THIS IS THE NEW QED VERSION 1.0 -------------------------------- If you have used QED 0.21, or one of the earlier versions of QED, then welcome to the newest version of QED. If you are a registered owner of QED, don't panic! I will be sending out notification on how to upgrade for a nominal charge. You may have already noticed that the cost of registering QED has gone up to $30. This is about the only way I have of saying thanks to those who registered earlier. Before sending out letters on how to upgrade QED I want to wait about a month to make sure that all of the serious bugs are worked out. Like some of the earlier versions of QED, this is a crippled version of the executable, and I am still only distributing full documentation to registered owners. COMMENTS ON THE COMMAND MODE ---------------------------- The additional documentation has become somewhat less necessary as there is now a macro record feature. I had considered disabling this feature, but it occurs to me that many of you will want to verify that this is really a new feature, and that it works. It also turns out that in actual use most of you will still need the additional documentation on the command mode, and macros to really make use of this feature. There are well over 100 commands available, many of which you will need to write quality macros. LOTS OF NEW FEATURES -------------------- You may want to look at intro.txt for a highlight of new features. There are plenty of new features, as well as most of the original features. There have been some changes to the menus, and keyboard short-cuts. The menu items of course had to change somewhat to reflect the new features. I also ran out of RIGHT AMIGA key short-cuts, so I rearranged a few, and added some CTRL-key commands. It turns out the CTRL keyboard short cuts I selected make sense when you notice that they are grouped together on the keyboard, and don't conflict with CTRL key combinations which are used to generate binary characters 0-31. QED HAS GROWN FEATURES, AND SIZE -------------------------------- In the past I had maintained a fairly rigid stance regarding adding new features in a spurious manner. I wanted to keep QED relatively small, and fast. This is still the case, however it became apparent about a year ago that QED would have to completely rewritten if I was going to implement even half the features you requested, and do so in an efficient manner. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the rewrite was when I decided to write QED to be reentrant. This allows you to make QED resident so you can re-run the program multiple times from the CLI without using as much memory as you would have to do if QED was reloaded every time. Unfortunately there is a certain amount of additional overhead required when writing reentrant programs, so the size of QED has grown somewhat. Still, there are probably twice the features of the original QED, so the extra size is still fairly well balanced. There are many new commands, and features provided for those interfacing QED with ARexx. There are also many new tools available from the pull-down menus such as columner support; right & left margin support; new paragraph formatting features; the macro recorder; find matching braces, brackets, parenthesis; swap case of character/block; etc. You will probably have to read through the documentation, or you may miss some features. Many of the commands available from the pull-down menus can be limited to a marked block of text, and in some cases, to a marked column. 2.0 COMPATABILITY ----------------- QED is compatable with version 2.0 of the operating system, and has been tested running under a 68000, 68010, 68020, and 68030 CPU. It seems to run just fine on the Amiga 3000 too. There is very little in the code which is 2.0 specific though. WHAT IS LIKELY TO BE COMING IN THE FUTURE ----------------------------------------- QED is still not a real flashy program. The whistles, and bells still cost in terms of program size, and memory utilization. I doubt QED will ever be real flashy. I do want to add a few more more features such as better control of the file requester from the keyboard, and there are a lot of little things I'd like to touch up, but you have waited a year for this release, and I certainly feel it is ready for use. I suspect 2 more updates to QED are called for including: 1.) Bug/enhancement fixes for QED 1.0. 2.) A 2.0 specific version - this would likely decrease the code size of QED as I could remove the file requester, and take advantage of some of OS 2.0's new features like gadtools.library to build the menu strips. Plus obviously I could use new color arrangements for those running 2.0. Despite the lack of flashy features, I think many of you will find QED to be useful. Its still very fast, and relatively small. QED DOCUMENTATION ----------------- A friend of mine is interested in typesetting the documentation; let me know what you think about that. If we go ahead with this I would have to pay him something for his time (only right). I would still want to wait a bit to make sure the documentation is locked-down, and not subject to a lot of changes. If this works out, we will probably work this such that registered owners can order the printed documentation from him directly.