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o BGUI 41.11 Aminet Release

After several months of wait for a moment with enough free time, BGUI was
finally released to Aminet.  This release is considered stable for use and
distribution with production versions of Amiga programs.

Despite there are still a few known bugs to be addressed, all the features
that are said as being completed, do not cause any known crashes or harm of
any other kind.

Unfortunately, it was not possible yet to complete two important features:
the BGUI preferences editor and the ability to nest clipped view objects
(AKA virtual groups).  The preferences editor may still be used as it is.
The clipped views may be used but if on is used inside another, gadgets will
appear displaced due to yet unsolved bugs in coordinate calculations.

BGUI 41.11 is the same as BGUI 41.10 except that two new external classes
are supplied: a 2D bar class and a layout group class.

The 2D bar class is a proportional gadget class with a knob that may have
movement freedom in either two directions.  It may be used as a replacement
of normal proportional classes if the freedom options only enable the
movement in one direction.

It may also be used as a replacement of gadgets like progress bar class if
the freedom options completely disable the movement in both directions.
Knob bar drawing is highly optimized to avoid flicker even with gadgets
that occupy large areas.

The layout group is a sub-class of BGUI group class.  It overrides group
class layout methods to provide new types of layout that were not available
before with a more powerful control over the way group member gadgets resize
and layout relatively to each other.

One of the types of layout is a table like layout.  It lets the member
gadgets be placed in arbitrary positions in a virtual table eventually with
spanning multiple rows or columns.  There are also constraints that let the
developer define how each gadget is placed and resized within the slot that
it occupies.

The other types of layout are just particular cases of the table layout:
the horizontal group (all members in the same row), the vertical group (all
members in the same column) and the paged group (all members in the same
table cell (row/column) but only one may be made visible at once.

BGUI ships with example programs that demonstrate also how these new
gadgets may be used.  There are screenshots of these example programs in
BGUI site.

BGUI is free for use and distribution and maybe found in Aminet (dev/gui)
or at BGUI site ( http://www.bgui.e-na.net/ ).  User, developer and
AmigaGuide/HTML documentation are made available in separate archives.

There is also a BGUI Rexx interface library available that was developed
by Jilles Tjoelker.  Jilles kindly donated his library source code to BGUI.


o BGUI goes Open Source, AROS team take over

A step that was planned a long time ago to be taken right after the Aminet
release, is to Open the source of BGUI.  With the intention let it live
beyond the hardware platform on which it was original developed, BGUI
was handed over to the AROS (Amiga Replacement OS) competent development
team.

BGUI development is not by any means stopped or given up.  BGUI just got a
new open and more promissing home.  As an integrated part, BGUI inherits
the same Open Source license of AROS.  From now on BGUI source code is
available from AROS CVS repository.

For the time being the BGUI bug report database and Web interface
application will still be made available in BGUI site.  Besides the BGUI
users mailing list, the BGUI developers mailing list is now also open to
anybody.

For more information about AROS and BGUI integration go to:

http://www.aros.org/


Manuel Lemos