Messages

1

PopUp Wisdom / Re: Parsing of Fortune Files

« on: July 22, 2008, 01:16 PM »

you have a couple of choices for forcing newlines in these files. you can manually put a \n where you want a newline

if i were willing to do this, i would have used popupwisdom's own format

or you can start lines which should start on a new line with a space or you can put 2 newlines (or more) to indicate a break.

meh. none of this is wysiwyg. wouldn't it be nice to have a wysiwyg file format, that would be pleasant to read and work with, as well as being used as a data format?

i do appreciate the work you've put into compliance with the cookie-jar format, and i understand why it needs to work the way it does, but perhaps you can appreciate the feature request i defined above.

maybe you can define a new format, unique to popupwisdom, that is similar to the cookie-jar format but is wysiwyg. you get newlines and spaces and tabs if you put them, where you put them, and nowhere else, (except whitespace between content and delimiter is ignored, like you currently do with cookie-jar format). in this new and original file format, you would probably want to define a new delimiter different from % or %%. you could call it popup wisdom wysiwyg file format. it shouldn't be too much work on top of work you've already done, but i feel like it would be a useful and worthy addition.

what do people think about this?

2

PopUp Wisdom / Re: Parsing of Fortune Files

« on: July 22, 2008, 02:45 AM »

I uninstalled the previous version and installed the latest version in a clean directory, so there would be no complications.

I created a fortune file with %% delimiters, and unfortunately it did not work. Every separate non-blank line was parsed as a separate quote, even lines containing the %% delimiter.

When I search-and-replaced the %% delimiters with the % delimiter, the program failed in a different way. The whitespace preceding and trailing the quote were ignored, as expected, but the newlines within the quotes were not respected except for the author line (starting with a dash), instead they were substituted with spaces. So:

[Select]

.....

%

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

-- Walt Whitman, from _Song of Myself_

%

.....

got displayed as:

[Select]

"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
 -- Walt Whitman, from _Song of Myself_

(with one space at the beginning of the author line, substituting for the newline that was supposed to be before it)

Clearly, some things are amiss.

Edit: I think I figured out the problem. For %-using fortune files, within the quote, you're substituting a space for single newlines, but you are displaying newlines if two or more consecutive newlines are involved (except the very first newline gets substituted with a space again). Why you're doing it this way, I don't know. It's probably a bug.

3

PopUp Wisdom / Problem Using Mouse Wheel

« on: July 16, 2008, 12:18 PM »

When "Shrink Font to Fit" is deselected, certain long quotes put a scroll bar on the side of the popup window. In such cases, however, clicking on the window and rolling the mouse wheel does not produce the desired result of scrolling. The text stays put. This is so even though the mouse is a standard PS2 wheel mouse, no fancy features or incompatible software running.

4

PopUp Wisdom / Re: Parsing of Fortune Files

« on: July 16, 2008, 11:59 AM »

Paying attention to this problem, I also notice a couple of other things.

* When a quote is displayed, a newline is appended to the bottom of it. Is this by design, or is it an oversight? When the quote is copied and pasted, the newline makes it different from the quote as copied and pasted from the quotes file. If the newline at the bottom is by design -- to put some space between the text and the buttons at the bottom -- perhaps it can be used for display purposes, but not appended to the copied text when the copy button is pressed.

* As quotes are parsed from a BSD-style fortunes file, it would be useful to ignore all whitespace from the % to the first non-whitespace character, and again, ignore all whitespace from the last non-whitespace character to the next %. That way,

%



"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

-- Bertrand Russell


%

gets parsed as

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

-- Bertrand Russell

which is probably a sensible way to do it. There's a reference to this in the source I gave in the previous message, but it's a suggestion rather than a rule. What do people think?

5

PopUp Wisdom / Re: Parsing of Fortune Files

« on: July 16, 2008, 08:24 AM »

See here for some more detail, under "Cookie-Jar Format".

Apparently %% is a valid delimiter too, so maybe you could support that as well?

6

PopUp Wisdom / Re: Parsing of Fortune Files

« on: July 16, 2008, 07:56 AM »

Like I said, I'm not sure what the specification is. I wouldn't want to cause you to fall out of spec merely to convenience me. But if it is within spec, that would be great.

7

PopUp Wisdom / Feature Request: Scrolling Window

« on: July 16, 2008, 07:25 AM »

It would be neat if PopUp Wisdom had an option whereby the quote window scrolled up from the bottom of the screen, and disappeared back down when clicked, similar to the behavior of MSN Live Messenger alert windows.

Edit: If this feature were to be implemented, it would also be useful to have an auto-close-after-time-period option, again similar to MSN Live Messenger. I haven't timed it precisely, but MSN Live Messenger alert windows auto-close after around 5 seconds. The time period should of course be modifiable.

8

PopUp Wisdom / Parsing of Fortune Files

« on: July 16, 2008, 07:18 AM »

I am having some trouble with the parsing of fortune files.

First off, I note that I like to have a blank line separating the quote from the speaker, as follows:

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

-- Bertrand Russell

%

.....

However, Popup Wisdom displays such formatting as follows:

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
-- Bertrand Russell

So I tried putting a space on the blank line separating the quote from the speaker.

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
(there's one space here)
-- Bertrand Russell

%

.....

But Popup Wisdom displays such a quote as follows:

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."
 -- Bertrand Russell

In other words, it ignores the line with the single space on it, and concatenates the space with the content of the line following it, displaying the result on one line.

Now, I know that I can always try and convert my quotes file to Popup Wisdom's own format to get the precise formatting that I want, but that's a lot of work, especially for multi-line, oddly formatted quotes. I haven't figured out a way to automate the conversion. I'd much rather be able to use fortune format.

I'm also not sure if the above is buggy or expected behavior, not being intimately familiar with the fortune format specification. Nor am I sure if there is a way to get the behavior that I want using the fortune format.

I am open to ideas and suggestions. Thanks.

9

PopUp Wisdom / Big Skin Set Has Unnecessary Files

« on: July 15, 2008, 05:36 PM »

bash.org.txt is included in the Big Skin Set. Not only is it misplaced under the Skins directory and inappropriately included in this archive, it blows up the size of the archive by about a megabyte. Please remove it.

Also, it makes little sense to include the iTunes, Longhorn and Mac OS skins as part of the Big Skin Set, since these three skins are already installed as default with the program.