HotDog: The Next Helping !
Toolbars
HotDog32 sees the introduction of the Floating Toolbar, two of which should appear when you first run this program. They are COMPLETELY customizable ! You can have anything from 1 to 10 buttons calling a different HotDog function, or any HTML tag, or the button can add text that you specify.
ROVER
The ROVER window has now become a mini-WWW browser. You can use it to cruise around the Web and if you find a page you like, and you're curious as to what HTML they used then just click on the "Open In HotDog" button to transfer their page straight into a HotDog document. There's also a Width Checker which you can use to see how your page will appear to users who's computers are running with widths of 640, 800 or 1024.
Sounds !!
Putting the fun back into editing, this is how I reckon Windows95 sound schemes should work ! You can ask for random sounds on events (attach sound to any of our 83 functions or on standard events like Document Open, Close, Save etc...) and furthermore, you can choose how often a sound will play - perhaps you'd like to hear one 10% of the time, just to keep you on your toes ! Sample sounds have been shipped with this beta, but please feel free to roll your own - the .INI file storage system is pretty easy to figure out. See the "\SOUNDS" directory for a good starting point, and the "[Sounds]" section in HotDog.INI
Multi File Find and Replace
Now you can use this to search through flippin' great wadges of files, and HotDog will present you with a list of those that matched your search criteria. And you can use the Find and Replace function to change Unix text to DOS text and vice versa.
Watch Out For....
- The list dialog box can be used to actually build lists, instead of just building a skeleton of a list.
- The table dialog now has a Preview button
- If you use the "Select Browser Before Preview" option you can then ask HotDog to use ALL the browsers you have listed to preview the document. Great for checking cross-browser compatibility.
- Projects allow you to specify standard directories for them, which overrides the default directories listed on the Tools/Options screen. Watch for more Project options coming soon !
- Repeat Last Command ! Well almost.....the last command you used from the Toolbars or shortcut keys will be stored and displayed in the status bar and can be called again by clicking on it in the status bar, or defining a shortcut key to it, or perhaps even a button in the floating toolbars. It's "Ctrl+Shift+R" in this program, but you can change it. The only problem is that it doesn't yet track the last command you issued directly from HotDog menus.
Changes Since v0.9 Beta
- Resizable Floating Toolbars
- You can now resize the floating toolbars to get a better fit in your working space.
- Shortcut Keys Added To Menus
- When you have defined shortcut keys that go to HotDog dialog boxes, these shortcuts are added to the menus on the main form.
- Binary FTP now restored
- HotDog can upload your entire project at once, including the graphics and sounds files you refer to, and what's more it'll put them in the correct relative directories for you, and it'll even create the directories for you !
- HTML buttons now have HTML tag as caption
- Well...sort of :-). The small size of the toolbar buttons means that we can't display the whole tag as the caption, so we're just showing an abbreviated form....unless, of course, the whole tag is short anyway (4 characters or less), in which case you'll see the whole tag as the button caption. See the "Retro 16-Bit" toolbar for examples.
- Toolbone And Animated Splash are now optional
- Use Toolbone option in the View menu to include or remove the Toolbone - some people like to have the extra working space. The animated splash screen can also be replaced with a static splash screen. Go to Tools / Options to change this setting and to find out what else you can do to customize HotDog to your own HTML editing needs.
- In the "because we can" category, HotDog now automatically locates your installations of Netscape Navigator and the Microsoft Internet Explorer when it is installed for the first time.
Known Bugs
- When calling Netscape HotDog has been seen to lock up occassionally. It is safe to ask Windows to end the HotDog session and reload it. It has been reported that two Netscape windows will open up followed by a "Document Preview failed" message from HotDog. We can't reproduce these, but your feedback will help track the cause down.
- The spell checker does not highlight mispelled words as it goes along.
- After customizing Toolbars then "Toolbars" menu may not correctly show which toolbars are currently opened (they should be checked).
- When sounds are being played based on HotDog Functions (the long list, not the short one), they will not be heard when main menus are used, only when a toolbar or shortcut key is used to call them.
- Diamond Stealth or Matrox Millenium video card owners may see the Toolbone bar with the buttons displayed in the wrong place....very weird stuff ! We're looking into this one, but it has just come up at the last minute. The Toolbone bar can be made invisible for those who don't want to look at this, which also returns some valuable screen real estate to your documents.