July 25, 2001

I am not entirely sure that this release is ready for release but here goes … Scope 2.0 final is out 🙂 I have fixed all the reported bugs but have been very sparse in feature additions since I don’t want to add new features and then have to go through a further bug-testing cycle. Hopefully, this release is bug free though I can’t be completely sure since I had to do some extensive code changes in order to fix some of the bugs. The next release will probably be Scope 3.0 (to coincide with the version number for Blog <g>) and will contain customizable toolbars, hopefully John’s new Favorites and quite a few other things. For the moment, get Scope 2.0 …

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Posted by Fahim at 2:02 pm  |  No Comments

Went back to working on Scope yesterday 🙂 I managed to resolve quite a few minor bugs and annoyances in Scope. Most of them had to do with the Mozilla engine and interaction with it. In the process, I finally came to the realization that I cannot take a common approach for both the IE and Mozilla engines even though I would like the functionality to be similar for both. So I have started diverging a bit in how I code for each engine but am still trying to maintain the same functionality for both engines as much as possible. One thing that I had to drop though was download and security options for the Mozilla engine – not that I ever knew whether they worked or not in the first place :p

One major thing that I did fix was not being able to use the ENTER key in web forms though the fix itself has resulted in a curious problem with Mozilla but I’m not going to worry about it for the moment unless I can find a quick fix for it today. In my effort to discover what was going wrong, I actually created a test application with two browser windows on it – one a component that I’d dropped on the form and the other a browser object that I’d created on the fly at run time (as I do in Scope). I discovered that the browser created as a component at design-time worked fine when it came to using the ENTER key in web forms, it was just on-the-fly created browsers that had problems with the ENTER key – go figure. I tried a lot of things like comparing the runtime properties of both browsers and trying to duplicate the properties of the design-time created browser in the runtime one etc. but nothing worked. I finally figured out the solution and it basically involved creating a message handler routine for the main Scope window and passing any key presses to the active browser object. Of course, now Mozilla thinks that you are trying to print or fax when you press ENTER in a web form for some weird reason … I have no solution for that at the moment.

I’ve been thinking about Blog and what I need to do for the next release while working on Scope – it never stops, does it? :p I want to implement linking to older posts but that is going to have a few problems unless I also add a daily auto-archive facility which will archive the previous day’s entries. I think what I’ll end up doing is have the auto-archiving facility but give an option to turn it off so that you can archive things manually but that would mean your links to older posts might not always work – depending on whether the posts had been archived or not. Hey, you sometimes have to make compromises 🙂

Speaking of compromises, John asked me a couple of days ago whehter I had had to resign from my company and then I realized that I hadn’t written about the aftermath of the whole tie incident from last Friday (now here’s a place where linking to older posts would have been handy <g>). And no, I didn’t compromise as the above segue might suggest :p It just turned out to be much-ado-about-nothing since I didn’t wear a tie but didn’t get pulled up either since I guess they either assumed that everybody would automatically comply or decided not to enforce the rule 🙂 Of course, John seems to think that I might have compromised because he wrote to me today and asked me whether it was a tie that he saw around my neck in the webcam <vbg> Nope, that’s just my holster :p And no, that’s not for a gun – just my iPaq :p

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Posted by Fahim at 8:02 am  |  No Comments