Active GUI element

Static GUI element

Code

WPS object

File/Path

Command line

Entry-field content

[Key combination]

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If you have any comments regarding articles or tips in this or any previous issue of the VOICE Newsletter, please send them to editor@os2voice.org. We are always interested in what our readers have to say.

Addendum
April 10, 2006

Jürgen Ulbts provided the following update to Andreas Peters' article DBox2 - Video Streaming on OS/2 and eCS:

First of all, thank you for the interesting article about the DBox2! I found the whole issue very interesting this month. :-).

I have an update for the DBox2 article that you can hopefully add to it. But it doesn't matter if you can't.

After I had already created a ready-to-run package for the ProjectX version 0.90.3.00 from 2005-12-31 (compiled version plus source code in a subdirectory), I have uploaded version 0.90.4.00 (2006-03-30) as a ready-to-run package to Hobbes.

Version 0.90.4.00 now comes with a small installer (instos2.cmd — Christian already knows it from my Java Movie Database) that creates two batch files for starting ProjectX (startOS2.cmd for java.exe, and startOS2Debug.cmd for javaw.exe, i.e., one with and one without a command line window) and also the corresponding WPS objects (incl. icon, thanks to Rüdiger Ihle) and links to the documentation and the ProjectX web site.

This version also uses the native IDCTSSE.DLL for accelerated display of previews (thanks to Roland Brill for the DLL).

April 25, 2006

Jürgen Gaida from our translation team pointed out the following regarding scrolling with the new Newsletter layout:

I just noticed that since the new layout went online, the site has become much slower than the old one using Mozilla 1.4.2 (VAC build). Partially, Mozilla causes almost 100% CPU load and the whole system is slowed down. Do you have any explanation for this?

I still have to test this with a later Mozilla but maybe you already know the problem!

Christian Hennecke answers:

First, I thought that it was caused by transparent PNGs. To my knowledge, the OS/2 graphics engine lacks some features that are required for displaying real transparency, and the work-around apparently needs quite a bit of computing power.

But in our case it is not caused by PNGs. Instead it is the legend which has a fixed position. On OS/2 Mozilla apparently has problems with the position: fixed; CSS property. If I changed this, scrolling would get fast again. However, the legend wouldn't be accessible from anywhere in the article anymore.

As an alternative, we could add a title attribute or an event handler to every occurence of special markup using Javascript so that an explanation would be displayed as a fly-over help upon moving the mouse over it. This could get really distracting, though.

Tell us what you think about this! How would you prefer information about the markup to be displayed?