Image Markup Tool blog

Spent much of the day figuring out something that will be portable to all our other Windows application projects, but which I'm doing for the first time with this IMT release: building an installer which can install the app both in "normal" mode and in "portable application" mode.

In both cases, the installation is basically the same; the difference is in how the program is run.

The "portable" install is designed to be used on a thumb drive or other removable drive, and its main feature is that settings, window positions, sizes etc. are all saved in the program folder, so that they travel with the drive. In a "normal" install, these settings are saved in the user's Application Data folder. The "portable" option is designed to be compatible with the PortableApps standard 0.9.8 (see the PortableApps website for more information). If you install the program to the PortableApps folder on a thumb drive, the PortableApps menu will automatically find it. However, regardless of which install type you chose when installing the program, you can still run the program in either mode.

One difficulty lies in the fact that a "normal" install ought to be registered for uninstall, and gets its uninstall application dropped automatically into its program folder; if this happens for the "portable" install, then the PortableApps menu system finds the uninstaller and puts it on the menu as if it were a regular application. I solved this by running a batch file to move the uninstaller and its data file, at the end of the process, to another location.

Other issues involved ensuring that state info files get removed when uninstalling from a thumb drive, and making sure that icons and shortcuts work in either case.

I'd intended to complete a new release today, and I did get the Help file updated, version info fixed, and various other bits of prep, but I need to rewrite the installer to support PortableApp installations, and that can't really be rushed. I ran out of time, so I'll finish it tomorrow.

My first approach to a fix, which was to cast the variable value to a number whenever using it, failed; the user reported no difference. This morning, I installed an Italian locale on Ubuntu, and tested the IMT there, but didn't see any difference at all; everything works fine for me. This suggests that the problem was in the locale for Wine itself, rather than for Ubuntu.

This sent me back to the IMT code, and it turned out that I was generating the value for the XSL variable using Delphi's FloatToStr function, which uses the system locale. That looks like the cause of the problem, so I've changed that call; I now set the DecimalSeparator specifically, and then use FloatToStrF(ScaleFactor, ffGeneral, 6, 2), which should give a result with a period for a separator on any locale. I'm now waiting for the user to report back on whether this works or not, because I haven't been able to create a test system that reproduces the problem so far.

Had a couple of bug reports from a user, some of which are due to Wine, and some of which are probably my fault:

• The XSLT Web View transformation fails to calculate zone offsets for this user; they all come out as NaN. I think I may have pinned this down to a problem based on locale; when the $ImageScaleFactor is calculated, his log shows that it has a comma for the decimal separator, and when the number is later used in a calculation, the calculation fails. On my computers (Win and Linux) it succeeds, but presumably my locale ensures a period separator. I'm trying a solution which uses an explicit cast (number()) when the value is used; we'll see if that helps on his system.
• The Annotation window disappears when you move to another desktop and back again, on Wine. This is definitely a Wine bug, but it's presumably related to the fact that the window is set to always-on-top; that's why the bug doesn't affect regular windows. I determined that it was getting a negative Left setting during the desktop cycle, so I've added code which checks for negative values and sets them to 0 when the window is activated. It still disappears, but now you can get it back by clicking the show button off and on again.
• When FormState saved the application's state to the Application Data folder, it was being saved to a folder named only "v.1" instead of "Image Markup Tool v.1". This turns out to be caused by the fact that Wine doesn't correctly read the product name field in the version info record, so I've rewritten that code so that if no product name is found, the filename of the executable is used instead.

I'll do a new release tomorrow, if the XSLT bug is solved.

I've become interested in the Portable Apps idea, especially since we'll need to be travelling and demoing our apps in Finland. Having learned about the PortableApps system, and built drives that run Tomcat stacks, I decided to modify my apps so they'll run in portable contexts. I've done this for Transformer and IMT. When you run the app with a -portable flag on the command line, it stores its stuff in a Data directory which is in the application tree, rather than in the Documents and Settings tree on the hard drive. I also had to create a special launcher for each of the applications, to conform with the PortableApps standard. (In doing this, I discovered that the PortableApps menu doesn't follow its own documentation, so I had to do some hacking.)

Everything seems to be working well on thumb drives with a manual setup. Now all I need to do is elaborate the installers for each of the apps, so the user can choose to install to a thumb drive as a portable app. That'll take a couple of hours of figuring out, but it shouldn't be too complicated.

A user suggested that a Back button would be helpful in the browser-based Help system I wrote for IMT and Transformer, so I've implemented that (changes to XSLT and JavaScript). Started it at home (I'm using the same system for Markin 4), then finished it at work and tested with the IMT Help.

Today I fixed an erroneous tab order in the annotation window, and also added a routine that eliminates placeholder text and places the cursor inside the tag in a new annotation, when you activate the annotation text box. This saves time. I've also tweaked the zooming functionality so that when you zoom, if an annotation is selected, it's centred in the zoomed window. It's now much easier -- in fact it's automatic -- to zoom in on the annotation area you're working on.

Updated the Help file and the online source code repository to include the new dialog box; also created an icon for it, and updated the icon library.

I've now added a dialog box which is invoked by Control + E (or an appropriate edit menu control), which pops up an XML tag insertion dialog box. This allows you to type the name of a tag, or the name followed by attributes with their values (i.e. the interior of an XML open tag). It will then tag the selected text (if any) with a complete tag automatically. It also makes use of the FormState.pas state-saving code to remember up to 16 tags you've used, in order, and show them in the combo box, so you can easily choose tags you've used before.

Nothing beats using the application yourself for hours on end when it comes to discovering optimizations and annoyances. After today's work on Mariage, I've made these changes:

• Fixed a problem with edit commands not working in the new syntax-highlighting TSynMemo controls. This was caused by my forgetting to update onIdle events and TAction events so that they allow for TSynMemo components as well as descendents of TCustomMemo.
• Added a new popup menu for edit commands in the Annotation/Category window. Going to the main menu changes the active window, which causes the active control to change, making it impossible to use that Edit menu when working in the Annotation/Category window.
• Added a main menu command for Clone Annotation, a TAction that already has toolbar buttons, but had no menu item, so might have gone unnnoticed. It's extremely useful.
• Built a new installer and posted it, and rolled out fresh executables to Chicory and Endive.