After a decade of gathering dust that ended when Steve Fryatt took a look at the application, releasing a new version last month, WinEd has been updated again. This time, as well as looking at a few bugs, Steve has paid particular attention to the way it exports icon names, and re-implemented that feature completely.
The program is a tool for developers, allowing them to design windows and the icons used within them, and save that design to a special file, which you’ll find in many applications, called a template file. Using such a file, rather than build up a window by specifying in the code how big it is and what icons are needed where, etc., the application can instead specify the template file, and when it needs to open a window, tell the operating system which window definition within that file to use.
In order to make use of any icons within the window, though, the application does still need to be aware of them, what they are, and what they’re used for – how to act on clicks on them, or handle their contents, and so on. To this end, to make it easier to refer to the icons, WinEd has a facility to export the icon names, so that those names – as defined in the window template – can be used in the source code for the application.
Steve’s update expands on the existing export options – adding C enum and #define formats (with BASIC, MessageTrans, and C typedef already supported). It also allows window and icon names to be converted into upper or lower case, and makes it possible to add a standard prefix to all icon name definitions. GUI options are now provided for excluding window names from definitions, where appropriate, and replaces characters that are invalid depending on what they are being exported to.
A number of bugs have also been addressed: There was a problem loading templates whose names included a % character, and another that left a window icon in the file browser when an open window was deleted – both now fixed. Also fixed is the way unsaved files were handled during an aborted Desktop shut-down, which prevented WinEd from being quit.
All keypresses except for Escape are now disabled during drag operations in order to avoid unexpected side effects, a check now is carried out to ensure there is a window selected in the template browser before any attempt is made to carry out an operation on it, and the behaviour of radio icons when subjected to Adjust-clicks have been corrected.
And finally, interactive help messages throughout the application have been improved.
Licenced under GPLv2, WinEd can be found via !Store, in the RISC OS Open Ltd third party package repository and fetched using Packman, or directly from Steve’s website. The source code is held in a RISCOS.info subversion repository.
