Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log

Paolo Amoroso's weblog. Main interests: Lisp, astronomy (Moon), space exploration (Apollo and early manned programs)

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McCLIM: upcoming 0.9.2 release and recent changes

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

The McCLIM developers have called for a feature freeze in view of the upcoming 0.9.2 "Laetare Sunday" release, which is scheduled for March 26, 2006.

Also as a result of this work, there was a lot of CVS commit activity within the past month. Here are the major changes:

• Christophe Rhodes added a translation function for making it possible to type more non-ASCII characters.
• Tim Moore moved menu-choose out of experimental status because it has proven its robustness. It may be worth promoting to the non-experimental status also the code in Experimental/pointer-doc-hack.lisp, which draws cool icons for the mouse gesture indicators in the pointer documentation area instead of textual representations. I have been successfully using it for the past few years, and I don't remember a single glitch.
• Andreas Fuchs improved the display of text at the end of lines.
• Andreas implemented standard-tree-output-record. The Franz CLIM manual explains the typical CLIM usage of this kind of output record: "This class is optimized to store output records that tend to be created one after another with ascending y coordinates, such as you would find in a scrolling window of text". Christophe reports performance issues.

  The implementation of standard-tree-output-record is based on the spatial-trees library, and now McCLIM's ASDF definition depends on it. This, however, is a small library that is ASDF-INSTALLable and should run virtually anywhere.

• Christophe added an experimental, don't-do-this-at-home implementation of device font text style support for the CLX, McCLIM Freetype and PostScript backends.
• Andreas added some editing commands to the Goatee text editing pane.
• Christophe added to Goatee commands for inserting Latin1 characters. For the CLX backend, this requires SBCL and telent-clx 0.7.2 or later.
• Tim worked on drag-and-drop of presentations.

There was also the usual share of fixes and improvements. Finally, the Beagle backend for MacOS X experienced some bit rot and it currently does not work.