At 03:24 AM 12/29/99 -0800, water@tscnet.com wrote:
At 11:08 PM 12/28/99 -0800, Raab, Andreas wrote:
Brian,
I've been using Squeak on CE for a little while, mostly toying with enhancements for handhelds that I've been coding up, but I haven't found a way to link the string output of Jot or the keyboard to Squeak. I'm still getting familiar with WinCE programming, so not all of the VM sources make much sense to me. At any rate, is there a simple fix to this, either at the user level or the VM-level?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'linking the string output of Jot or the keyboard to Squeak'. Could you explain what the problem is?! (I'm assuming that you have a workspace or something alike open in Squeak so that you can actually *see* if there is some input ;-) You should try 'Sensor kbdTest' to see if there is actually some input generated.
It's simply that any input from the keyboard or Jot never, ever reaches Squeak (particularly frustrating is watching the cursor stubbornly do nothing in various windows while I type ;). If I find myself in a modal dialog box, I find that the only means to escape is to force Squeak to shutdown via the Windows system dialog. When this happens, the "Program memory" used by Squeak is not recovered, so that I have to reset the machine every few sessions like this. Every case of input is equally unsuccessful, I find, even with a clean image. I'll keep changing the "variables", though, until I get something to budge or can prove that there is a definite VM bug.
Also, "Sensor kbdTest" apparently gets stripped in the process of creating the Tiny image, so I will have to play a bit to get this to happen. However, since I use a Casio E-100 (16mb main memory), I can set up the machine to carry a significant part of the Squeak image if necessary. By the way, it seems that the VM does indeed support higher color depths on screens that support color; mine allows 8-bit and 16-bit levels of color-depth, although it's quite sluggish and I wouldn't recommend it at all unless Squeak's separate screen buffer could be done away with.
Also, if possible, it'd be great to know if there's a way to get the VM to 'force' its way to the top of the window stack on start-up, so that I didn't have to use the Task-Switcher to get to it.
I have no idea why Squeak isn't coming up in the foreground - I suspect that reading the image takes so long (couple of seconds) that CE gets confused (the window is opened after the image is read). If anyone knows the reason for this (admittedly strange) behavior, please let me know.
Andreas
Well, I'll look into that separately, then. Thanks for the info, though. Incidentally, is there a high-quality emulator you can recommend for debugging CE? :)
-Brian
Okay, it seems that there are some tricks I can use to get the keyboard/jot input to Squeak (mostly just forcing Squeak to stay in the foreground with the stylus). Apparently the fact that SqueakCE tends to lose it's position at the top of the window stack is causing the problem. I'm going to read up on WinCE programming and take a stroll through the VM code to see what's going on. So, the problem isn't as bad as I thought.
Thanks, -Brian