ANNOUNCE: Toucan 1.2.1 - A feathered friend for the Palm
Mac Cody
Toucan 1.2.1 is a bug fix release for Toucan 1.2. Bugs were
found in both the main Toucan script (toucan.tcl) and in
toucanLib1.2, so both elements will need to be reinstalled.
Details of the bugs can be found in the Toucan documentation.
Toucan is an integrated development environment (IDE) for
developing applications for the Palm OS using Ashok Nadkarni's
Palm Tcl interpreter. The main webpage for Toucan is at
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/
Toucan is based on Tcl/Tk (of course!) and provides an
environment for developing Palm Tcl applications using Tk
widgets to give an approximate appearance to the Palm Forms
interface. It is not a 100% perfect look-and-feel (at least
with the initial version), but it is sufficient for the user
to design the Forms interface and create the Tcl scripts to
glue them all together.
The intent is that once the Palm Tcl application is developed,
the IDE will convert the relevant Forms interface elements
into a resource script file and place the Tcl glue scripts
into a separate script file. Once this is done, the resource
script file can be passed through Pilrc (version 2.8),
sourcing in the Tcl glue script file at that time. Finally,
par (version 00.05.01) will combine the binaries generated by
Pilrc with the PalmTcl library to form a Palm resource file
ready to download into a Palm PDA or Pose.
Toucan runs on both GNU/Linux/X Windows and Microsoft Windows
platforms, though current development is on Slackware Linux
8.0 with TclTk 8.3.4. Toucan is licensed under the same
license as Tcl. Details can be found in the file LICENSE in
the distribution.
Here is a list of what Toucan 1.2.1 provides:
o Graphical creation of Palm FORM and MENU resources.
o Support for all FORM objects supported by PalmTcl 0.3.
o Drag-n-drop generation of FORM objects.
o Access to default FORM object properties via right-click on
drag-n-drop source labels.
o Repositioning of forms and form objects via mouse drag with
visual feedback of current coordinates.
o Mouse double-click on individual MENU, FORM, and FORM
objects displays a pop-up operations menu for access to
element properties, element deletion, and copying of the
assigned resource ID to the cut buffer for pasting to your
favorite text editor (useful for speeding up PalmTcl script
development).
o Dynamic modification of MENU, FORM, and FORM object
properties via dialog windows.
o Creation and editing of Palm launcher large icon and small
icon resource bitmaps. Jan Nitjmans' Img extension is
needed to support BMP file read and write.
o Creation of BITMAP[GRAY|GRAY16|COLOR|COLOR16|COLOR16K]
elements and their associations to BMP files. Support for
FORMBITMAP objects has been added to allow placement of
bitmaps onto the Palm display.
o Support for the STRING resources. STRING resources can be
treated as either arbitrary strings or Palm Tcl scripts
(new for Toucan 1.2).
o For some Form objects a default to AUTO on width or height
is set when the corresponding slider is set to 0.
o Entries on Form element and Form object dialogs which
reference other resources (namely IDs) are pick lists of
ID values that are currently available. For example, the
Menu ID selection on the Form properties dialog is disabled
(or only one 'Null' entry) unless there are Menu IDs to
select from. Note that this causes some breakage of Toucan
1.0 project (.tpj) files.
o A built-in, multiple document interface (MDI) editor is
available to support the editing of STRING resources. When
editing Palm Tcl scripts, the editors provide syntax
highlighting. Standard editing functions are available,
through both hot keys and an Edit menu. Editor
characteristics, such as font type, size, and color, can be
changed by the user. The editor content can be stored in an
external file (mainitaining compatibility with earlier
version of Toucan) or embedded within the Toucan project
file and the resource script file processed by PilRC. Each
editor window has document change detection to prevent loss
of unsaved data. The MDI editor is based on the ctext
megawidget (version 2.5.1) developed by George Peter Staplin
enhanced to provide electric brace, parenthesis, and quotes
matching and text change detection (new for Toucan 1.2).
o Setting of command line parameters for PilRC and par
utilities. Both utilities are required for use with Toucan.
o Generation of PilRC script file (.rcp) and files generated
by PilrRC and par commands, with execution feedback in a
dialog window.
o Storage and retrieval of all resource properties, bitmap
data, and utility parameters in a single Toucan project file
(.tpj).
o The HTML-based documentation has been replaced with
documentation in PDF format.
o Graphic icons are available for use with desktop launchers.
o New toucanLib1.2 library file to hold supporting libraries.
A distribution of Toucan 1.2.1 is available for GNU/Linux as a
GZIP-compressed tarfile:
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/downloads/toucan-1.2.1.tgz
A distribution of Toucan 1.2.1 is available for MS Windows as a
WINZIP compressed file:
http://home.attbi.com/~maccody/downloads/toucan-1.2.1.zip
Questions, comments, bug reports, and suggestions can be sent
to Mac Cody at mac...@attbi.com.
Hope you enjoy Toucan!
Mac Cody
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