Second mid-summer update: Post-roadtrip, TextEdit progress, Clipboard…

Okay, so both members of development team have been busy being on vacation trips for the past few weeks, but we’re again back (although still on “kind of” summer break). To celebrate this we decided to each post a picture of what we’ve been up to, but to make this appropriate to topic of this blog, we do this by showing the photos using M.A.C.E running Photoshop πŸ™‚

Road trip vacations

First, Pukka went on a road trip to Eastern Finland with his good old trusty Volvo station wagon for one week:

Pukka went on a road trip to Eastern Finland with his good old trusty Volvo station wagon for one week

Toni went on a two-week road trip to Northern Germany, visiting 12 cities in 14 days, including taking this amazing train from Hamburg to Kiel:

Toni went on a two-week road trip to Northern Germany, visiting 12 cities in 14 days, including taking this amazing train from Hamburg to Kiel

TextEdit progress (and Scrap Manager)

During this two weeks of visiting a lot of places, Toni had a couple evenings time to do some work on (non-styled) Text Edit, which now is nearly complete, and is able to run TeachText with almost all text editing features working:

TeachText works now on M.A.C.E.!

These are the notable features which work now in TextEdit:

  • Multi-line text display, with scrolling support (viewRect/destRect offsetting)
  • TEKey text input (still a bit hacky but functional)
  • TEClick with autoscrolling support, double-click word selection (using TEFindWord), and fExtend support for “shift-key”-type extending of selection, and recognition of left/right side of character for proper caret positioning
  • TextEdit hook support for nearly all TE Hooks (TEDoText, TERecalc, TEWordBreak, ClikLoop, TEFindWord, TEFindLine, TETrimMeasure, EOLHook, HighHook, etc…) which can be customized by 68K apps
  • Caret support with TEIdle blinking, TEKey cursor key movement (including multi-line support), and multi-line selection range support
  • Nearly all “quirks” of regular System 7.x TextEdit implemented as they work on real Mac; including the weird way caret gets positioned when moving across line boundaries using left/right arrow keys if previously clicked on right-hand side of a character, etc…
  • Dialog Manager edit field support, with System 7-type multi-line text support (i.e. edit fields with one line get extended horizontally 2x size, and scroll both horizontally and vertically, while multi-line edit fields only scroll vertically), “tabbing” between edit fields, and complete TEKey/TEClick support
  • Maybe some others I’ve forgotten to mention

Additionally, as TeachText wanted to use also Scrap Manager for edit functions, in parallel to implementing TECut/TECopy which use private TextEdit scrap, the implementation of generic Scrap Manager was finalized so that Clipboard file is fully supported (previously only in-memory state of scrap was implemented).

However, TEPaste still needs to be added for a 100% completion of “Edit” menu features for TeachText – and also, styled TextEdit work has not yet been started, which will be required in future to support more complex apps such as SimpleText and HyperCard 2.x.

Next up, on Toolbox API side, work is being done on Resource Manager’s resource fork write support, mostly just because after Scrap Manager was implemented, SuperPaint was able to progress a bit further in it’s startup, but wants to create “SuperPaint Prefs” file using Resource Manager’s functions, so might as well add that next. As of writing this, there’s already support for AddResource, ChangedResource and WriteResource, but we need to add resource fork compacting support to UpdateResFile to actually write the file properly. But we’ll get back to that later.

Bonus pic – for fun πŸ™‚

Meanwhile, here’s a funny pic of what it looks when we run 28 M.A.C.E. instances at once πŸ™‚ All quite responsive even though they’re all in full debug mode, although same can’t be said about the old Mac Pro when it was running them… πŸ˜€

28 individual M.A.C.E. applications (in debug mode) running at once πŸ™‚