Folks,
Finally, we've been able to release Beta 2. You can download the
installer from the usual location on the website:
http://www.object-arts.co.uk/navigation/downloads/DolphinX6.htmlYour existing serial number should work to unlock the image. Check the
release notes for the changes in this version compared with Beta 1 but
here's a brief run through of the highlights:
1) STS integration. Following the announcement that we've been able to
license David Gorisek's Source Tracking System, we have now integrated
this into the base Dolphin Professional image.
We'd like existing STS users to check this out to make sure it
functions as expected. To be fair, David haven't yet seen the
integrated code so there may be problems. Please report these in the
usual way, by entering a bug report and posting a message here.
We'd also be interested in hearing from other users if there are any
other (straightforward) enhancements you think can be made to the STS
integration before the release.
Please note that David is planning to implement an Admin facility for
STS to allow the easily opening and backup of repositories.
2) Help integration. The help/documentation is a big task and is not
yet complete. However, this release has the first showing of what we
have done so far. There's a lot of stuff that's not yet ready, so it's
probably easier if I tell you what is there, rather than what's not.
Please check out the following areas:
(a) "What's This" Shift+F1 help is now available for all the icons in
the System Folder and for all of the panes in the Class and System
Browsers. This will obviously be extended to all of the tools before
the release.
(b) Standard context F1 help is available for the System Folder,
Workspace and the Class and System browsers. Obviously, this will be
completed for the other tools.
(c) The Welcome workspace has now been replaced by a specialised help
window. Since we have adopted Scintilla for the workspaces they can no
longer display rich text so the welcome window, which should be one of
the first things a new user sees, looked a bit "flat". We think that
the new Help/First Splash experiments make this look a lot better.
(d) The Tip of the Day has also been replaced by a series of pop-up
help Windows. As before, this is accessible from the Help menu and also
at image startup. The new pop-ups seem, to me at least, to be less
intrusive and I found that I can actually live with them turned on now,
which I could never do before.
(e) The Help/What's New documentation is complete and the Help/Guided
Tour is complete for the System Folder, Workspace, Class Browser and
System Browser.
(f) The Getting Started section is complete.
Most of the other stuff in the help file is not ready and is in a state
of flux so don't pay too much attention to that for the moment.
Completing the documentation is the major thrust left before release
(at least we hope it is).
3) Go Search. We've implemented a rather cool search bar in all of the
Dolphin tools. Why not use the Shift+F1 help to find out what it does?
4) Somewhat hidden away is the introduction of the ToolbarIconButton.
This allows toolbars to be built out of buttons that make use of icons
rather than those horrid mini-bitmaps. Most of the toolbars in the
development system are now implemented in this way, so take a look to
see how it's done. There are a couple of reasons why this seemed to be
a good idea:
(a) If you have a button that launches a presenter then it's likely
that you already have an icon for this and you don't really want to
draw another bitmap just for the toolbar button. This was certainly the
case with the development system.
(b) Another cool reason, which we haven't really made use of yet, is
that the toolbars can now easily be resized to have larger buttons.
There's no need to redraw the bitmaps because the icons will just yield
up the appropriate size images.
I think we are starting to see the "light at the end of the tunnel",
and it is our hope that we can release D6 early in November (perhaps as
soon as the 7th). Depending on the response from this beta, we believe
that most of the remaining work will be in completing the documentation.
Basically, we intend to get all the "user" documentation complete and
then do as much of the "developer" documentation as time allows before
the release date. we can always update the latter at some point in the
not too distant future.
I hope you enjoy the new version.
Best Regards,
--
Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com
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