Shoutbox

Hmmm..... you mean like some kind of dump every day... so people can see Patchou's progress?

Sound funny... but you'll get dumps which are very unstable, and might in some cases not even startup..... but interesting tough, i would wanna see that every day.. i'm bored anyway

But i guess that if Patchou does that, it will be to a very small group of trusted people

Patchou, Patchou, Patchou.... make me hapy

Releasing beta copies to a timetable almost guarantees they will be broken and also hampers progress because he would have to fix things on Sunday, whereas when developing its often a lot better break things in the short term to get them working better in the long term.

Also they probably wouldn't be around for a while - programming takes time.

Having said that I would love to get some weekly (or whenever the program feels like releasing itself) betas to try.

ME would like that to

Patchou said he wants to "keep some surprises" so he probably won't make those weekly releases... we could keep track of all the progress he makes...

quote:

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Originally posted by Misterjad
maybe i can make a complete french translation of messenger plus! 

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Patchou = French... so wont he do the "complete" translation?

yeah i know that, but in the last release just the head menu and the ad were traduce and the other things were in english so as patchou is developing plus! in english, i'll traduce it in frenc

Plus! was only avaliable in english, the new multi language thing will be new to MP2.00.

I assume as Patchou writes the thing, as french is his tounge language he'll just do it straight off. Saving time n all.

No, the partial French translation already existed... Patchou did that, but you wont noticed if you're not french.

Well, yes, in Messenger Plus! currently, if you have Messenger french installed your menus are in french, but that's all. As I said, the new version will (in fact, it already does  ) support multi language. Concerning the french translation.... I'm a little lazy so I suppose I will ask someone to do it for me ... when you program, you are used to do it in english, event the comments in the code are in english.

I'll release an alpha version of MP2 as soon as I feel it's good enough for you to see it. The Alpha program will be available only to a small group of people who I know will make a difference. When we're sure that the new version has everything we want in it, that the scripting feature is poweful enough, etc... I'll release a public beta version which will be freely redistributable and which will expire after some time. I just want to be sure I'm not forced to released too many "patch-releases" after the official release of 2.00 as it would bother most of the people.

By the way, maybe you'll be interested to know that except for the first installation, subsequent installations of MP2 won't require a reboot. I've worked a lot on this with the Interactive Agent plugin so there is no reason why I wouldn't include that capability in MP.

Concerning scripting now... I'm doing a lot of research today about it. I'm still wondering how I'm going to allow scripts to change the program, what kind of thing I should offer, etc... for example, I saw that neither VBScript or JScript are capable of calling API functions... I've found some stuff on the internet to do it (aka DynaWrap, if you know about it...) but the fact is that even if it's good for some method calls, it's not really interesting to make all kind of tricks just to be able to create and manipulate windows.... so... well.... I don't know... that's the big dilema: if the script capability is weak, nobody will wan't to use it; if I add complicated stuff, then most of the people won't understand how to use it.

Let me know what you think about it.... are you all familiar with window procedures, message loops, etc...? how would you create a window in VBScript if you had to?

Patchou.

In fact, I'm really wondering this: is it better to concentrate on scripts even if it's not very friendly to use at the end or should I forget about the scripting feature and make a new version of Messenger Plus! with most of the stuff I see in the Suggestion page of this forum.... I definitively need your input on this, that's a damn important question. Again, my main problem is the limitations of scripting languages when we want to create windows, modify windows, create bitmaps, etc etc...

Patchou.