Beta Testers Needed. Now!

[serving2masters]

Hey, some may remember I had a spreadsheet program a few weeks ago. Well, it's back and it's beefed up. Huge-like.

Anyway, I'm hoping to get it done in time to submit it for Apple's Student Developer Design Awards thing on the first of March, so I could use some help testing it.

What do you get out of it, you ask? Well, damn little except a hearty handshake should I ever meet you in real life, and the joy of screwing around with this:

http://homepage.mac.com/gotterdamn/BCSpreadsheet.dmg.gz

Current features:
fully(?) functional spreadsheet which handles trig functions, standard *+/-^, sums, products, etc.

copy/cutting/pasting cells works now. I think flawlessly.

undo/redo works

insert/delete row/column

copy's as tiff for kickass pasting of a table into TextEdit and the like.

Copy as HTML code, to give you the selected cells as an html page.

Cell Info window showing the web of dependencies between cells.

Font/color changing for selected cells. (look at sample.sps for example)

Prints pretty well, but I haven't figured out how to find out if the user wants a landscape or a portrait yet.


Functions I'm hoping to do in the next five days:
Graphs. Hopefully line,scatter, and bar graphs.

[seb2]

looks nice.

the only two things i've discovered so far are: in the "save as" dialog, don't use helvetica for "File Format" and make the popup menu the same size as the one above.

and: in the application menu, rename "hide newapplication"

[martinatkinson]

Hello!

I downloaded it and willl play around with it tonight, what kind of programming language are you using to make this? I am assuming Cocoa but correct me if I am wrong.

Have a great day!

Albert

[martinatkinson]

Hello!

I quickly looked at your application and looks good, I will point one thing out. Your interface style (the black whit and grey) of the cells should probably look more like an Aqua application. Especially since you are submitting this in the design awards. I *think* that Apple will be looking for something that compliments the Mac OS X interface.

Sorry if this seems harsh just wanted to point that thing out. If you make it more Aqua-like it will be alot better in my opinion. Your features are totally awesome though and I have not found any bugs not mentioned by "seb2"

Have a great day!

Albert

[serving2masters]

First, thanks to both of you for looking at it.

seb2: The save as menu is the one apple designed - I just overrode the datarepresentationoftype method, so to get rid of that part, I'd have to tell it to only save-as in .sps and do .csv in some separate import/export thing. That might be better though, since .csv doesn't actually save everything.

Thanks for catching the newapplication thing!

martinatkinson: Yep, pure cocoa. First thing I've ever written in it.

I started out with a more aqua design, using the tableheadercell's instead of the black ones, but it looked kind of weird stacking them on the left. I'll see if I can find a better looking cell though.

[seb2]

Originally posted by serving2masters
First, thanks to both of you for looking at it.

seb2: The save as menu is the one apple designed - I just overrode the datarepresentationoftype method, so to get rid of that part, I'd have to tell it to only save-as in .sps and do .csv in some separate import/export thing. That might be better though, since .csv doesn't actually save everything.

no, sorry, i meant the label for the popup menu. since i couldn't find it in your nib, i guess you construct this at runtime. use something like [NSFont systemFontOfSize:[NSFont systemFontSize]], if that helps...

[whitesaint]

Have you read the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines? I suggest a new Icon as well. Try making the colors (the black) customizable, i know this is very easy to implement. Also make it cool by adding transprency! I know this is also very easy to implement. Other than that, yes follow the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines, especially if you are going for an award such as that. It could use a little bit of optimizing too.

-whitesaint

[serving2masters]

Whitesaint:
I got through about a page of the human interface guidelines before I decided, "screw it man, I've been using computers my whole life - I know what stuff's supposed to look like". It appears I may have been optimistic though :-)

Customizable coloring sounds good, and I'll implement that sometime this weekend.

Where would you suggest transparency? I had the cell info window transparent when I first made it, but for me at least, transparency just makes everything hard to read.

seb2:
is this what you were talking about?
http://homepage.mac.com/gotterdamn/savesheet.jpg



I changed the color scheme today, and more importantly found where most of my performance troubles were coming from, which I'll explain at the bottom of this, in case anyone is interested in learning from my experience. The interface looks a lot more "aqua" now, I think.

I also fixed one bug where the font got screwed up when loading a file.


Anyway, if anyone's interested in taking a look at the change (minimal thought it is) It's at the same link.


--------performance trouble experience---------
The cells I was using for column/row markers (the black ones) were set to be disabled. This was because I didn't want people to be able to select them, and (despite what the api says) disabling a cell is the only way to stop selection.

The performance issues came from the fact that disabled cells are partly transparent. Transparency is pretty and all when it's in the right place, but when there's a whole bunch of them being drawn, it slows everything down horribly. So, the way I got around all this was to override the isEnabled method to always return false. This way, even though my cell was still enabled (meaning it redrew itself normally), when the NSMatrix checked to see if it was allowed to be selected, it was told it wasn't.

Anyway, net result for me was it cut down on the delay when using the command-arrow commands by about 80%