July is always a slow month here at Ambrosia. With all of the convention, holiday and
Summer fun going on, things tend to stretch out somewhat. But this doesn't mean that we
aren't still stirring the pot.
Matt has been working on a new version of Eclipse that will have several new and often requested features. This new version, 3.1.0, will be entering beta soon and should be released before the Summer's end. Here's a breakdown:
• Eclipse will be Energy Saver aware, which means that users will have the ability to control the
settings of the Energy Saver control panel from within Eclipse. The control panel will still need
to be installed, mainly because we would rather work with the control panel than try to replace
it. Rewriting the functionality of this control panel would only open more opportunities for
problems to occur, and would require Eclipse to have an INIT associated with it.
• We have fixed a bug where system floaters (Control Strip, OneClick, and our reminder window)
as well as the password dialog would force Eclipse to cycle its images one or more times. Users
of these programs will notice that Eclipse would sometimes display one image for a very short
time and then move on to the next before behaving normally. This has been rectified.
• Many people have asked for Eclipse to dim at startup. What we have done is add a check box
that will allow for you to set a password in Eclipse and have Eclipse ask for this password
when the mouse or keyboard is used. This should help a little more against those "prying eyes"
around you.
• Eclipse has been ported to CodeWarrior Pro. This is a new development environment from
Metrowerks, and the programmers around here get all giddy when they talk about it. I'm afraid
to ask for more information.
• We have had some problems with several different types of images. Currently, we are working
with some .gif files that are causing Eclipse to crash. We have also had reports about .jpg images
being too small to be displayed. Currently, a work around for these problems is to convert the
image to another format (PICT is an option). However, we hope to have Eclipse better handle
these situations.
• And finally, in the mysterious problem area, we have had problems with other programs that
place dialog boxes on the screen. For example, if you are downloading something from Netscape,
when the file is complete, you normally see a dialog box stating that the file is being decompressed
or converted. We have had reports of crashes occurring when Eclipse is in a dimmed state and
these dialog boxes appear on the screen. Currently, the work around is to use the "Just dim the
screen" option with no password. However, we are looking into another solution during this
upgrade.
If you have been following the happenings here at Ambrosia, you know that there is much waiting in the wings. So far, we have 3 games and 2 utilities being worked on. Keep checking these pages for complete reports of the status of each project. Until next time...
