To get a little bit away from the converting business, which is a bit boring to be honest, I started with some basic formatting options in the GUI. Font and alignment are rather easy, just some buttons which set the property of the all selected cells. A little bit more complicated are the border settings, especially because there you need a special input element.
I tried with buttons but it took very much space and the names on them are not really useful. Like in usual spreadsheet applications it is better to just show the result with a little graphic. It’s the first time I used the TMUIBitmap object, very handy and easy to use.
Besides that I created a combobox like element, when you click onto the button a new borderless window open with the different border buttons inside and if you select one, or click somewhere else the window automatically close again. Not very difficult with the MUIClass-system.
First, I want say thanks to all people send me texts or code snippets how to read TurboCalc TCD files some where very helpful. Sadly in none of them the functions are nicely explained so in the end it came to just straight forward try out with the Manual and write for every function a line in the file to check the result in Leu. But finally the most functions which are available in Leu can be converted from TurboCalc. I’m not sure if it makes sense to make a TurboCalc writer, because it’s a dead program, nice but dead. Writing is hard because you need to know everything about the file, and some of the comments in the text files suggest that TurboCalc is very picky when the tags are not in the correct order or somehow divert from the ideal format.
Leu and TurboCalc, converted functions
On a special wish I also implemented a possibility to inline edit the cells, without changing to the edit box. Until now you can only insert a new contents, and not use the mouse to set the cursor. When you can grab the mouse you can also set the cursor in the edit field.
What I’m not really getting, is why the people are excited about that program, it’s not like there is no spreadsheet program, there is TurboCalc, ok it’s old but fairly nice working and there is Ignition, I never used that but from screen shots it looks rather decent. At least much more advanced than this piece of crap 😛
Maybe the people are just happy, that someone codes something. Speaking of which here is the latest Version: 0.05 with edit feature, finally an Icon and TCD function loading.
Notice it can also export the table as HTML or as Wikitable. (just use the endings “.html” or “.wikitable_pipes” .wikitable_wikimedia”). Ok that will be more useful, when I introduced stuff to change colors, borders and fonts.
I played a lot with TurboCalc and it’s files, and checked the fileformat. I still have some very old files from around 1995-1997. An finally a little bit stuff is working.
The second file is my timetable of 2nd semester in university, I printed it out to hang at the door. (yeah, I had color printer back in the days, a termo-transfer printer) As you can see the properties and colors comes nicely to Leu even the Formula, I need to try more functions to see how to convert them to the Leu functions. Of course it’s also possible to save that file again as Libre Office file and load it there. That’s how it looks like in LibreOffice
The Leu application had a big bug under MorphOS, it was impossible to use the scrollbars as long there was part of the grid underneath. The click always went directly to the grid, so the scrollbar never got it. This did not happen under AROS Zune or Amiga MUI 3.8, so it must be something special of the MorphOS MUI implementation.
After a pointer of jacadcaps at morph.zone the solution was rather easy. When you register in MUIM_Setup which events you want to be notified of there is a new flag MUI_EHF_GUIMODE for TMUI_EventHandlerNode.ehn_flags, introduced in MUI 4 which tells MUI to NOT notifiy you about events happen in a part of your element which is hidden. For example if your element is on a Tab control but your page is not visible at the moment, or like in our case, the element is partly hidden by the scrollbox. This behavior was the default behavior for old MUI 3.x on Amiga as far I can see. Beside, I see uses for such feature, it should be extremely seldom, that you want to be notified about clicks on your non visible part. For me it is very odd to make this seldom needed to old versions incompatible behavior as the new default, and not, as I would suggest create a Flag which turns on the new way for event handling. Btw. even in this case I would expect some kind of marker in the event that this was triggered on a hidden part. You have nearly no way to know that somewhere in the tree above you some element could cause that.
But in the end, the most important part is I know it now and it also explains some strange behavior I had in the LCL (clicks on sleeping windows, clicks on not visible tabs) which should all be fixed by that.
I also did a new compilation of Leu, this version now already has a open and save requester, it should be able to open xls, xlsx, ods and maybe csv files (if you change the pattern I preconfigured). The output format you define by the extension, I tried xls, xlsx, ods, csv and html and all seems to work as expected.
