Zugg Software :: View topic

Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2004 3:46 am

Here it is, the alpha Pre-Order version of Zeus.

Zeus is the core engine that the eMobius email client will be written with. The Pre-Order demo contains 3 demo applications:

1) Browser (demo.zml) - A mini web browser
2) Editor (editor.zml) - A mini text editor
3) Calculator (calc.zml) - A mini calculator

These are "toy" applications. For example, the editor doesn't even load/save files yet. The most complete application is the calculator.

These applications demonstrate some of the technology being used to develop eMobius. For example, the editor already includes as-you-type spell checking. Full Theme support (using Windows XP theme files) is also implemented and the Zeus demo comes with several pre-defined themes. You can load any Windows XP theme file to change the look of the application.

The Download and Order pages are active now at: http://www.emobius.com

I hope you enjoy playing with this new toy. There is still LOTS to be added, and even MORE to be documented. I'll be expanding the documentation as I continue to program.

Please take this opportunity to support Zugg Software and the development of the eMobius email client by purchasing the pre-order for $25. This is half of the expected public version price. This is the only time you'll be able to buy it for this low price. The price will increase when the first beta version of the eMobius email client is released.

The current license used by the Zeus demo is the normal 90-day auto-expire license that is used for zMUD. It is expected that this license will be changed to an unlimited license in the future. Upgrades are typically free for 2 years, but early adopters have the best chance of getting free upgrades longer than this since the new license code has not yet been completed by eLicense.

Feel free to post bug reports or feature requests to the "ZuggMail Forum" on www.zuggsoft.com. We'll eventually have Zeus and eMobius forums of our own, but for now this is still a good place to post.

Have fun, and thanks for your support!

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Very very nice... only possible request is being able to right-click a toolbar (floating or docked) and tell that toolbar to dock to a specific docking location which is defined in the zml file.

Novice Joined: 17 Jan 2003 Posts: 37

Does this mean that zMUD won't be having as many upgrades?

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

I get some errors when trying to run it. First it seems to require you to use an admin account or else it just crashes at startup.

After running it as admin I get an error message:
"This application was built with a trial-run version of the Addict SpellChecking and Thesaurus components. Distributing an application based upon this version of Addict is against the license agreement."

Also I don't manage to run any of the .zml files. Each time I try to doubleclick, drop them on the .exe I get the same window at startup.

Edit: It turned out that the reason I couldn't chose a .zml file was that I tried to run from a non admin account. This isn't nice - you should not be forced to jump between accounts just to check email.

Apprentice Joined: 11 Apr 2003 Posts: 119 Location: Sweden

Also, the web browser address field is a textfield, not a textbox so pressing enter causes a new line instead of browsing to the site.

/edit: Very nice first release otherwise though!

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

quote:
Originally posted by jtviper456

Does this mean that zMUD won't be having as many upgrades?

zMUD is a very cool, more than fully featured, MXP compatable mud client. It is the top of its game and it's now on a stable release. I'd imagine it has reached a plateau for a while regardless of other projects Zugg might have around.

And free upgrades on zmud for a limitted market isn't going to leave him with much money to be able to keep making said upgrades. Be thankful he's doing another project to help keep Zugg software afloat.

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 698

Slick, fresh and exciting. Very sexy!

'Hint' doesn't seem to work in the demo.zml

Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2004 3:00 pm

Rorso, please remember that this is an ALPHA.

That said, you *always* need to run as Admin to install anything that uses eLicense the first time. This is the same as zMUD and any other product.

However, I'm surprised you are getting the error about Addict. I thought I compiled it against the registered version (although since there are 3 copies of Addict on my system, it *does* get confusing).

Is anyone else getting those error messages about Addict?

Anyway, keep in mind that I haven't even tested this on any computer other than my development system, which also means it hasn't been tested on anything except WinXP Home.

Heh, of course, none of you ever saw zMUD v1.0 did you Smile

. Let's just say that Zeus already looks and works much much better. Just please remember what an early stage this is in and try to keep that in mind when you post.

