HighWire 0.1.5 — public beta

  Once again the time has come for a new release of HighWire, and this time the list of changes should hold something of interest for everybody!

 


Image support and cache functionality

  Clearly the most exciting change is that HighWire finally is capable of viewing JPG/PNG graphics, and that the program now is able to download and display images via remote connections! In order to achieve this you must however specify a directory HighWire can use for its temporary files. In your highwire.cfg file you need to enter a line with this syntax:

	CACHEDIR = <full path to cache directory>

In addition to this, HighWire is also able to store image bitmaps in RAM to speed up the handling of graphics. Eg. swapping between pages stored in the cache can benefit enormously from this! You can determine the amount of RAM that can be used to store images:

	CACHEMEM = <size in kilo bytes>

If this setting is not present, HighWire will use 100kb. It is important to point out, that if you visit graphic intensive pages HighWire may have to spend time flushing the cache memory over and over again if the cache memory limit is set too low.

  Please note that not all subformats of JPG and PNG are implemented yet. Thus, some types of images may be displayed weired (eg. interlaced, transparent, some monochome).

  Other interesting changes includes improved dithering and added support for 32k screen modes as well as better support for TrueColour and GrayScale. There has also been an optimisation of the cache scheme that lead to reduced flickering upon image rendering. Finally, a correction in the calculation of cache size for disk cached objects was made, and a bug causing the program to enter an infinite loop (when writing to the cache failed for some reason) was fixed.

 


Various issues

  Upon request from several people testing previous HighWire releases, it is now enough to just enter eg. "www.atari.org" instead of "http://www.atari.org". In other words, when no protocol prefix is specified in the URL edit field, HighWire will assume "http://". While looking into the user interface issues it is also worth pointing out that there is a new keyboard shortcut added:
 
   CTRL+N => Opens a new (empty) browser window

  The previous version did not use correct clipping when drawing infobar/edit field, something that could cause droppings on screen when the window was shaded or iconified. This is all fixed now, as is a bug that would lead to unexpected results when a table cell had both rowspan and colspan specified. Something that is all new to 0.1.5 is the progress bar (only visible if you have an infobar) which will give you an indication on how busy HighWire currently is with loading and rendering.

  If a server is not responding, HighWire can now detect this and instead of hanging you will get a message telling you that HTTP header request timed out. Another problem that could lead to infinite loops was when HighWire hit very long lines in HTML texts, obviously a bug we're happy to see deleted. If a connection fails HighWire will now correctly close the socket, thus preventing messages about "too many open files". A problem with very long URLs overflowing an internal buffer (potentially crashing HighWire) is another thing that has been cleared up in the new release.

  HighWire should now also be better at detecting situations when it is about to run out of available memory. This may prevent HighWire from crashing under such circumstances. Another change has been made in the Unicode support, to enable HighWire to cope better with invalid characters.

  Finally, a frames related problem with <base href=".."> was found and cured.

For more details see the Change.Log file.

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.