The summary of the long weekend, very funny tool already, Excel (xls, xlsx) and Open/LibreOffice (ods) loading works nicely, it already draws right, left and center aligned, with background and colors, also the calculation works as it should be and I implemented the multiple Worksheets selector. It’s much faster now, because it only redraws the cells which were changed (especially when dragging the cell border or selecting cells)
So I made a little “Release”, it’s just everything hammered together, still VERY buggy! for sure. just call “Leu <your file>” if you call without a file you get an empty playground where you can type your own stuff into, but formats and so on are not available.
Long time before some people started to port OpenOffice/LibreOffice to Amiga OS4 (sadly only OS4). I saw some screenshots but that is also already a long time ago, seems that is a bit of a too big fish to fry.
Maybe a smarter way would be to just implement something like LibreOffice which can read files from LibreOffice. I gave it a go, and it was not that complicated as I thought it would be, at least if you are using the right language (FreePascal) and the right GUI set (MUIClass). The biggest problem is no usable table component in MUI (at least I know of, for all systems available). I had to implement one from scratch.
And this being FreePascal, of course it works on all Amiga Systems (not only OS4). I implemented only some styles/options (no font size and font name) but color and font styles are there, also left,center and right alignment. It even calculates cells. Funny tool, one could make a real LibreOffice Calc Viewer out of this.
Loaded LibreOffice File on AROS (lower window is the original LibreOffice View)LibreOffice loaded in Amiga OS3LibreOffice File loaded in MorphOSLibreOffice loaded in AmigaOS4
Currently FreePascal on Amiga systems cannot use SSL currently, at MUIMapparium I went around it by proxy it on my own server. The reason for this is that usually at AROS the coder use a static linked OpenSSL, which we cannot use directly in FreePascal. But there is also a normal Amiga-style Library for it called AmiSSL. I started to write a import unit for FreePascal and it works.
Download a page via HTTPS using AmiSSL with FreePascal
There is one tiny hick up, the Library is not available for AROS and also no other possibility on AROS to use SSL for other languages than C. And it seems the devs are not willing to change that, because …. reasons… or just don’t like it… or don’t like the maintainer of AmiSSL, who knows, maybe just “fuck you, who cares about other languages”, as usual.
I tried to run MUIMapparium on the Draco, but sadly it does not work, mostly it just freezes on start, sometimes it starts but the PNG images are distorted. Seems the PNG Reader has some problems on the Draco, it’s a little bit strange. I while before I created a MUIMapparium using Datatypes instead of the FreePascal PNG reader and do not use CyberGraphics functions anymore, but plain graphics library function. Therefore it also works on a standard AGA Amiga.
And this Version also works on the Draco, it’s really only the PNG image reader which has some problems, maybe I should debug this and really think about to move the Datatype MUIMapparium to the standard option, the only problem with that, you need a good PNG Datatype installed to have it working. WarpPNG for best results, but most do not have that I guess
Long time before I bought a electric plug with WLAN adapter, I wanted to use to turn on the light in the garden (also for the water pump and such stuff). But this WLAN switches are really bad, always want connection to internet only usable via a very shaky app always want so many access rights who knows for what, always must log in. I switched after a while to radio controlled switches at 433 MHz and bought a Raspi 433 MHz sender.
But now I found out that you can change this WLAN switch I bought with a own local server written in nodejs. Of all languages it had to be Javascript with nodejs. It basically never works, on my Desktop computer I got it to work but on the Raspi where it should stay (because must always run) I do not get it to work nodejs, npm is just ****. It always works a while but when the switch contact it, it shows a javascript error. No Idea what that means
Of course I wrote a own server program in FreePascal running on the raspi. It’s not very complicated in principle the WLAN switch just send a part its of the MAC address and a Token you use to switch on and off. was not very difficult, with the http server example from FreePascal I also added a little Webserver to it, that I can control it via browser or standalone apps. The NodeJS server needed > 10% of the Raspi, even there is no WLAN switch connected to it (because it stops when I start it 😉 ) FreePascal, with connected switch and a browser pulling the status <1% CPU time. Without WLAN Switch it’s not noticeable at all.
And because we are on a blog for FPC for Amiga-System I wrote a little MUI App to control the Outside light from my Amiga as well.
I’m really thinking to buy more of them. really nice and easy. Let’s see the next weeks how reliable it is. 😉 The advantage to the 433 MHz radio controlled switches is that the WLAN switches know their own status, and tell the server on the handshake.
