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Ho ho ho
Date: 21/12/2016
Tags: scribe html-editor 		The merry little elves at Memecode have been working away at all hours of the night to bring you a working Rich Text (HTML) editor in Scribe to put in your Christmas stockings.

With the release of Scribe v2.1.33 there is enough functionality to write email with styles. The reply/forwarding side of things isn't as good as the composition of new email. For a variety of reasons. And the control is still definitely in "Alpha" (i.e. incomplete functionality, still contains bugs, possibly show stopping ones).

It would be a excellent idea to reset the reply/forward formats to their default values, because I've updated the default template for HTML reply/forward. If you have a custom template for plain text, save that before you reset the templates in File -> Options -> General -> Reply / Fwd templates -> Reset.

Also go into your signature settings and configure a HTML sig for each account with an identity.

I'll set some expectations first... with the pros:
  • You can edit and delete styles to the text: font, font size, bold/italic/underline, foreground and background colours.
  • The tool bar tracks the current style.
  • You can add and remove links.
  • Most common text editor operations work: deleting / adding text. Selecting regions. Copy / paste.
  • Text reflows to the space available.
And some cons:
  • No undo / redo.
  • Cut / Copy / Paste is plain text only.
  • Replies/forwards are by default converted to plain text, losing any source styling. This is on purpose until I rewrite the reply/forward template merge code to cope.
  • The cursor can get "stuck" sometimes. Reposition with the mouse or use a different key combination.
  • Screen updates might be flaky in some situations.
  • No support for multiple levels of quoting.
  • No support for images (yet, it's on the todo list).
  • No indent/outdent support yet.
  • No lists, bulleted or numbered.
  • Swapping between the text and HTML tabs after you create the email or reply doesn't work. You are locked into whatever control you start with. This will change in later releases.

To switch between plain text and HTML quickly use Edit -> Use HTML Editor.

Do not use the HTML control for production emails. If it matters, use the plain text compose control. Otherwise I'd like to hear how it goes.
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Rich Text / HTML support in Scribe
Date: 5/12/2016
Tags: scribe 		There has been a lot of people asking about the Rich Text / HTML editing support in Scribe and so while not fixing crash bugs I'm actively developing a new control to support styled text editing.

So that those that are interested can track the progress I'm publishing my internal spreadsheet of bugs and features:



Broadly speaking my hope is to have a very basic control working by the end of the year. Good enough that you can write and reply to email with, even if there isn't a lot of support for styling. Maybe some basic stuff like bold, colours and font size.
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Refactoring for performance
Date: 26/8/2016
Tags: mc2 		A few weeks into actually using the MC2 I realized that the response time of the expression pedal was quite poor, running in the 100-200ms range. After doing some tests I worked out that it was because of the way messages were passed from the hardware thread that received the events, like analog to digital reads for the expression pedal, to the user interface thread, where they would be processed and sent back out the hardware thread to the Axefx. The problem with this was the the Raspberry PI is quite slow (or at least the version I'm using) and the user interface update speed was lagging. If the user interface is being updated, it's not processing messages. Hence the delay. But fixing it wasn't straight forward, because all the user interface code and Axefx code were all jumbled up like this:


So I took all the code that relates to the Axefx, and all the code that updates the user interface and separated them out into their own source code files. I called the Axefx specific code the "logic". Now I had 3 separate bits of code:
  • The user interface code. Responsible for updating the screen. Changing settings, like IA button actions etc.
  • The Axefx logic code. Which responds to MIDI inputs, converts hardware events to outgoing MIDI etc.
  • The hardware interface code. This is responsible for talking to all the hardware, both inputs and outputs.
Now I originally had 2 threads. And I decided that unless I really had to I would stay with those 2 threads, but the logic had to move from the UI thread, into the hardware thread. This meant that responding to MIDI and hardware events was decoupled from the user interface updating. Like this:


So hardware events, like the expression pedal value changing, would by processed immediately in the same thread and an outgoing MIDI message could be sent almost immediately, even if the UI was busy doing something. The latency was hugely improved. It's got to the point that it no longer has an impact musically. It seems to respond instantly.

In doing this I realized that I could hide all the details of each block of code behind a message passing interface. Which is excellent for thread safety. There was a little shared data that I wrapped in a mutex. But all in all the design feels nice and clean.

