WASTE Roadmap Last updated on June 21, 2006

The latest final-quality version of WASTE is 2.1 (which is functionally identical to 2.1b1, released in August 2002) and it implements the main goal originally planned for version 2.0, namely, paragraph-level formatting, including word processor-style tabs. WASTE 2.1 is also the first version of WASTE that can be compiled natively for Mac OS X, as a Mach-O binary, while retaining backward compatibility all the way back to System 7.1 and 68000 CPUs.

WASTE 3.0

WASTE 3.0 is currently being tested and adopted in a number of Mac OS X applications. An early evaluation kit is available for download. WASTE 3.0 was rewritten from scratch in C++, using the STL, modern programming idioms, and an MVC architecture. It requires Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), and features the following changes:

• Text is stored internally in UTF-16 format.
• Text is measured and rendered using ATSUI into a Quartz (Core Graphics) context. Dependencies on Quickdraw have been reduced to a bare minimum.
• Text input is Unicode-based, using Carbon text events rather than TSM Apple events. This means all Mac OS X keyboards and input methods are supported, including many (like Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, Vietnamese) that were not usable with WASTE 2.1.
• A few APIs that were deprecated in WASTE 2.1 have been removed, and a few more are deprecated, unsupported or not fully supported.
• Low-level text-drawing and measuring hooks have been removed, as they were way too dependent on peculiarities of the WorldScript APIs.
• WASTE is now packaged as a Universal (PowerPC/Intel) Mach-O framework.

Migrating WASTE to ATSUI has taken a good chunk of time and effort, and due to fundamental differences between ATSUI and Quickdraw Text, not all features previously available in WASTE 2.1 are available in the first release of WASTE 3.0.

If you have an application that uses WASTE 2.1, please read this document to learn what you can do to prepare the transition to WASTE 3.0.

Here's a list of features planned for future builds of WASTE 3.x:

• Better font panel support.
• Built-in spell-checking support.
• An HIView wrapper.
• Accessibility support.
• Numbered and bulleted lists.

Copyright © 1998-2006 Merzwaren