Input ----- The PS2 wheel support within Select 2i1 had been left with an experimental feature for handling dual-axis scroll wheels. This made scrolling difficult on systems which used such mice. In addition, mice without wheels would be misidentified and would scroll erratically. These issues have been corrected. Outside the PS2Driver, the Kernel itself contained a fault in the scroll wheel handling. This caused random failures during mouse operations whose symptoms generally included random data aborts. This has been addressed. The default scroll handler, the WindowScroll module, can now be disabled. This allows other user components to provide alternative scrolling facilities. Window manager -------------- The enhancements for Select 2i1 have been completed by the addition of two new features, and a correction of a few bugs : * Revised icon highlighting algorithm Icon highlighting previously was applied using an effect which was intended to provided a representation of the sprites and text which was a little like a photographic negative. Invariably, however, the image which was rendered was black silhouette. In order to rationalise this and bring sprite rendering in line with other changes to the window manager, the highlighting algorithm has been modified. Highlighted text in icons will invert as before. Highlighted sprites within icons will be faded toward the highlight background. In addition to providing a better rendition of the highlighted image, this also ensures that where the background colours of such icons are used, the highlighted sprite follows this colour scheme. * New 'Special icon highlighting' feature. Selected icons within Filer (and other, similar applications) follow the standard behaviour of displaying highlighted icons in using the standard highlighting methods. However, experience has shown that using colour for such selections is a much better indicator and is more visible to the user. Attempts to accommodate this and maintain a consistent behaviour across all icons with all colour schemes would be impossible. Thus, a 'special' icon highlighting feature was introduced. At the users discretion, icons which use the 'standard' colours may be displayed in configurable colours when selected. The effect of this is to allow icons selected within the Filer to be shown with a coloured background, rather than merely becoming darker. In addition, a long-standing fault with the widths of menus containing sprites has been addressed, allowing such menus to be displayed reliably. Where tinting was applied to icons, this would only apply to the colours of the sprites. Due to changes for the above features and in order to ensure that this feature is more useful, the tinting of the icon is now applied to the text of the icon as well. Networking ---------- ShareFS is now capable of providing information about the free space of remote discs of over 4GB capacity. This however only applies to remote machines that are also running Select2i3 or RISC OS 5. Toolbox ------- The Window gadgets for radio and option buttons have had minor issues with their resize code fixed. Previously, such gadgets would fail to resize correctly. Configuration tools ------------------- The Tool order configuration tool has been updated to make use of the new ImageFileRender gadget, thus allowing different tool orders to be selected, with visual representation of the tool order being shown. The Window configuration tool has been completely re-written from scratch. The new tool provides a much more organised view of the configuration options and provides new options for configuring the use of dithering on deep sprites, dithering on icon backgrounds (a long standing feature which has not been provided externally) and configuration of the new 'Special Icon Highlighting' feature. Applications ------------ A fault in the SVG export feature of Draw was causing objects to become filled incorrectly. This was due to an incorrect default 'fill-rule' being specified by the creator, and has been addressed. JPEGs created by Paint might be generated as empty files if insufficient memory was available. This has been addressed. Miscellaneous ------------- In order to address an incompatibility with the ArcFS Memory Manager module, the PatchApp component has been updated to patch the module as it loads. This is in addition to a similar fix applied to the ImpressionSpell module, which was provided with Select 2i1. -- Paul Middleton Managing Director RISCOS Ltd Tel +44 (0)29 2046 4020 Direct, Fax +44 (0)29 2049 2326 Email: mailto:paul@riscos.com Web http://www.riscos.com/ RISC OS Built by RISCOS Ltd - Powered by ARMŽ Technology RISC OS is a trademark of Pace Micro Technology plc ARM is a registered trademark of ARM Limited -----------------------------------------------------------------------