Mr Frenzy and I had a coding Pow Wow last night.  Different from a Discussion Pow Wow, a Coding Pow Wow helps during low motivation periods like when work is requiring overtime, or when plugging undo in to a system that was not designed for undo is too daunting.

The notes editor's list of items used older code to drag and drop items.  Realbasic now provides more information to the event making the coding easier.  Undo provided the incentive to change the code to use the new functionality, but only the combined powers of a Coding Pow Wow provided enough will power.

So, after several minutes talking about Robot Chicken Star Wars spoofs and grumbling about real-life jobs, code shredding began.

Realbasic's newly provided parameters made the code much easier at the start, but the lack of consistency of their data provided some stumbling blocks.  Par for the course.

After off-by-one fiddling, sacrificing spousal content for an extra hour of Pow Wow time, and ending up with a linked list searching algorithm, the new drag-and-drop item reordering that would allow easy hook up to drag and drop is ready to go.  WOO!!

This is another big step in the undo mindset and puts us that much closer to the next release.

CrystalBall Lite (CBLite) has been updated to version 2.1.2.

 This version fixes the following bug:

• Fixed Bug: You can now drag a Counter Button by click-dragging the main part of the button area.

We are hard at work on the next minor version of CBLite which will include the new Dice Templates feature, Undo on all editable parts of CBLite, and improved Table Rolling. Check out the Message Boards and our Blog above for recent news and information.  If you have questions about CBLite please visit the Message Board.

Undo is an important part of any application.  It seems like every application nowdays supports undo.  I have personally avoided attempting to write undo/redo capabilities into CrystalBall and CBLite because it seems like a very large task.  I am beginning to realize that in order to Undo/Redo to not be a complete chore you need to design your whole code methodology around it... 

An important aspect of CrystalBall and CrystalBall Lite is the ability to roll on tables of data to generate other random information or look up information on a table.  Those of you familiar with CrystalBall v3.1 will know of the Treasure and Name Generators.  Those generators are based on some very specific code that only allows you to generate those particular types of information.  For CB4.0 and CBLite we wanted something that was more generic in its design, so that the end-user could generate any type of information that they wanted.

The need for a Generic Generator became apparent after we released the ability to ROLL on TABLES with a dice roll.  Suddenly there was great excitement to try to reproduce the Treasure tables from D&D.  But as people began to use the dice roller to try to construct the tables they began to run into issues.