Don't forget to...

Don't forget to...

[UK Users]
Change the time zone offset in your Environment configuration now that we are on BST and not GMT any longer.

[Others]
Remember to do the same if your country does this twice yearly nonsense at the appropriate time and in the appropriate direction depending on your hemisphere.

[South Africans]
Ignore the above entirely as you are one of the few nations that don't do this crazy time shifting twice a year ! Why is everywhere else not so sensible ?

[All Users]
The good news is that this will be the last time, from v1.6 the Environment Prefs allow you to use a "Local Time Zone" which is the recommended default which assuming you have your OS4 settings correctly configured will do the time switching automatically. It works too

The whole Environment Window is getting an overhaul with a new user configurable <Home> location, sortable listviews etc.

Now might be a good time for a brief rundown on the planned (and mostly now implimented) features for v1.6 - shown below.

Better star plotting which looks a bit more realistic on modern TFT monitors. Much, much, much better twilight rendering. A better way of drawing planetary grids to avoid clutter on smaller images.

A more responsive way of using the control panel to enter location and FOV information.

A status window showing realtime update of the RA and Dec under the mouse pointer, time, manual/auto advance mode and drawing progress (if you are quick enough to see the latter).

An ongoing programme of improving the images in the hypertext encyclopedia.

All string objects replaced by betterstring which gives the user more control when entering information.

A message alert system to inform the user when DU copies to the clipboard or changes the FOV behind the scenes to locate an object. The message will autoclose after a brief interval.

A new "Information" menu to allow the user to check the last message (see above) and also view a new Statistics window showing information about the current display.

When using keys to navigate the sky or step through time, it is now possible to hold down a key and get the action repeated.

NGC objects that have a PGC identifier now show the PGC ID in their Info Window.

And quite a lot of under the bonnet stuff.


And of course a few bugfixes, thankfully not too many




Bill.


PS. It would have been really nice if Hyperion had released the exisitng SDK with the timezone.library information that OS4 uses in the last few releases - but I managed to write all the code myself to parse all(?) the variations of the TZONE env var. Some help for developers promoting your OS would be a good idea !

@BillE

Quote:

Agreed. I know how to get the relevant information from timezone.library (courtesy of the YAM source code), but I can't do it without the includes.

The 32-bit icon system is also missing from the current SDK, and nobody could or would tell me how to use it. I had to get the relevant #defines and how to read/write 32-bit icons from the bloke who maintains AfA_OS!

Chris

@Chris

Quote:Don't use any information from him! It seems he created is own icon format, of course incompatible to the AmigaOS one, which doesn't and can't work with anything else.

@joerg
Quote:

DualPNG works on ALL Amiga systems (3.x, 4.x, AROS, and MOS).

@joerg

Just the API for icon.library, which is the same. Actually the internal format you get out of icon.library is the same as well, not sure about the file on disk but that doesn't concern me, I'm not writing icons to disk with AfA that I expect to use elsewhere, nor am I reading them manually.