Release Notes for Harmony 1.0
=============================
Author: Keith Andrews
Updated: Mansuet Gaisbauer
This document describes enhancements, bug fixes, and other release
information for Harmony Release 1.0.
Enhancements/Changes
--------------------
In Rel 1.0
o A preliminary release of the Harmony User Guide is available. See
the file hug.ps in $HARMONY_HOME/misc. Because the Harmony User
Guide is a little bit behind the development, the are some mistakes
in it. Some of them are in the "Installation" section, please the
information contained in the INSTALLATION file for a correct
description of the installation.
o Changes in the Viewer menus
- View is renamed to Display
o Session Manager
- The local map supports a more selective display of references
of a document (only references of selected types are displayed)
- Number of search results can be restricted
- Support of "Hyper-G URL" for the GOTO function
hyperg://<host>/<object-name>
hyperg:<server-name>/<object-name>
hyperg:<global-object-id>
see hyperg://hgiicm.tu-graz.ac.at/technical
- The local cache of the session can be cleared by the user
- A user configurable menu for starting external programs is
intergrated in the Session Manager menu. The following X11
resources are used to controll the
menu:
*tools: tool1|tool2| .... | tooln
*Tool.tool1.commandline: commandline
*Tool.tool1.menuentry: menuentry
*Tool.tool2.commandline: commandline
....
menuentry: String appearing in the File/Tools menu
commandline: command line to execute. The following
'$'-variables can be used:
$title : title of the current object
$user : users current login name
$host : current Hyper-G host Harmony is connected to
$port : port of the current connection to the Hyper-G
server
$id : ID of the current object
$goid : global object ID of the current object
$display : display Harmony is running at
$interactive: a dialog is displayed to let the user input
the value which replaces this variable. For
each occurence of this variable a new dialog
is presented. The input is taken as it is no
further variable replacement is done.
$generic : has the same function as $interactive but also
does variable replacement in the entered string.
- A status browser is now intrgrated into the SM which shows all
users logged in into the current server. One or more users
can be selected to send them a message (like UN*X write
command).
o Infromation Landscape
- objects are displayed using textures
o Image Viewer
- Improved dithering
- faster redraw
- faster scrolling
- large TIFF images are displayed correctly now
- Now it is possible to save Images to a file
- Full support for editing images in an external editor is
now available
- areas are marked using the markerColor instead of
simply xor'ing the rubberband
Known Bugs:
Incorrect image data might crash the viewer.
o Scene Viewer
- new plattforms:
SUN OS: Mesa
HPUX: Mesa
- VRML support (experimental) WARNING!! VRML is a SUBSET
of the Inventor format, so Inventor scenes might cause trouble.
- new command line parameter: -singlebuf
to force single buffering for all gl-contexts
- Implementation of Level of Detail for VRML
- speedup for wireframe and smooth shading by using different
backbuffer structures (pixmap for wirframe, ximage for
smooth shading). The X11 resource
Harmony.Scene*mesabackbuf
can be used to set the a structure for all displaying
styles.
o PostScript Viewer
- internal changes
- Now supports editing of anchors.
- move
- resize
use Ctrl-RightMouseButton for editing - what happens
depends on where you hit the anchor rectangle:
hit the center of the anchor rectangle -> move anchor
around
hit the border of the anchor rectangle-> resize it
it behaves very similar to a window on screen. To make
things easier the sensitive border region is larger
than the drawn anchor border.
The anchor you hit is highlighted, if you have
overlapping anchors you can use the Shift key
(together with Ctrl-RightMouseButton) to step through
until the anchor you want to edit is highlighted.
In Rel 1.0s
o Harmony now supports Hyper-G annotations.
o It is possible to create a new text document from scratch, without
having to import a dummy document first.
o The Harmony Local Map has an Options panel and can now display
parent/child relationships, annotations, inline images, textures,
etc. in addition to standard referential hyperlink relationships.
o The Harmony Film Player now supports circular link anchors.
o The Harmony Text Viewer has a View Source command, which displays
the HTF source of the current document.
o The Harmony 3D Scene Viewer is now available in a MESA/X11 version
for Linux and Sun Solaris (as well as for SGI Irix and DEC OSF/1 in
both OpenGL and MESA/X11 versions).
o The Harmony Administrator (haradmin) is an experimental new tool to
help Hyper-G system administrators maintain user accounts, groups,
etc. Normal users can use haradmin to add/change their own passwords
and hosts.
