Welcome to the latest release of HighWire, 0.1.2!
It's been a while since the last official release of HighWire back in January, but development hasn't stopped. If you are ever looking for the latest information on the development status of the project, please stop by the HighWire web site. You can also post a comment in our forum for discussions on HighWire, Good or Bad!
The team would like to take a moment to thank everyone who voted for HighWire in the MyAtari awards, the support is appreciated. We would also like to congratulate the other award winners.
Let's get right to the question. What has been improved in the 0.1.2 release of HighWire you ask? Well, the first visible update to HighWire is the addition of the navigation bar with the traditional browser buttons Forward, Back, Home, Reload, Stop and the URL edit field. A nice feature of the Forward and Back buttons is when holding them a bit longer, a popup appears for selecting not only the last or next page, but also every URL that is stored in history. The navigation bar can also be hidden or shown by holding down the ALT key while clicking the window's close button.
Online support is still "Unofficial", but initial implementation of the Ovl's for different TCP/IP stack support has been added, see the directory 'modules and read the README.TXT file. Form support has also been improved with the support of Selection List. Other improvements in the handling of frame sets, frames can now be resized. Calculation of the width of tables and cells has also been improved. Not to mention the many other bug fixes, updates made to HighWire. For the full list of changes in this release, you can read them in the Change.Log file included in the archive.
Our team "Captain" Baldrick did an outstanding job writing this next part in the last release, I thought it should also be included in this version of the developer letter. (I also added some oyster cookies for Baldrick and Gokmase to munch on while reading.)
If you are interested in helping with the HighWire project, don't hesitate to get in touch with any member of the development team and let them know. There are lots of areas where more people would make the job easier. If you can't program, then consider helping with the documentation or get involved with submitting bug reports. If you are a programmer and are interested in working on the code of HighWire, then definitely get in contact with the development team. Many sections of the code can seem quite confusing without knowing how some of the basics of the code works. There are also libraries that are needed to compile the code now that you can get from the development list. Translations into other languages would also be a nice addition to the project. While we have many different languages spoken by members of the development team, we only have language support for French and English.
Not only is a modern browser needed for our platform. It is our belief that our best option is one that is native and open source. By native we mean something that was written with our machines in mind and Open source so that we never have to worry about a programmer deciding to stop development. Even if the whole development team were to quit tomorrow the code would still be available and waiting for someone else to continue on the work. We believe that HighWire can fill this role. While currently it should not really be classified as a browser, but more of a demonstration of a parsing and rendering engine. This technology is open source, so hopefully with your support it can be the core to many projects on our platform. Not the least of which will be in the future a fully modern web browser. To reach that goal we will need time and the help of community.
– Thank you,
– HighWire Development Team
Some useful links.
Here are some useful links for the HighWire project.
http://highwire.atari-users.net/ – HighWire Project Homepage.
HighWire Users mailing list – A list for users to ask questions and report bugs.
HighWire Developer Mailing list – A list for people interested in actively working on the project.