Friday, March 28, 2003 - Fri, 28 Mar 2003

Very interesting! A few important ideas came to me with some visits to some websites.

AllChars is a small program that provides shortcuts by pressing and releasing the [Ctrl] key followed by one or two user-selectable characters. I’ve been thinking of the best way to have event and other shortcuts in Behold easily by the keyboard. I had thought of a dozen different ideas, but had not come up with what I decided to be the best yet. But just after that, I came upon HTML Codes and the HTML codes all start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon. An ampersand is very easy to type (for typists) since it is just a Shift-7. Once an ampersand is typed, Behold can bring up a hint/selection box of possible command/event shortcuts you can enter, e.g. &ac might be used to add a child, or &bur might be to add burial information. The trailing semicolon that HTML codes have would not be needed since a space would do. In the rare instance you want an ampersand followed by a character, you could use two ampersands to represent a real one, e.g. &&a gives &a, or & immediately followed by a space does not change. Simple and elegant and I like it. This is for Version 2 when editing is added.

Then I came across a program called BugSight that monitors running programs and reports on errors made in calls to the Windows Operating System. It does not work on NT-based systems (NT, 2000, XP), since Microsoft removed the method used to obtain the info required. So it will work for me until I buy a new computer. I think I’ll use that program (in addition to Memory Sleuth that checks for memory leaks) as I get to the final stages of testing. It might reveal some oversights.