PIC V2.00e Notes and Revision History July 5, 1995 Smaller PIC Footprint --------------------- Rick Hullinger e-mailed me to ask whether it would be possible to reduce the total height of the PIC button bar to just the height of the buttons. He also asked to be able to put this single button row at the very top of the display. Well, why not? It seemed like a great idea to me so this version implements his suggestion. The general idea is that PIC shrinks to one row high when it is not active by hiding its caption bar. When you move the cursor over it, PIC wakes up and goes back to two rows high. This allows it to take up even less space on the display except when actually being used. The blue-on-gray version tag that replaces the unused buttons is not present in the REGISTERED version, so PIC often uses EVEN LESS screen space than what you will see in the evaluation copy. Balloon Label Visibility ------------------------ The button labels that identify the command lines for buttons as you pass the mouse cursor over the PIC buttons now display above the buttons if PIC is located at the bottom of the screen. Bugs ---- Due to a faulty mouse driver initalization in PIC, some users experienced complete loss of mouse capability in Windows after running PIC. This problem, which did not show up on our original test systems, has been fixed. This a particulary frustrating kind of bug for an inexperienced user to encounter. My sincere appologies to anyone who had to contend with this problem. Fixed the "Discard all changes?" message in "Modify Buttons..." to also be displayed when positions of buttons or button sets are exchanged. Errata ------ Corrected a button label error in the the on-line help: "Files..." was erroneously called "Dir...". June 20, 1995 This version of PIC contains a significant revision to the "Always On Top" command avaliable on the PIC system menu so that it can set other windows and icons in addition to PIC to also be "Always On Top". There is a very popular utility that has found its way to many BBS's that provides nothing but this single function! The only restriction is that you need to be using a mouse or compatible pointing device to be able to use this extension to "Always On Top". However, it seems to be much more natural and intuitive to point and click a window that you want to place on top (this is the way PIC does it) rather than to use a control character (which might be preempted for other uses by some other Windows program) to accomplish the same effect. Bugs ---- Found and fixed cosmetic errors on the Order screen including, multiple on-screen copies of the order form, an overhang in the order form text and fixed the site license calc function to prevent it from requesting acceptance of a price break multiple times. Fixed another bug causing program manager to re-spawn its startup programs when PIC was uninstalled as shell. This is a continuation of the fix of Bug 2 below but in a different mode. June 15, 1995 Bug 1 ----- Alas, no sooner was PIC placed on the board than a user immediately encountered a problem when attempting to use PIC with a shell other than Program Manager. Although we had not intended to have PIC used with other shells, to assume that PIC would not be used with other shells is definitely a bug and caused problems. This version should correct the problem by providing the following: 1. If WIN.INI or SYSTEM.INI are changed by PIC, a backup will always be saved first (WIN.BAK or SYSTEM.BAK). 2. PIC will always ask permission before adding any changes to either WIN.INI or SYSTEM.INI. 3. Neither of these INI files will be changed by PIC unless it absolutely needs to be changed. A gratuitious write of PROGMAN.EXE to SYSTEM.INI "shell=" is what actually caused the bug mentioned above because it removed the original shell path. 4. The only time that PIC will ever change the "shell=" entry in SYSTEM.INI is if a user installs PIC as the new shell. In this case, the old shell path will be saved and can be recovered by using any of the other "PIC Setup" commands described in the PIC online help. 5. Both README.TXT and the PIC online help describe the exact changes made to WIN.INI (See "PIC Setup" in the online help) and SYSTEM.INI (See "Shell Operation" in the online help). We still don't know how well PIC will work with other shells, but at the very least, it should do no harm to try. If the results are bad, the PIC command (typed in the "Run..." box from the PIC system menu): pic /uninstall will remove any changes to INI files. If results are really bad, running the REMOVE.EXE utility provided with PIC will take it off your system! Thanks, Phil, for the suggestions implemented above and accept my sincere apologies for the problem we caused you! Bug2 ---- Also fixed a related bug causing program manager to re-spawn its startup programs when PIC was uninstalled as shell. June 11, 1995 I think you will agree that the new version of PIC has a much cleaner and more attractive user interface than PIC V1.00. In addition, PIC has several new features including, direct selection of command items from Program Manager groups, "Always on Top" and the ability to place PIC anywhere and have the new location restored on re-entry to Windows. Some of these and other features were suggested by users who were kind enough to e-mail me some comments on the program. Thanks quys! You will also find that PIC updates its display much faster, and behaves much more solidly in every other way that we could think of. Numerous bugs were fixed. PREVIOUS USERS If you are a user of the previous version of the program please be sure to read the appropriate sections of the README.TXT file that explain how to keep your previous button configuration. All that is actually required is to locate and rename