In fact I loved the design so much I'm rewriting i.Ftp to use the same architecture. Oh yeah, and because it was kinda badly written and wouldn't port to modern UI systems that don't have thread safe UI APIs.
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Negative ADS1115 readings
Date: 1/8/2016
Tags: mc2 		I've been using an ADS1115 to convert the analog voltage from the expression pedal input, which is just a potentiometer really, to a 16 bit value. On the weekend I had a gig and both at the rehearsal and the set the expression pedal would flip to 127 (the maximum) when in the minimum position. It was also behaving erratically, the full range of output values was compressed into a very short throw of physical movement. I didn't technically need it for the gig so I just unplugged it.

So today I thought I'd get to the bottom of it. After switching on the logging and reproducing the issue it was apparent that a lot of "plugged" / "unplugged" events were happening. This was due to the values coming from the ADS1115 were bouncing between very low values (say 0 - 100) to very high values (65530 - 65535). I started by putting the multi-meter in voltage mode over the input pin of the ADS1115 and ground and found that the lowest voltage was about 0.1V which is, well, correct for the minimum position. So that led me to believe it was solely a software issue. Looking at the code that does the read, I found it was assuming the 16bit value was a unsigned integer. But that fact that the value was jumping to 65500 made me wonder if maybe the ADS1115 was giving me a signed value instead. So I changed the code to assume signed behaviour and now the values all seemed to follow each other as the pedal moves back and forth. Then checking with the data sheet: 
The ADS1113/4/5 provide 16 bits of data in binary twos complement format
Ugh, ok so I should read that more carefully. Still it going slightly negative like that even with a positive voltage is a bit weird to me. Oh well, I'm just going with max(0, AdcReadValue) for the moment and it seems to be working just fine now.
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Scribe: Installer script hooks
Date: 14/7/2016
Tags: scribe scripting 		So you know those red bars that appear in Scribe when it wants to install something? I've just added the spell check dictionaries to that so you have to confirm there install. This allows you to make sure you have a working internet connection before download a dictionary. But I thought it would be cool to add some scripting hooks for the install bar and the actual install itself. So take an example script like this: 
function BeforeInstall(App, Msg, Actions)
{
    Actions.Add("Scare");
    Msg = Msg + " (BeforeInstall was here)";
    return true;
}

function Install(App, Action)
{
    if (Action == "Scare")
    {
        MsgBox(App, "Boo!");
        return false;
    }
    
    return true;
}

function Main(App)
{
    if (!AddCallback("OnBeforeInstallBar", "BeforeInstall"))
        MsgBox(App, "Couldn't add BeforeInstall");
    if (!AddCallback("OnInstallComponent", "Install"))
        MsgBox(App, "Couldn't add Install");

    return 1;
}
What it does is install 2 callbacks, one for the missing capability bar, and one for the install itself. It messes with the message and buttons available to the install bar. Then adds a new "action" that is caught later in the "Install" function to put up a dialog box. Might be useful for managed installs of Scribe.
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The week of Mac bugs
Date: 7/7/2016
Tags: mac carbon 		This week has been mostly about making the Mac build of Scribe more polished. It's always lagged behind the Windows build. And now it's catching up fast:

1) HIViewSetFrame inside kEventControlDraw is bad

For many years I couldn't work out why some calls to HIViewSetFrame wouldn't work inside some application I was writing. It turns out that called that inside the kEventControlDraw callback is actually bad. It leaves lots of the controls half painted of showing the previous contents of the screen. And no amount of calling HIViewSetNeedsDisplay is going fix it. The compositor thinks the old position of the control is up to date and won't repaint it.

Ultimately if you find you need to move a control during the re-paint you have to send a message to yourself and do it after that particular repaint has finished.

2) Apple Event handling

After 4 years I finally found the reason why Lgi apps wouldn't respond to AppleEvents that were passed to them on startup. I answered my own stack overflow question today.

3) Editing the Application Menu

The Scribe Application menu, that sits between the Apple menu and File menu has never had the normal "About" and "Preferences" items. And while there is a lot of discussion on how to do that for Cocoa apps, there is little to no information for Carbon apps. And yes, Scribe is still a Carbon app, although it does use a bunch of modern APIs for text and so on. I tried mixing some Cocoa calls to get at the right menu, but that didn't work. Then after hours of searching the internet I finally stumbled on to a mailing list post that describes how to do it. So it seems it's possible, just really obscure.
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