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Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2011 7:52 pm
by daftspaniel
Hi Folks,

(Not been Dragoning for a while - irritating bug with my laptop GFX driver made XRoar unusable :cry: Anyway all going on Ubuntu now so back to it :D)

I am working on a web based screen designer for the Dragons text screen. Draw with blocks, hit a button and it generates the Basic code which you can load into XRoar or whatever.

Please take a look:
http://daftspaniel.com/Dragon/JSTools/S ... igner.html

Would appreciate any feedback before it goes 'live' - especially on the generated code :-)

Thanks,
Davy

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2011 8:11 pm
by daftspaniel
Whoops forgot to say it is tested on Firefox and Chrome only.... :D :oops:

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2011 9:08 pm
by admin
Nice - works fine with IE9

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2011 9:27 pm
by daftspaniel
Thanks for the feedback!

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2011 10:02 pm
by sixxie
Nice!

I think the only obvious user-interface thing I noticed was it would be good if you could draw freely if you keep the mouse button down.

Do you plan to make it handle the subdivision of character cells? That could be quite useful: maybe make it change the colour of any other 'set' pixels in a cell if you try and draw there in a new colour.

As for output, a list of assembly FCB directives would be useful for pasting into code, although I guess it would actually be pretty easy to search & replace the existing BASIC DATA lines.

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Thu Aug 25, 2011 10:56 pm
by Alastair
Something else that may need changing is that the grid disappears when you select white and then press CLS.

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2011 6:42 pm
by daftspaniel
Thanks - great feedback!
Alastair wrote:Something else that may need changing is that the grid disappears when you select white and then press CLS.
Ok - Will pick a neutral colour for this.
sixxie wrote:I think the only obvious user-interface thing I noticed was it would be good if you could draw freely if you keep the mouse button down.
Good idea - the clicking might cause RSI ;)
sixxie wrote:Do you plan to make it handle the subdivision of character cells? That could be quite useful: maybe make it change the colour of any other 'set' pixels in a cell if you try and draw there in a new colour.
Would be good - think I will add a text option first tho.
sixxie wrote:As for output, a list of assembly FCB directives would be useful for pasting into code
Another good one - a save to tape/disk routine on the Basic code would be handy too.

Cheers,
Davy

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 1:34 pm
by Sarah
That's neat, well done. I created something a little similar on the Dragon once, which scanned the text screen and then converted it to a BASIC program that uses the appropriate set of PRINT or PRINT@ statements (choosing literal strings, CHR$ and STRING$ as necessary) rather than the POKE approach. It doesn't seem to be on my website, though, so I don't know what I did with it, probably still stuck on an old tape somewhere... lol


Edit: Just remembered it appeared in Dragon User and found the article (September 1988, pages 17-19) if anyone's interested.

Re: Dragon Web Screen Designer - Try it out Please!

Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 10:39 pm
by daftspaniel
I looked at the article, I like the Dragon based solution!

Well worked on this today and I've got some of the requested features in there plus keyboard shortcuts which is particularly handy for changing colours.

Doing a big code tidy up as I changed it from a table to multiple divs which give much more consistent results across browsers. There are more buttons now so need to tidy the page layout a bit.

Not sure which features will be in the next version I put online but expect some goodies!

:D
Davy