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by James Robertson.
Original Post: More on the MacOSX version of VisualWorks
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The Return of the Thing. Back to the Land of Blog. That's me. After a week at Camp Smalltalk I've burrowed out of the backlog and am ready to blog again.
One great thing about CSOregon2004, was that there were a number of other Apple LapBooks running VisualWorks there. I worked on my project on my brand new 17" PowerBook (the model that you look for the retractable skateboard wheels on). I actually used the latest version of 7.3 at the time (jul03.3). VisualWorks rocks. So does OSX. Put the two together though... it can be kind of dissapointing.
First the good knows though... It seems that you can now do multiple non-continuous selections in lists. You know, the ctrl-select thing in windows and most Linux interfaces? You can't do that under OSX. The VM overrides the ctrl key to turn a (red) button press into a select button (yellow) press. This is plain stupid IMO. If you you want to do that, don't do it in the VM! Do it in the widget that cares about such stuff, in the Smalltalk code image. Not buried in the VM. For 7.3 (maybe 7.2.1 too--haven't checked yet) though, there's some redemption, you can use the 'option' key for multi select in lists.
And now for the bad news. The following items remain unfixed:
Periodically, the thing just dies. I had multiple crashes a day at Camp Smalltalk doing work under 7.3. Doing 7.2 work this morning... I've had two crashes.
Function keys still don't work!! C'mon. This should have been fixed in 7.2.1. It's still broken under 7.3 builds too. Tell me this will be fixed soon. Please.
Recently discovered, you can't draw eliptical arcs or wedges.
Is it not possible for the OSX VM to return memory to the OS as it does under Linux and Windows? ObjectMemory verboseShrinkMemoryBy: fillInTheBlank, doesn't seem to return memory to the OS, even when a global GC reports that you have 200MB unused!
I noticed that under some cases of drawing the same mask repetitively, the thing would die. Need to get that more reproducible.
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