your PIC.INI file and to move it into your Windows directory. See README.TXT for the details. PIC V1.00c Notes In this and future versions, the default PIC.INI file will be renamed to correspond to the version number, e.g. PICC.INI, to avoid over-writing someone's existing PIC.INI file and getting them really mad at us. If a PIC.INI file is found, that file will be used. Otherwise, the supplied PICx.INI will be renamed to PIC.INI and used instead. If you have your own PIC.INI file, you can delete PICx.INI. It will probably contain nothing new. If it does, we'll let you know. March 20, 1995 Resource Monitor ---------------- The "Free Resources" menu function has been revised to include a test that determines the amount of free fast RAM. This test is described in more detail in the PIC on-line Help. But you may be wondering why we bother with such a test. Well, there are at least two good reasons that we are aware of: First, you may want to know how much of that expensive RAM that you added to your system is actually being made available to Windows applications. Without a test like this, it is difficult to tell how much is being reserved by DOS or being tied up in RAM drives and disk cache. By knowing how much is actually available, you have the information you need to tune your system for best performance. Second, certain kinds of applications need fast memory. Hand scanners, for example, are improving by leaps and bounds and becoming very inexpensive. But those high-resolution images sure do need a lot of memory. I recently purchased a little 800 dpi, 256 gray level gem for less than a hundred dollars that provides outstanding performance on small images. When I tried to scan in a larger image I immediately ran into a problem. The scanner balked after scanning in only part of the image. At first, I thought it was bug in the scanner. Then I noticed that the hard disk light was on. What was happening was that the image bytes were being sent to the hard disk and the slowdown was so great that I was unable to move the scanner slowly enough across the page to produce an acceptable result. To make a long story short, of the 8 Meg of fast RAM available on my system, substantially less was available to the scanner. In fact, it turns out that the actual amount of available fast RAM is highly variable and can change considerably from moment to moment. Because of its virtual memory management scheme, Windows does not give client programs the option of getting only high-speed RAM. If a previous program has cluttered up the RAM space, Windows simply starts providing the memory requests from hard disk. Eventually Windows increases the amount of available fast RAM. But in the meantime, applications get trashed. The PIC fast RAM test provides a nice solution to this problem by both testing for available fast RAM and by coercing Windows into increasing the currently available fast RAM. For my hand scanner, all I need to do now is to run the PIC "Free Resources" test just before I begin a scan to insure that I have enough space available. PIC as a Windows Shell ---------------------- PIC now has full shell capability and can be installed as a Program Manager replacement. The main reason for doing this is to recover the resource space consumed by Program Manager on systems where a lot of program groups have been created. It appears that by the time you get to 30 program groups, almost 20 percent of the available USER space is being used by Program Manager. The reason for this is that Program Manager opens an additional window for each program group that it has created. The space for all of these windows comes out of the USER module and reduces available USER space that is shared by all programs. The space situation gets progressively worse as more program groups are added. Since the only advantage to having Program Manager active (even as an icon) is saving the reload time when you are constantly using it, it makes more sense to run it only as needed in cases where you want to reserve the resource space for more important applications. If it doesn't already have it, be sure to add a Program Manager (progman.exe) button to your Win Main group in PIC. That way, if you decide to run PIC as a shell, you will still be able to run Program Manager when you need it. File Associations from File Manager ----------------------------------- File associations assigned in File Manager are also now used by PIC if not explicitly configured in PIC. Swapping Groups and Tool Commands --------------------------------- Added the ability to swap (interchange) Groups and Tool Commands from the menus and updated the Help and menu prompts to reflect this change. Bugs ---- A leading space entered in front of a group name no longer causes the group to be deleted in "Change menu ..." etc. Duplicated button icons are no longer saved to the INI file. Fixed a bug causing the '*' operator to work incorrectly in Command Edit. Fixed a bug causing "invalid file" error on reload after an obscure file operation. March 8, 1995 Revised file association and filter handling to allow full configurability. Although a default set of filters is provided, these can now be replaced or revised. The shareware version of the program will support up to six simultaneous filters or associations. The registered version will allow up to fifty. A confirmation message is displayed when a filter or association is changed, added or deleted. Revised the help file and added more on-line messages. Fixed another icon bug. Feb 28, 1995 Added ability to select groups with letter keys. Fixed a bug causing icons to be scrambled when a group was removed. Feb 24, 1995 Converted floating button labels to small character set. Fixed a bug causing incorrect installation into WIN.INI. R.C.