Welcome to HotDog ! The first important lesson to learn about HotDog is that almost everything is customizable.
Don't like our shortcut keys ? Change them with the Tools / Shortcut Keys screen.
Want more toolbars, or different tools in the main toolbar ? Use the Tools / Customize Toolbars screen to change it all.
Do you want HotDog to look like a glorified Notepad ? Go to the View and Toolbars menus and turn off everything you can find :-)
Only you know the best environment for your web work, so we've made HotDog as flexible as possible. A quick scope through the Tools / Options screen and the View menu is a good way to find out some of the things you can change. Go forth and customize !
New Features
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Improved Main Toolbar
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The main toolbar is now much quicker to draw. You can also specify whether you want to see icons, wide text, narrow text, or icons plus text.
"Un-apply" tags
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If you highlight a pair of tags wrapped around text, such this example, then reapply the same tags then they will be removed. This makes HotDog act like a word-processor, applying and removing tags instead of just adding them time and time again.
Choose Your Icons
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All the icons used by our main and floating toolbars are kept in the ICONS subdirectory. Feel free to alter them :-) The Customize Toolbars form now allows you to choose any icon for each function, including icons you've designed yourself !
Pseudo-Minimizable Floating Toolbars
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If you activate a floating window and press any key (except Escape...and don't ask where the Any key is !) it will shrink to a more unobtrusive state. Or you can Shift-click on any of the buttons in them to make them shrink. Thanks to our Webguru for that one ! These sentimental Mac users....just can't leave their old interface behind ;-)
Instant Colour Editor
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Double click on any colour code to highlight it, click the right mouse button and choose the "Edit Color" option and choose your new colour. Simple !
Instant Table Creation
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Highlight multiple lines of text and bring up the table editor. Each line will be put into a different row of the table - a good way to get the grunt work done. You can also paste into the grid on the table editor.
Instant List Creation
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Highlight multiple lines of text and call the Insert List screen. The lines will each become seperate list items.
Improved AutoUpload
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If you use the HotDog Project feature then the upload feature will be able to place each of your web pages into the appropriate subdirectory, instead of only doing this for their support files. Make sure you keep the project file in the top level directory of your web site. You can also change HotDog's selection of relative directories for each file listed.
Printing
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Yes, it's back ! You can print your HTML documents.
Project File List
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The project manager now allows you to open a subset of the files that make up a project. But even though you haven't loaded them all its still useful to have a list of the other files so that you can drag them in as links. The View menu will have a Project File command that you can call to bring this floating list into view.
WWW Server Details
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HotDog now records your login name, directory and password for each of the servers you specify, not just the default one listed in the Tools/Options screen. The default server is now the one that appears at the top of the server list and you can use the buttons provided to change their order around.
ActiveX Support
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The Insert menu now includes an ActiveX command. You will be presented with a list of all OCX components on your system, some of which are ActiveX - there's no simple way to tell unless you put them there ! A good rule of thumb, so far, is that the name of standard OCX controls ends in "Control" while ActiveX controls are called "Objects". We've built this simple filter into the "Only Show ActiveX Controls" option on that screen, but it is not guaranteed to be correct. You should know which ActiveX files you have available to you. This form is based on code written by Joe Robinson and was available for public use. More information on ActiveX is available from http://www.microsoft.com
Lowercase File Names
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By default HotDog forces all file names into lower case (not the directories, just the file itself). This makes it easier when putting web sites from case-insensitive Windows machines to case-sensitive UNIX boxes. You can, of course, switch this option off if you want to.
Easier adding of <P> and <BR> tags to plain text
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Our 16 bit edition had a simple and elegant way of adding these tags. You highlight the text and clicked on the appropriate button and any carriage returns were replaced with the chosen tag. I've put this functionality back in, and you'll be pleased to note that it works whether called from a keyboard shortcut or the floating toolbar, and also takes into account the setting for using paragraph tags as containers (ie <P> and </P>)
Automatic ALT attribute creation
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As an aid to helpful web site aesthetics HotDog now automagically creates an ALT attribute for your images which includes the filename and size.
There's probably a lot more too.......but we fixed a lot of stuff quickly, as a breather between some of the major items listed above, and didn't keep track. So have a good rummage round to see what the doggie has buried :-)
Bugs Fixed
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Losing cursor when switching between apps
FIXED ! Woohoo ! This was a really insidious and annoying scumbag of a problem and I'm really, unbelievably glad it's been nailed.
ROVER modified
An option has been put in to make ROVER update whenever your current document is saved. This is the way I work - it feels right :-). Also ROVER will change to reflect whatever document you have selected, so as you toggle through multiple documents it will show you what each one looks like, unless you click on the "Lock" checkbox in the ROVER window.
Publishing
Numerous tweaks to the parsing of template fields. I've also added text boxes to help you add text to the grid controls that HotDog uses in various places. ie Words to replace when Publishing, Multi-File find and replace and Table creation.
There's probably a lot more too.......but we fixed a lot of stuff quickly, as a breather between some of the major bug fixes listed above, and didn't keep track. Try and reproduce the bugs you know about and see if they're gone - they certainly should be if you reported them to us.
Current Known Bugs
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Microsoft Service Packs
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A good general solution to any weird behaviour is to go to http://www.microsoft.com and find Service Pack #1, the OLE update and the Kernel update files. These install new versions of many important Windows95 files and will probably be very helpful.
Windows NT Problems
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*sigh* The commands we use to make our dialog windows and floating toolbars "float" (remain visible while not active) seems to cause deep distress to Windows NT. We are still working hard on this, but in the meantime the 16-bit version of HotDog should run without any problems. We've been told that this problem has been fixed with Windows NT 4.0 Beta 2.
Flickering when switching between windows
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This is linked to the above problem - I think they're the same thing, except that in NT you get a GPF and in Windows95 you just get this strange flickering as each of the visible forms becomes active and inactive very rapidly. We are still trying to get to the bottom of this one but its impact can be minimized by not having too many inactive dialogs open at once. Close what you don't need.
Problems with Previewing a Document
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Newer versions of Netscape can cause a timing problem in the communication between HotDog and the browser. If you ask HotDog to preview and Netscape is not already running, the inter-program communication may not work correctly and your document won't be displayed. Just request the preview again and it should work fine. In general you should have the browser already running when requesting a preview. The obtrusive message box which said "Document preview failed" has been replaced with a status bar message because of this timing problem.
Previewing with Microsoft Internet Explorer
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MSIE 3.0 Beta 1 (the current release at time of writing) doesn't respond to the DDE commands that MSIE 2.0 and most other browsers do. We have tried to communicate with this browser but failed - a thorough search of the appropriate newsgroups revealed a lot of people asking the same question and nobody had a solution.
Problems with toolbars and other normal Windows controls
If you've got MSIE 3.0 Beta 1 then you will also have a newer version of a file called COMCTL32.DLL. Look for it in your \windows\system directory and check the version number. If it is any higher than 4.70.1028 then it may be a version that we (and many others) have found to have a lot of problems co-existing with other windows components. If you can find your previous version and replace it with 4.70.1028 many problems with toolbars, sliders etc should be cleared up.
Insert Form Elements buttons obscuring the input fields
We have only had a couple of reports of this and have been unable to reproduce it so far, but if you go to the Insert menu and choose Form Element then you might see the buttons are over-size and actually obscure the caption some of the text boxes. Let us know if this happens to you....
