This weekend I bought the Portuguese version of the Hype magazine - it featured a 4 page special coverage of the Commodore Amiga computer. Not a bad article - mainly focused on the games capabilities of the machine, but the magazine is some sort of computer and console entertainment magazine - so no complaints here.
I 'm working on the update the Devs / Prefs and Fonts support of the AROS in the User Manual.
I'm trying to finish the AROS User Manual, but it's complicated so far - the missing parts are the most complicated to get the info.
Also been wondering about the AROS current development - even got myself reading my Third edition of the AMIGA ROM KERNEL manuals. Maybe I should get AmidevCPP?... MURKS IDE is still a bit on the lacking side.
Better stick to the manuals - don't know if I'll have enough time for working on them...
P.S.: Also I've remembered that the @font problem may have something to do with the system fonts required to be monospace - I have to confirm this though!...
segunda-feira, 10 de dezembro de 2007
quinta-feira, 6 de dezembro de 2007
Documenting the Amigaguide docs...
AROS supports almost everything that AmigaOS 3.1 supported (and a little more ;) ), and for that reason it has always relied on the Amiga sources for available documentation.
These includes Arrex (Rexx in AROS), installer script syntax and amigaguide basic doc structure and tags.
As it's widely known there's been a few twists, AROS has surpassed the original intents in some areas and dedicates documentation is now needed (as referred in my last post in this blog).
But my work on the AROS manuals has to be transposed to something that is readable in AROS. So the logical step is to provide the manuals in a hypertext document type that is readable by AROS.
In theory it should pose no prob as one of the major changes in v3.0+ AmigaOS was the introduction of datatypes. A recognizable file by the datatypes can be read and shared (up to some extent) by the AROS core libraries and tasks. And like AmigaOS, AROS offers a client tool for reading the files supported through datatypes - Multiview.
AROS supports two major hypertext docs through the use of datatypes. HTML and AmigaGuide.
Naturally the HTML would be the AROS natural choice, since there's already some documentation in this format. But the html.datatype does not offer fully support of HTML tags.
Amigaguide documentation is our other option, and to tell the truth a much better one. Supporting the V40 (3.1) tags, it's capable of doing all the basic HTML offerings and with a much better support of AROS specific features. Features such as running rexx scripts, runing other background tasks... (Example: you can have a help file stating that the X tool does the job y with a link that allows running the actual tool).
Besides it's a more natively environment integrated than html which tries to be as open to different env. formats as possible...
The only complaint i have is not being able to offer some form of embedded datatype support. This would make possible to include image files in a contextual manner to the text, helping to illustrate the text.
And the pen color control sticks to V2.0 intuition drawinfo structure (That means that you can only alter the background and foreground text color to the available drawinfo predefined colours - usually grey, black, white and blue...). A RGB type color changer would be nice (I wonder if there were changes in the 3.5, 3.9 and 4.0 amigaguide tags?)...
Also found a bug on the @font tag that ruins the most simple text formating possibility.
So I'll be trying to document the Amigaguide tags so that this documentation starts having more use!... Also KeenEars had the same idea regarding this - see AROS-EXEC post .
These includes Arrex (Rexx in AROS), installer script syntax and amigaguide basic doc structure and tags.
As it's widely known there's been a few twists, AROS has surpassed the original intents in some areas and dedicates documentation is now needed (as referred in my last post in this blog).
But my work on the AROS manuals has to be transposed to something that is readable in AROS. So the logical step is to provide the manuals in a hypertext document type that is readable by AROS.
In theory it should pose no prob as one of the major changes in v3.0+ AmigaOS was the introduction of datatypes. A recognizable file by the datatypes can be read and shared (up to some extent) by the AROS core libraries and tasks. And like AmigaOS, AROS offers a client tool for reading the files supported through datatypes - Multiview.
AROS supports two major hypertext docs through the use of datatypes. HTML and AmigaGuide.
Naturally the HTML would be the AROS natural choice, since there's already some documentation in this format. But the html.datatype does not offer fully support of HTML tags.