In Rel. 1.0b
o The Harmony Session Manager can now create and delete collections
and insert and delete documents (File Insert).
o The Harmony Text Viewer supports interactive editing of text
documents using your favourite text editor (by default emacs),
including a preview facility.
o Multiple anchors in a text document can be selected for deletion
simultaneously (Shift-Left-Click).
o The Harmony Text Viewer now allows inline images to be interactively
deleted (Ctrl-Left-Click to select, Anchors Delete) as well as
created.
o The Harmony Image Viewer supports circular and elliptical anchors in
addition to rectangles.
o The field editor widget now supports pasting of text from the X
paste buffer (middle mouse click).
o Transparent inline GIFs are really transparent.
o The Harmony icons are now compiled into the binaries and not loaded
from TIFF files.
o A "Go To" function in the Session Manager accepts collection names
and W3, Gopher, and telnet URLs. (NB. Remote W3 and Gopher documents
are fetched according to the Hyper-G philosophy via the local
Hyper-G server and not directly).
o The Harmony Session Manager now recognises and handles the
PresentationHints attribute. In particular, a collection member
document with CollectionHead as presentation hint is recognised as
descriptive head of the collection and is opened automatically when
the collection is opened.
o The Harmony Film Player allows you to interactively adjust
brightness using gamma correction.
Bug Fixes
---------
In Rel. 1.0
o Bug fixes in all parsts of the project
In Rel. 1.0s
o The "Could not read magic number file!" bug has been fixed.
o The Linux Text Viewer problem has been fixed.
o Links pointing to a destination within the same document are now
handled properly.
o Numerous other minor changes and fixes.
In Rel. 1.0b
o The marked rectangle in the Image Viewer (e.g. when creating a link
anchor) is now visible.
o The Text Viewer handles J.UCS documents correctly.
o On 8-bit displays, inline images are now dithered using the standard
Harmony colour table.
o The PostScript Viewer should now Save and Print properly.
Known Bugs
----------
o When collection members are accessed individually (e.g. via
hyperlinks), the collection browser displays them in order of
access, not in the correct sort order (sequence).
o In some circumstances, particularly on a slow line with a fast user,
the Session Manager is still in the process of fetching metadata
from the server, when the user clicks on a new document, which
causes the dialogue box "Get Children Error: prior request not
finished" to appear. The solution is: slow down, take it easy --
give your software time to rest...
This problem is especially noticable in Harmony versions supporting
the 3D information landscape (i.e. SGI and DEC Alpha), where the SM
has to fetch the children of each collection -- we are working on
alleviating it.
o The PostScript Viewer has a very hefty appetite for temporary disk
space (about 1MB per PostScript page). The PostScript Viewer uses
GhostScript to generate page images in PBM binary format.
Unfortunately, if no space is left, GhostScript just waits for some
to become free, so the PostScript Viewer looks like it has hung
up. This will be much better once smaller, compressed page images
are generated.
o The Text Viewer sometimes leaves temporary inline image files in
/tmp (or the configured temporary directory).
o Very large numbers of inline images (hundreds) in a text cause
difficulties.
o The Information Lasndscape is not totally in sync with the Session
Manager's collection browser. In particular, commands like Home and
Close All cause problems.
Known Limitations
-----------------
o Harmony does not yet support HTML forms and tables.
o Double-buffering provides flimmer-free screen update, but consumes
relatively large amounts of RAM on your X terminal. If your
machine/X-terminal has relatively little RAM for its X server, you
may want to turn double-buffering off (Harmony*double_buffered:
off).
o Harmony does not currently make use of shared libraries. These will
be introduced where possible to minimise code size.
o The Text Viewer cannot yet Save or Print in PostScript format.
(A shaky provisional implementation was taken out of Release 1.0b).
o There is still almost no documentation and help.