Mr_Kent, where is it that "Hint" isn't working more specifically? And Vodoc, thanks for the note about the Enter key, I'll check into that.

Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2004 3:02 pm

Btw, the http://www.emobius.com/ site is finally up and running!

Wizard Joined: 14 Oct 2000 Posts: 1368

quote:
Originally posted by Zugg

Rorso, please remember that this is an ALPHA.

That said, you *always* need to run as Admin to install anything that uses eLicense the first time. This is the same as zMUD and any other product.

After I ran it as admin e-license registered it. Then I tried to run it as a standard user by moving the script files on top of the zeus.exe to execute them but it still loaded the default script file. Running as a non admin also shows an error message at each startup.

quote:

Anyway, keep in mind that I haven't even tested this on any computer other than my development system, which also means it hasn't been tested on anything except WinXP Home.

Heh, of course, none of you ever saw zMUD v1.0 did you . Let's just say that Zeus already looks and works much much better. Just please remember what an early stage this is in and try to keep that in mind when you post.

I don't think anyone has written any rude posts about Zeus here. They are just bug reports. It is odd but I kind of enjoy beta testing programs and discovering that message box was pretty funny Smile

.

In either case the non admin vs admin accounts is in my opinion an issue that needs some considerition. In my opinion Windows XP home is really, really bad when it comes to how it handles file read/write access. Unlike the professional version I cant modify this manually - that is I cant say that nonadmin account X may write to some file. If I want to do that I have to reboot Windows into failsafe mode where a new tab magically appears on file properties.

I am not sure if I remember this correctly but when I installed zMUD I think something like this happened:
1. Install zMUD to c:zMUD with nonadmin account.
2. Run zMUD - fails as you have to run as admin first time.
3. Run zMUD as admin. Generates zmud.ini, mudlist.mdb etc.
4. Quit zMUD.
5. Start zMUD as nonadmin - cant write to zmud.ini because it got admin write access only.
6. Solution: Delete the generated files from admin account and then run as nonadmin.

Now most people probably use admin account for everything but these kinds of issues seem to happen in WinXP Home.

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 873 Location: USA

Neat.

I also get the spellchecker nag screen on every startup. No problem running the sample apps either via command line or drag/drop. XP pro, already had zMud installed.

You might consider adding shortcuts for the sample apps to the installation script.

Since we have to use a text editor for now, is there any way to break a program into separate modules/files? And will we be able to link to COM DLL's without using "CreateObject" or its Java equivalent?

-Tarn

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

Ditto on the spell checker nag (nice spell checker though, I might comment)

Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2004 7:29 pm

Same thing with the spell checker, otherwise everything else works just fine and dandy.

Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2004 11:19 pm

I noticed in the default DefFormD window that if you are resizing by clicking and dragging one of the sides, you get some odd behavior when you reach the side of the screen -- the opposite side of the window starts shrinking inward Wink

.

Anyway, I am Very impressed with this program so far.. it's pretty exciting to see all the stuff you mentioned in earlier posts start to come to life.

-Nezic

Site Admin Joined: 29 Sep 2000 Posts: 389 Location: USA

Thanks for the comments!

Lets use the same format we do for zMUD betas. If you want to tell Zugg how wonderful Zeus is (Please!), use this thread. If you want to report bugs, please start another thread so none of the reports get lost.

Chiara

Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2004 7:36 pm

Don't bother posting a separate thread on the spellcheck error. I just need to delete all of the spellchecker stuff and then reinstall the registered version. Somehow it's linking to a library left over from the trial version somewhere.

On the DefFormD, ignore the entire default form (the one you get when you run Zeus with no filename argument). This form is my "play area" for putting components that I'm working on and I haven't cleared it out, so there is all sorts of wierd crap there. It's not supposed to do anything useful.

Eventually the default form will display a list of known ZML applications for you to select from.

Rorso, the comments that I noticed was the: "This isn't nice - you should not be forced to jump between accounts just to check email." Obviously nothing at this stage is related to email and obviously I'd never make you jump between accounts to check email, so that comment wasn't really appropriate at this early stage. I'm sure you didn't mean anything bad by it though.