Amigaguide documentation is our other option, and to tell the truth a much better one. Supporting the V40 (3.1) tags, it's capable of doing all the basic HTML offerings and with a much better support of AROS specific features. Features such as running rexx scripts, runing other background tasks... (Example: you can have a help file stating that the X tool does the job y with a link that allows running the actual tool).
Besides it's a more natively environment integrated than html which tries to be as open to different env. formats as possible...
The only complaint i have is not being able to offer some form of embedded datatype support. This would make possible to include image files in a contextual manner to the text, helping to illustrate the text.
And the pen color control sticks to V2.0 intuition drawinfo structure (That means that you can only alter the background and foreground text color to the available drawinfo predefined colours - usually grey, black, white and blue...). A RGB type color changer would be nice (I wonder if there were changes in the 3.5, 3.9 and 4.0 amigaguide tags?)...
Also found a bug on the @font tag that ruins the most simple text formating possibility.
So I'll be trying to document the Amigaguide tags so that this documentation starts having more use!... Also KeenEars had the same idea regarding this - see AROS-EXEC post .
terça-feira, 4 de dezembro de 2007
AROS Documentation
One thing that striked me when downloaded the Night Build in October 2007 was that although AROS seemed pretty advanced since my AROS-MAX last boot in 2004, there were very little documented features.
And having the documentation in html was always a bit offside to me (a real paper freak - i'm afraid).
So I began the quest to produce a more updated documentation, that was useful and enjoyable to read. I searched for my A4000 manuals, but quickly decided that they were not much help in most terms.
I remeber V1.3 manuals to be enjoyable and complete in user terms (and that was it), but the V 3.0 weren't. Also by today standards what would be a reasonable layout design was not very appealing to the general user.
Some decisions were made regarding initial layout design - took a couple ideas from my HP95-LX manual, as well from some technical reports that i made earlier.
I've decided to separate the documentation in three manuals:
- AROS User Manual
- AROS Shell Manual
- AROS Installation Manual
That will make my life easier updating all the revisions and new features. Also the Shell manual should reach version 0.99 earlier than the others.
Still awaiting for SVN access so i can also try update the HTML ones.
And last but not least i would like to express my congrats to the AROS documentation team:
Stefan Rieken, Matt Parsons, Adam Chodorowski, Sergey Mineychev, Matthias Rustler, Neil Cafferkey. (I hope i didn't forgot anyone!)
And having the documentation in html was always a bit offside to me (a real paper freak - i'm afraid).
So I began the quest to produce a more updated documentation, that was useful and enjoyable to read. I searched for my A4000 manuals, but quickly decided that they were not much help in most terms.
I remeber V1.3 manuals to be enjoyable and complete in user terms (and that was it), but the V 3.0 weren't. Also by today standards what would be a reasonable layout design was not very appealing to the general user.
Some decisions were made regarding initial layout design - took a couple ideas from my HP95-LX manual, as well from some technical reports that i made earlier.
I've decided to separate the documentation in three manuals:
- AROS User Manual
- AROS Shell Manual
- AROS Installation Manual
That will make my life easier updating all the revisions and new features. Also the Shell manual should reach version 0.99 earlier than the others.
Still awaiting for SVN access so i can also try update the HTML ones.
And last but not least i would like to express my congrats to the AROS documentation team:
Stefan Rieken, Matt Parsons, Adam Chodorowski, Sergey Mineychev, Matthias Rustler, Neil Cafferkey. (I hope i didn't forgot anyone!)
Intro
Hi and welcome to Wandering around AROS blog.
It's a simple blog so don't expect much of it...
If you don't know anything about AROS than you've missed a wonderfull AmigaOS incarnation which is totally hardware independent and as many modern features. Just check the Icon Links on the top left of this Blog!
Hope You like the ICE Theme (which is the current default theme for AROS GUI)!
It's a simple blog so don't expect much of it...
If you don't know anything about AROS than you've missed a wonderfull AmigaOS incarnation which is totally hardware independent and as many modern features. Just check the Icon Links on the top left of this Blog!
Hope You like the ICE Theme (which is the current default theme for AROS GUI)!
Subscrever:
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