Well, I think everything is slowly falling into shape.

This week I actually got to take two days off. Went camping up Skegness way - great place. Got pretty drunk two nights on the trot which was the first alcohol I've had since October last year - it was great. Guinness goes great with fried eggs and baked beans, although the vents in the van proved fairly inefficient in the morning (so Cath and Jess tell me - dunno I was asleep :-)). Suffice to say a great time was had by all, and we're really looking forward to August when we do the whole UK over a two week period, from Lands End to John O'Groats. However, before that happens we need two items - the first is an awning (anybody in the UK have an awning suitable for a VW Kombi they want sell me?), and the second is a cheap PowerBook.

All I really need is something that will run Eddie and PowerFant - I don't need a PPC as all I want Fant for is to check 68k and PPC syntax - I'm really gonna have to make a macro for "mov".

So a personal plea - if anybody has a current (ish) 030/040 based PowerBook could you please write and let me know your impressions of your axe (sorry, machine). I don't want to spend more than about 1000 ukp on the machine as it will be used only whilst on the road, so speed isn't crucial. I am particularly interested in your impressions of the screen - for example is it sluggish, easy on the eye etc. Thanks in advance.

One thing that has cropped up quite a lot on customer support just lately is how to write system extensions with Fant/PowerFant. To that end over the next week I'll be writing up a guide to just such a procedure. As some of you may know, I am coming to the end of my current employment, and as a fairwell present, my employers have decided to send me on a free course - all expenses paid. So for the next month I am away during the week on a networking course (deep joy etc), but I am taking a Mac with me for those long lonely hotel nights. It's a great opportunity to get a lot of work done - Eddie may even get a "print" option - whatdya mean "about bloody time!" Kevin? :-)

Its sad when your hardware takes up more space than your luggage. Still no way could I go 5 days without a Mac. The course is DOS based (Novell) which is a slight embarrasment, but hey, it's free and I get a free DOS box out of it which I can assure you is only useful for the monitor that comes with it :-) (and then only after I've tweaked the colour balance and convergence etc...)

Ok, Let me just put on my Lightsoft hat....

Next up - some market research.
Anybody ever had a release version of Eddie crash on them. If so, I want to speak to you. The reason I am asking this is we want to be absolutely sure Eddies core is solid before the next major expansion. We have not seen a release version crash on any of the various machines we use.

If you do have a reproduceable crash situation with Eddie talk to me. A lot of people use Eddie for GP input/editing and email work. During the next cuppla months a lot of internal work will be going on - for example one thing I really want is a "paste as quotation" for email work, and "strip on paste" where Eddie does some user configurable things to a text block during paste - for example strip leading spaces, funny characters etc. If anybody has any good ideas, now is the time to speak up.

Finally, you'll be pleased to know that the acceleration with PowerPC fragments went pretty smoothly - it works fine. The next PPC version of Eddie should be faster again as we're recoding a lot of the graphics handling bits in PPC code. The full procedure will be published in the PowerFant 4.05 documentation which will be the next official release and may well automate the procedure so we can have true mixed ISA projects - that is the output app has 68k segments and PowerPC fragments with Build running the right bits as necessary.

Brynley has done some pretty good design work on the user interface for the new project manager, from which we'll be taking the coding cues. Brynley points out that the interface has become a little confusing what with various checkboxes and menu options taking effect. This is a good example of the programmers being too close to realise the problem - indeed until Brynley produced his mock up, we had no idea there was a problem!

We will not be releasing PowerFant V4.04 as the modifications can be considered hacks, and the interface is a mess. Thus 4.04 as mentioned in my diary earlier in the week is an internal development version only. IF you urgently need to create 68k/PowerPC accelerated mixed apps (as apposed to FAT apps) we will release 4.04 on an individual basis. Contact us.

The current official version is 4.02 for both Fantasm and PowerFantasm. The 4.03 update on these pages is unofficial, if nice. It provides PowerPC debugger labels and updates Eddie for Powerfant so you have more control over the colours (and as an aside, makes the status bar work correctly on 4 grey PB's). The update to 4.05 will be based on 4.02 for both versions of the software.

Ok, Lightsoft hat off...

One final plea - we want to see how many Apple stickers we can get on the back of the camper. We reckon you can get a lot more on the back of a VW camper than you can on the back of an Alfa, which is one of the reasons I bought it :-)

So, to help us in this quest, if you have any spare Apple stickers knocking about (you shouldn't - they should be out pushing the cause), it'd be great if you could send them to us at the normal address. Anybody care to guess at how many we can fit on? We are probably talking about a 50/50 mix of the big ones and small ones...

Till the next time