from MACL 1.2.2 to MACL 1.3.1

[GAPPA%iravcl.ira.uka.de@RELAY.CS.NET]

Dear Andrew & ACL Developers,


I sent you a bug report for MACL 1.2.2 in November last year via
APPLE GERMANY. In your answer  because of it I guess you 
only got the first out of 9 pages, but never mind  you advised 
me to "convert" to MACL 1.3.1, as a lot of bugs are fixed there. 
So we did it and we must say that it was really hard work to get
 our programm run on 1.3.1. It took us nearly two months for
converting the user-interface functions. We did it in fact
because we saw no other chance to get support for ongoing 
problems (and because we do not want to tell our clients to buy
an old version). 
It would have been a great help if we had release notes telling 
the most important changes compared to the last version and what 
to do to get the old code run. For example that a default-button 
is no longer set up automatically as the first button added, 
window-draw-contents is not called any more but view-draw-contents,
window-activate-event-handler has to be changed to view-activate-
event-handler, in which usual-.. must now be called, dialog-item-
click-event-handler behaves in another way than before, as it is 
no more called for composed dialog-items but only for the 
individual ones, dialog-item-click-event-handler for fred-windows 
is now called when you click into the scroll bars etc. (thats 
just what I kept in mind). And we first had to reimplement the 
*array-dialog-item*, before we knew of the technical notes (#231).
Our main problem arized out of using the *graphics-window* of the
MACL 1.2.2 examples. We did not manage to reimplement one with the
same functionality and so we had to change much of our code. 
So please think it over to provide your ACL users with "release 
notes".


The main reason of our difficulties in changing to MACL 1.3.1. 
was that we used the MACL examples and still do. When you develop 
a comfortable and complex user-interface (what we do for an expert 
system shell written in COMMON LISP), you are happy with all 
"high level" graphic routines you can get. So it would be a wish 
of us if some example features (for example *pop-up-menu* and 
*graphics-window*/*scroller*) are embedded into the standard MACL 
(or appended like quickdraw), so that we and other users can be sure 
they keep running in update versions with the same functionality. 


We would like to ask one question concerning the *scroller*-example
because our actual design decisions for the user-interface depend
on the availability of this feature. The scroller seems to work for
dialog items, such as buttons and sequence-dialog-items, but 
unfortunately it doesnt work for editable-text-dialog-items, as 
you can see when you evaluate the following code:

   (load "ccl;examples:scrollers.Lisp")
   (setq foo-dialog (oneof *dialog*))
   (setq foo-scroller (oneof ccl::*scroller*
                             :view-container foo-dialog
                             :view-size #@(125 125)))
   (ask foo-scroller (add-dialog-items
                      (oneof *sequence-dialog-item*
                             :dialog-item-position #@(4 60)
                             :table-sequence `(sequence)
                             :selection-type :disjoint
                             :visible-dimensions #@(1 1))
                      (oneof *editable-text-dialog-item*
                             :dialog-item-position #@(4 90)
                             :dialog-item-size #@(100 18))))

When you scroll the view down and type in text, the characters 
appear in a different place. Can you give us a hint, how we can get 
it to  work? Besides, we think that the new feature to scroll 
subviews of a window is a very useful one.


We would appreciate any comments from you.
      Ute.


Ute Gappa (Mrs.)
Institute of Logic, Karlsruhe University, P.O. Box 6980,
7500 Karlsruhe, West Germany