Amaya 4.3 first impressions.

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001 Irene.Vatton@inrialpes.fr wrote:

> The Amaya team is proud to announce the Amaya 4.3 release.

I have been trying this out on Win98.  

Things have gone reasonably well, but there are a few points I'd like to 
raise.

Firstly, you may remember I had problems seeing the tooltip help on Solaris.
I have not tested this on Solaris yet, but under Win98 I get black on cream
tooltips, which I can see.

I have not figured out how to adjust the default colour of links for pages
without style sheets.  I can set the foreground and background correctly
with no problems, but this I cannot change.  Similarly I would like to
set the default colour for visited links also.

I noticed that Access Keys are now supported for some elements.  According
to tests of my pages that I ran on Bobby a while back, one can have accesskeys
for text links, but there is nothing about the support for these.  I think
I put some in my pages, but cannot see anything, which is fair enough for
now.  So I went to the Activity statement:

<see next point>

to see what plans in this area might be and below the word
Introduction I could see a link, but no surrounding text.
I have white on black as my default colours, so I think the text there is
defined to be black, and the background is left as default. Please could
you define all the colours on that page so it is accessible?

I tried to cut and paste the URL from Amaya into this window, but the
paste operation was not activated.  Indeed, I see from my clipboard
viewer that using the menus in amaya Edit->Copy does not put anything
in the windows clipboard.

Finally, when amaya starts it creates a window that is too big.  OK, I 
have fixed that by saving the window geometry after a resize. But the
odd thing about this is that until I resized the window to a sensible
size, the wheel on my mouse did not work.  Now it does, of course.
This may indicate some unintended coupling in the Amaya code...

Anyway, it is good to see progress being made with Amaya, and whilest
I have not been able to access the activity statement with Amaya, it
is generally performing well.


One more point that has occurred to me.  Some time ago I asked if the cursor
could change shape when it was over a link, so that it was easier to see
that a link was there, whatever the attributes for the page.  It was 
pointed out that links are shown by the presentation of a URL in the
bottom of the Amaya window.  However, since moving to a PC I am now using
screen enlargement software which follows my mouse around the real screen
whiles showing the relevant section on the whole of my display.  This 
means that when I am looking at the top of the amaya window, for most
sensible sizes of that window, I cannot see the bottom of the window.
So, any changes apparent there are missed.   I should be able to create
a special subwindow that always keeps this bottom part in view, when 
I am using Amaya, but that depends on the software knowing I am in Amaya,
and it seems it can only tell which application I am in by the text on
the window frame.  This text has no constant part -- it changes as 
I browse different pages, so I cannot use this facility.

Therefore, 2 possible fixes for this are:

Change the shape of the mouse pointer as most other browsers do.
   This will not necessitate any configuration of my screen magnification
   software.

Change the window title to always include "Amaya" in text form, 
   so my software can detect it.  

I am using Lunarplus for enlargement,

http://www.dolphinuk.co.uk/

on Win98.


	Thank you,
	Hugh
	hgs@dmu.ac.uk

Received on Thursday, 1 March 2001 14:03:10 UTC