Re: [Emutos-devel] Desktop date and time formatting

[Vincent R. <vin...@fr...>]

On 22/06/2015 18:52, Roger Burrows wrote:
> At the moment, EmuTOS displays it according to the preferences saved
> in EMUDESK.INF;

Is there any Atari TOS version which behaves like this?
If not, we could completely remove those date options from the desktop 
preferences dialog.

> Also, note that NVRAM contains additional date/time stuff (used by Atari TOS)
> that isn't covered by the existing preferences dialog: 2 additional date
> formats, plus the date separator.  I've been thinking about the best way to add
> support for that without making things too confusing or incompatible.

If I'm not wrong, in Atari TOS 4.x those settings are set using the 
NVRAM control panel applet.

So we could either:
- ask the user to use a control panel applet to change the date 
settings, just like TOS
- implement an new dialog in EmuDesk to set all the NVRAM parameters 
(that would make sense - and we have room in 512k ROMs)

> Also, I want to allow users to be able to use EMUDESK.INF to control
> their date/time preferences, like now, but I also want to allow them
> to be able to control them with NVRAM if they prefer.

Isn't it overkill to provide 2 mechanisms?

Another axis of reflexion:
- The NVRAM is always stored on the computer
- EMUDESK.INF may be stored on a floppy

If I save EMUDESK.INF with French date settings on a floppy, and I give 
that floppy to someone else in a foreign country, do I really want that 
the French date settings override the ones of other people? I don't 
think so.

A similar problem is the drive icon labels saved in EMUDESK.INF. I don't 
remember how we solved that.

Another similar question would be the keyboard layout (if it could be 
saved in EMUDESK.INF). This one must definitely stay on the local 
computer only.

> My current idea is to add an additional radio button "Default" to each of the
> date and time preferences.  Selecting that would cause date & time formats
> (including the date separator) to be taken from NVRAM if present; if not
> present, values would be the usual country defaults.  The actual implementation
> of this would be to use the value in the _IDT cookie, which is already set up
> like this.  Of course, "Default" would be a saved option too.

This would be good, but probably overkill.

> In order to put this into the dialog without making it even larger, I'm
> thinking of shortening the DD-MM-YY & MM-DD-YY buttons to D-M-Y/M-D-Y (or
> possibly DMY/MDY) and 24 Hour/12 Hour to 24H/12H (or possibly 24/12).

That's very acceptable.

-- 
Vincent Rivière