admin's blog

Today sees the release of WaterSums 1.1.1, more than 4 months after the initial release of WaterSums 1.1. This version includes many new features, most of which are described in the Release Notes. Some bug fixes have been made also. We also have a new website theme to celebrate - designed by Chris Morgan.

The main highlights of WaterSums 1.1.1 are:

• auto-analyse,
• contours,
• simple and rule-based control editing,
• analysis report file display,
• Load and Save features for Curves and Patterns, and
• feature catch-up for the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin.

WaterSums now has a single download that utilises 64-bit features where possible on 64-bit Windows operating systems and runs as a 32-bit application on 32-bit systems.

Why not download the new version and test it today? The new automatic analysis and display of contours will certainly get your attention.

In the first part of this article, the difficulties of enhancing WaterSums to use toolbar buttons to control simulation playback speed with the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV) were discussed. In the second part, an asynchronous pause and unpause function were presented. This third and last part ties the pieces together by presenting a solution which makes it relatively easy to control the ASV without the crashes that can happen frequently when there are active animations.

In the first part of this article, the difficulties of enhancing WaterSums to use toolbar buttons to control simulation playback speed with the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV) were discussed. In this part, we see the implementation of some functions to help with the necessary pausing of animations before various ASV operations can be performed successfully. Searches of the web did not find any useful hints in this direction, but extensive experimentation and testing came up with a method that worked without crashing.

Update: This blog entry has been updated to include extra checks to make the pause function safer for more complex animations.

As stated in a previous blog entry, WaterSums 1.1 introduced many new features that were only available with the Silverlight plugin. WaterSums 1.1.1 aims to backport some of this functionality to the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV) plugin.

One of these features is adjusting the speed of animation playback using the toolbar buttons in WaterSums and this uncovered some knotty problems with controlling Adobe SVG Viewer. Update: more knotty problems have been discovered and this blog entry has been updated to include the extra information.

It has been a while since I reported the latest developments in WaterSums software, so here is an update. WaterSums 1.1.1 is slowly moving closer to release. This new release adds Adobe SVG Viewer support for many of the new features added in WaterSums 1.1 which only worked with the Silverlight plugin. Various new features have also been added including:

• New Auto-Analyse after network edits
• Network Analysis Result Summary now displayed in status bar
• EPANET analysis report files are now displayed with syntax highlighting and hyperlinks to network objects
• Display of contours based on network nodal elevations.
• Simple and Rule-Based Controls are now included in the Project tree and a Control Editor with syntax highlighting and Control checking is provided

In the first part of this article, the difficulties of enhancing WaterSums to use the mousewheel with the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV) were reported. Zoom (scale change) and Scroll (translation) operations are not handled synchronously by ASV and animations complicate this even more. Searches of the web did not help and experimentation was the only option. The conclusions were that for ASV:

1. mousewheel zooming is not possible without stopping animations
2. map zooming and scrolling is much slower when existing animations are paused
3. maximum zoom limits in ASV must be handled

WaterSums 1.1 introduced many new features that were only available with the Silverlight plugin. WaterSums 1.1.1 aims to backport some of this functionality to the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV) plugin.

One of the desirable features is zooming with the scroll wheel. