is this tuesday still?

it's just after seven am. I've been home two hours. This is normal. Bed sounds appealing, but it's Q1, and Q1 spare time means coding, specifically, coding the±wire. And the coffee is really good just now. I stay up a while..

I confess, I've been real anxious about the CPU usage on windows, not that it was a lot, at least by system measurements, but somehow, some way, it just bogged the system down, everything on the machine took longer to happen when the±wire was running. It was frustrating.

My wee test lappy - an uber-reliable Toshiba 133, with 16MB ram running Win98; If software runs on that, it'll pretty much run on anything. Shit, even bottom-feeder charities are up to those ancient 166MMX ex-biz cast-offs; in other words; it's a perfect floor-level test machine, and aye, a trusty friend! - wouldn't run it at all!

I remember early builds like sludge, and recent ones just nada. OS X is my main bag, for sure, but "cross-platform" is more than just a buzz-word for me, I want the±wire to run EVERYWHERE! I wrote somewhere else that I was considering a "lite" version for older, slower machines. I was serious.

NO NEED!

It was a hunch. See, I'm lazy, if something gets the job done, code-wise, I'm happy enough. I don't always require elegance, though I do en-joy creating elegant code. It was the windows themselves. I was just hiding them see; two of them; the prefs window, and the login window. Means I could poll them directly for strings and variable, your nickname, for instance, is the value of the login field. it's lazy, I know, and now that all the cute functions I wanted for the new version of the±wire are well in place and working I thought I'd make a wee effort to clean-up a bit, throw out dead variables, that sort of thing.

So I'm closing the windows, stuff that isn't actually being used now, putting these strings and variables in more permanent places, freeing up some memory. RB makes this infuriatingly difficult, and will "open" a window even if you so much as ask if the window is open. madness.

Closing up the prefs window made no difference at all, not that I'd realistically hoped this operation would fix anything, especially the windoze sludge problem; that I attributed to RB5's new compiler, and sighed. I thought I might get a few KB of memory was all, maybe a snappier launch. The lite version would be a cinch to throw together, problem solved, sorta. damned annoying though.

it's invisible on windows, but on OS X you can see quite clearly, in the login window, the address field focus ring shimmers, as if being activated and deactivated very very quickly, it's quite a pleasing effect, in fact. I didn't code it, it just happens.

Closing up the login window changed everything on windoze. the±wire bursts into action on the wee 133 now, dns, zener an all! Let's call it 0.7.6.

It was the shimmer I reckon.

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org