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Overview -> General Information -> Release Notes for daVinci V2.1.1

Release Notes for daVinci V2.1.1

daVinci V2.1.1 is a minor release with substantial quality improvements especially in the user interface, which has been revised to Tcl/Tk version 8.0.3. daVinci has been internationalized and additional commands have been added to the API. Unfortunately this is not a public release. Please contact the daVinci project, if you need the new features.

What is new in daVinci V2.1.1:

Internationalization
All user-interface elements of daVinci and the grapheditor application have been internationalized. By just creating a file daVinci_<language>.lang for the daVinci dialogs and a file gedit_<language>.lang for the grapheditor dialogs and by setting the new environment variable DAVINCI_LANG to <language> every language can be defined for daVinci. The distribution contains language files for English (language: C as the default language) and German (language: de).

Full user-interface control via API commands
Up to version V2.1 an application can change only the Edit menu and the application icon bar of daVinci. Additionally the File menu can be controlled by the application. Now it is possible to start daVinci without any user-interface elements (i.e. only the drawing area will be visible in the daVinci window) and configure the user-interface at runtime with API commands of the new Graphical User-Interface category. Just mix system menus and application menus or system icons and application icons together in one menu or iconbar. It is possible to define radio menus like the Layout->Orientation menu and radio icons like the icons for setting the fine tuning mode in the daVinci system.

Socket connection for applications
In all previous daVinci versions applications can be connected by UNIX pipes exclusively. In V2.1.1 an application can connect as a socket client to a daVinci socket server. This can be done on the registered daVinci socket port 2542 or on any other port specified. With this new feature, the application can even run on a different machine anywhere in the network. The connect application dialog has been reimplemented to allow the usage of this new feature.

Further new API commands
Some additional API commands allow access to the dialogs of the Option menu and allow to change some settings that couldn't be changed in previous versions. With these new commands it is now possible to completely rebuild the daVinci user-interface with the new user-interface control feature described above without losing any functionality. All API commands support the new internationalization feature of daVinci. An application can even use the daVinci internationalization mechanism for its own internationalization.

User-Interface based on Tcl/Tk version 8.0.3
The user-interface of daVinci is now based on Tcl/Tk 8.0.3. Applications using commands of the API Tcl category should run without changes according to the Tcl/Tk documentation. The user should not see any differences which can be refered to the changed Tcl/Tk version.

Windows NT version available
A major new development is the Windows NT 4.0 (Intel) version of daVinci, which is the first non-UNIX platform for daVinci. Thanks to the Tcl/Tk developers it was possible to just recompile the source code of daVinci on Windows NT with only minimal changes in the sources, which could all be done via compiler switches and if-clauses in Tcl, such that the sources of daVinci are still the same for all supported platforms.

On Windows NT the user will see the same user-interface as on UNIX. One major change is the usage of the native file selector boxes on Windows for all file dialogs in daVinci including the API file browser. Some of the command-line options are useless on Windows NT and one disadvantage is, that applications can't be connected via Pipes on NT, because Tcl/Tk pipes still don't work as expected on this platform. But with the new socket connections this shouldn't be a serious problem. All other features of daVinci work as usual.

For the public release of this version, we will have new licensing conditions.

Bug fixes
In daVinci V2.1.1, the bugs 02-V2.1 till 11-V2.1 of the previous V2.1 release are fixed.


daVinci V2.1.1 Online Documentation - Page update: Oct 21, 1998