From: ijp@oak9.doc.ic.ac.uk (Ian Palmer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn
Subject: 3d icons for RO3.xx
Date: 21 Jul 92 10:10:37 GMT
Organization: Department of Computing, Imperial College, University of London, UK.
X-Newsreader: Tin 1.1 PL3

Jason Williams' 3d window icons posted to comp.sources.acorn contain
one slight bug. As far as I can tell the close window icon (cicon)
needs to be an even numner of pixels wide (it currently has an odd
number). This leads to a strange gap between the close icon and the
main title bar (only noticable at the top and bottom).

Other things that could be added to make them look even better
(depeinding on preference) would be to add to the various window bits
(eg. close icon, toggle icon, etc) a mask, and mask out bits that are
title bar coloured, this way they to change colour when the caret is
focused on that window.

And one question about the various replacement window bits floating
about, they all seem to have a spurious icon which appears to serve no
useful purpose. I think it's called 'blicon' (if memory serves me
right, but it usually doesn't). It always seems to be defined as a
black bounded gery square, about 18x18 pixels. I tried changing it to
semething very distinctive, and nothing happened - so I can only assume
it's rather redundant - but it does appear in Roger Wilson's !SetIcons
definitions, so I assume it must do something... But then again :-)

Oh, and on a different note, something to wet your appetites. I shall
soon (probably tomorrow, if not next week) upload (to somewhere, havn't
decided where yet) a little (understatement of the year) application
called 'Word Hound' a combined thesaurus and dictionary (yes
dictionary, with definitions and the like). The only problem is that
it's big (very big - we are talking hard disc only application here)
and I havn't quite worked out how to split the main dictionary (2 Meg
of compressed data) into distributable (and recombinable) bits yet.

But just to give a few indications of what you can expect, here are a
few details :

  - Dictionary with over 30,000 entries (2 Meg compressed).

  - Roget's 1901 thesaurus with over 30,000 keywords (compare with
    Risc Developements' Desktop Thesaurus with (now) about 13,000
    keywords) (approx 700k compressed data).

  - Fast access (well under a second from hard disc).

  - Can pass words (and phrases) to the application currently holding
    the caret. Can also import words to search for from other
    applications (eg. Impression).

  - Only takes up 128k application space.

  - RISC OS front end.

  - The application can (if you need it to) work with just the
    thesaurus data (or just the dictionary data) thus you could get
    a complete thesaurus in just under 1.6M (this would fit on a high
    density floppy).

  - Easy to use (well I think it is).

  - Three types of search :
      1 - Normal 'search for this word'
      2 - 'Search for all words starting with ....'
      3 - 'Search for words that might sound a bit like .....'

  - It's FREE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (to private users,
                                        subject to conditions)

I shall also be uploading (again somewhere) some other applications
(wot I 'ave writted) (although not quite as exciting) over the next
week (or so) :

  - Calenary  (combined calendar and diary program)

  - Staka     (sort of 3d Tetris game-ette)

  - Blib      (Basic Library organiser, extracter, teasmaid, cuddly
              toy, etc.)

Ian

--
                            E-mail : ijp@doc.ic.ac.uk
 ___           __       Snail mail : Department of Computing, Huxley Building,
  /  _   _    /_/ _   / _ _   _  _   Imperial College, 180 Queens Gate,
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn