RJ TextEd

yereverluvinuncleber wrote: ↑20 Dec 2018 18:54

pjj wrote: ↑03 Dec 2018 10:50 I tried Brief, Brook Fead Reader and Feedbro, but they're far far behind NewsFox (which is discontinued and for which I keep separate Fx 56 installation). Life must go on, though; before NewsFox I was using another RSS reader and barely imagined life without it -- and now I can't even recall its name
I guess I'll dump all Quantum good-for-nothing feed/live bookmarks readers (for now I use Drop Feeds) and start using Tiny Tiny RSS on my server. Oh, well.

I understand Interlink (a brand new thunderbird fork) has in addition to mail, RSS support, http://binaryoutcast.com/projects/interlink/ one of those apps built on the Unified XUL Platform.

Oooh, interesting, thanks

Great to hear UXP is seeing some attention. Interlink sounds interesting though it could use with a modern website to give the impression it's current. The theme they've chosen feels very old school to me which may give some potential users the wrong idea.

I think the best of both worlds would definitely be Quantum's performance through Servo integration with UXP whilst keeping the addon APIs they have obliterated in favour of WebExtensions. Mozilla has tried to sell us a load of BS when it suggests that many of the cut-and-run decisions it's made are necessary to get the performance improvements from Quantum.

Interlink was built from a little crowd-sourcing, the developer stood up and volunteered to create a new fork of TB using UXP and the crowd responded. He has had his cash, he built it and will support it for a year. His clients are small in number but they paid for it and that's all he needs. There won't be many changes to the site I suspect.

PS. In the light of recent news re: the developer of Interlink - I wouldn't recommend this software to anyone any more.

Audacity is a fine open source tool that I use to create my desktop programs. I assign various sounds to events to give my creations some 'flesh'. Without the sounds, I dare to say that the programs would lose half of their character. To capture some of the unique sounds I use a separate microphone through the laptop's 2.5mm jack and record them using Audacity. I also use Audacity to manipulate any open source sounds that I have downloaded from sites such as freesound.org.



Audacity is a fantastic tool that allows you to manipulate multiple sounds to create projects that you can re-open to change again at any time you require.

Audacity is here:
https://www.audacityteam.org/

Freesound is here:
https://www.freesound.org

I mentioned LiceCap a few posts ago. It is a screen video capture tool that captures to GIF file format. It is simply the easiest of the screen capture tools to use and is a delight to operate, I cannot recommend any other tool over it.

My trouble is that I cannot use it as it will not capture my programs. My programs run on a layer that sits between the desktop and just under the Windows applications. My current laptop has an integrated Intel GPU and all that the tool captures is my bare desktop background and icons or the Windows applications above. This may be due to the GPU hardware as the previous laptop with an Nvidia GPU worked perfectly.



https://www.cockos.com/licecap/

I would still recommend you use Licecap over all the other tools mentioned here, if it works for you and you want to capture GIFs, once tried, you will never revert.

Unsure if this fits here but I've been struggling to find a decent replacement for the very limited HTML <select> box.

Since day dot, that standard <select> has supported text searching but with nearly zero reasonable user feedback! So most users have no clue it's available or whether it's working if they try it. AFAIK it's also based on the start of option strings and the timeout is very fast so not necessarily that helpful.

It's so very disappointing to come back to web dev work, after a bit of a break or not doing code that uses form elements, and find that HTML5 has fixed a few of the problems with form fields, but critically not others. It's still painful / impossible to even style default select boxes and their drop downs with CSS! That's completely separate from actual functionality.

Oh well, before this turns into an (extended?) rant, I better stop here. Those of you who work on web front end code sometimes, do you have a particular widget that you have found meets your needs? I have explored so very many as thankfully there's lots of options that generous developers have open sourced but also, too many is not easy to filter! Much like the <select> lists we're trying to present to users need filtering, haha.

So far I've looked into these:

• jQuery UI Autocomplete ( zero default style; [tab] doesn't select currently highlighted option which seems keyboard un-friendly)
• Selectize.js ([tab]bing out of the fields is broken / messy)
• Chosen (nice style but currently deprecated pending the developers deciding if they want to rewrite / iterate, it seems)
• Accessible Autocomplete (looked good for a while but "minimal wrapper" enhanceSelectElement() method is a bit clunky and unrefined)
• Choices (completely broken search algorithm)

Still considering these:

• Select2

Have found the js.libhunt.com site helpful for looking for modules but still looking for that sweet blend of features, documentation quality and ongoing support.

What are your preferences, suggestions?

Another tool that is now useful to RJTextEd is ReactOS 0.4.14.

I have been pushing ReactOS for a few years now but only recently has it become stable and usable enough to confidently install your typical Windows applications.

During some recent testing I installed RJText Ed flawlessly, it runs well, a few on-screen artefacts and a problem with the document map transparency but it works!



So, ReactOS is useful as the base o/s for RJTextEd or rather you can now do you development on a free Windows open source o/s.

This is also a good hint that it might not be wise to drop the 32bit version of RJTextEd as although ReactOS is growing in capability, a reliable 64bit build is still some time away.

It still isn't stable but it is usable for testing. It boots in virtual mod on virtualBox in about 15 secs and so can function as a useful XP test system, sandbox or similar.

yereverluvinuncleber wrote: ↑20 Jan 2020 01:44 Another tool that is now useful to RJTextEd is ReactOS 0.4.14.

I have been pushing ReactOS for a few years now but only recently has it become stable and usable enough to confidently install your typical Windows applications.

During some recent testing I installed RJText Ed flawlessly, it runs well, a few on-screen artefacts and a problem with the document map transparency but it works!



So, ReactOS is useful as the base o/s for RJTextEd or rather you can now do you development on a free Windows open source o/s.

This is also a good hint that it might not be wise to drop the 32bit version of RJTextEd as although ReactOS is growing in capability, a reliable 64bit build is still some time away.

It still isn't stable but it is usable for testing. It boots in virtual mode on virtualBox in about 15 secs and so can function as a useful XP test system, sandbox or similar.

I understand your interest in ReactOS but even in this single post you are kinda flip flopping back and forth regarding whether it's really mature enough to be relied upon by developers who need tools to be reliable. The way I read this, which may be just me, is

- Maybe it's usable in a VM, but not as a primary OS
- I was pushing it for years before it was ready, but now I really think it is ready
- In an era of 64 bit computing, it's 32 bit so limited to 4GB of RAM and a support ball ache for developers wanting to migrate fully to 64 bit
- Maybe try it if you need to test on something that kinda partially represents XP

For me, ReactOS's best use case is for people who learned to use XP and do not want to learn or adopt the changes forced upon them by the MS 'up'grade cycle. My parents would fall into that category. Technology is hard enough for them but changing things for no good reason every few years just makes it that much harder.

But open source is no guarantee that this sort of model will work. Instead of the solidity of a company stating they will support an OS for X years without major changes, such as is the case with the LTS concept, projects like ReactOS may not be able to make such claims unless enough developers show interest in supporting it. Problem there is obtaining enough critical mass of developers. For that to happen, the concept needs a uniquely appealing case. In ReactOS the only unique appeal is the Windows architecture. So developers would be thinking "hmmm, I want to volunteer my hard work ... maybe an OS project would be interesting ... hmmm ... Windows, Linux (maybe RISC5?) architecture?". For me, that's what has held the ReactOS project back: whether developers feel the Windows architecture is more interesting to work on than others.

Who knows, as more developers may get sick and tired of worrying about potential Torvalds notso-benevolent dictator rants, maybe ReactOS will seem more attractive?

No flip flopping from me, none whatsoever.

ReactOS is NOT usable for daily use, that's it. No other statement can supercede or deny that until it reaches a live version 1.0 state. No-one vaguely intelligent would rely on it as their main o/s. However, it should be obvious, even in the state it is in, ie. seriously Alpha, it has some uses now:

1. As a test bed for RJtextEd as a potential future platform, it proves a point. It runs.

2. As a potential test bed for 32bit applications, 32 bit o/s support may be dropped by future Windows but ReactOS will retain that feature. You may be unaware of the massive amount of 32bit apps that need a home but they do exist I assure you. Personally, I have a one massive 32bit project that will have ReactOS as its future home as no other can be relied upon. All my code in fact is 32bit and 99% will never be ported to a 64 bit environment.

3. Testing your app on an XP-like o/s (See 2) , ReactOS is close enough and is based upon the NT5 APIs so testing it on ReactOS is almost as good as doing the same on XP. Note: ReactOS needs no licences so you can have as many instances as you require. No hardware required, installs in a couple of minutes, boots in 15 secs. Easy testing. You can dismiss XP but you can't dismiss ReactOS for the future, if your brain is functioning.

4. Testing any utility on ReactOS acts as a good sandbox so that you can test unknown and potentially dodgy EXEs in a VM with an easy-to-install Windows-like o/s without any worry about damaging something.

5. Yes, you really can develop on ReactOS, if only to prove it can be done. ReactOS has recently become self-hosting. I wouldn't recommend it but for a Linux dev. it really could be an option. Running ONE application alone with frequent snapshots enabled, it could be an option.

So, there you have it. For me though, this testing simply proves a point. It ruddy well works.

On your final points, very, very, very few applications actually need RAM greater than 4gb, that is why 32bit apps persist. 4gb is easily sufficient for the vast majority of apps.

If anyone cannot understand the need for ReactOS then there is a good thread here that suggests a few :
https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15868#p123529

It is a long way off but testing results like these show a lot of promise.

A useful tool for use alongside RJTed is the HTM2CHM tool from Yaroslav Kirillov that is used to compile HTML files into a single CHM file.

It works with the Microsoft supplied CHM builder tools (HTMLHelp Workshop). Both HTM2CHM and HTMLHelp Workshop are abandonware but still do the job admirably and cheaply!

You simply install both tools, run HTM2CHM, point it to the HTM and the output location and press compile. In my case, it produces compiled CHM file alongside the HTML files within the HELP folder.

You'll need to dog a bit to find these tools but they are what you need to built CHM files (just as those which Rickard supplies help documentation in, in CHM format)

One of my programs is currently distributed using setup2go, a very useful and comprehensive installer program that builds a .exe installer.

It is quite comprehensive installer build tool and the only limitations for me is that it is only builds a 32bit installer (not that we really need 64bit installers), it is unsupported (but it works) and that it needs registration to get rid of the free version pop up (still does the job though ).

You'll have to find a copy of setup2go on the web as it is now abandonware. Although you could contact me directly for a copy if you were desperate.