Remember that I'm running WinXP Home here myself. Although yes, my user account has admin privs turned on. There is no way around the fact that you need to run anything that uses eLicense from the admin account first. eLicense needs to install the LicCtl service and add stuff to the registry and only the Admin enabled accounts can do this. It hasn't really been much of an issue with zMUD, or zExplorer or anything else, so I'm not expecting it to be a big issue with Zeus and is something I really have little control over.

Tarn, you can split a ZML file into "include files". See how the "aboutbox.xml" file is included into the sample applications. So yes, you can break applications into files that contain <window> statements and then use those in multiple applications. As far as COM, there will be a Core.CreateCOMObject method at some point to create COM objects, but it will work pretty much like creating them in VBScript. You can already even create other visual controls via VBScript...I just haven't documented how you do this yet. There's lots of stuff that needs to be documented that isn't shown in any of the demo apps.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Neat stuff, Zugg.

The spell checker and theme thingywhatsit are both very cool. Now you need to add those extra features to the calculator like hex <-> decimal *grin* because that's what I use the most :)

Only one sticking point for me, and that is the 'e' logo looks too much like the old internet explorer logo... hmm maybe we could have a logo competition? *grin*

Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 5:17 am

quote:
Originally posted by Rainchild
Only one sticking point for me, and that is the 'e' logo looks too much like the old internet explorer logo... hmm maybe we could have a logo competition? *grin*

Best place for logos is here: http://www.designoutpost.com/ I got a logo made for a big craft show, and I know several other people who have gotten their business logos here as well.

Posted: Mon Jun 07, 2004 6:32 am

Rainchild: gee, Zugg would never do something like that on purpose, would he? [}:)]

Except for maybe the color combination, I'm actually very happy with how the logo turned out. I might do something fancier with the 'e' in the middle, but the mobius strip animation turned out exactly how I wanted it.

Once eMobius is making some money, I'll probably have a real designer do some professional graphics for the logo and splash screens. But only once I'm selling enough to afford this and make it worth while.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

You should link the download/buy pages directly to the Zuggsoft/download pages.

Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 12:03 am

Why? Seriously, I'm interested in the reasoning behind this. These are going to be two completely different products with completely different audiences running on different web servers. I don't want people looking for eMobius to get lost in the current zMUD download page, and if I put eMobius first on the download page, that makes it more annoying for MUD people looking for zMUD.

Remember that eventually the download list for eMobius is going to be quite large. In addition to the main eMobius link, there will be downloads of various other applications, plugins, the Zeus Development system, etc.

I'd think that putting the link to eMobius on the main www.zuggsoft.com page directing people to www.emobius.com would be good enough to get zMUD people interested in eMobius, and a link from the eMobius page back to the zuggsoft.com page would be good enough for people who want to explore more. But I doubt most eMobius users are going to be even vaguely interested in zMUD.

Right now the customer base completely overlaps, but I'm doing the web design and planning for the future and not for how it is right now.

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

True. I was just thinking about that Other Products category. I see your point and know your right. Just one of those poorly thought out ideas I get right after getting home from work.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Btw this is car payment week so I'm poor. I'll preorder next week, though I don't know if I'm going to have much use for zeus until the first version of emobius comes out ;)

About the logo.. m'kay... well I might play anyways, I can't stand the explorer 'e' ;)

Posted: Tue Jun 08, 2004 6:29 pm

Heehee...I definitely understand. With quarterly taxes due this month, I'm poor too. Regarding the 'e', of course the eventual *real* logo with have a *much* better 'e'. eMobius should be better in all aspects, including the logo ;)

Enchanter Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 656 Location: USA

Hey Zugg, I have not has a chance to look at it yet, but I wanted to ask, can there be stay on top buttons like in zmud. That is one thing I HATE about the windows calulator, you cannot keep it on top when, so if your going back and forth between some document and the calulator, you end up hiding the calulator.

If the calc already has a stay on top - ignore this.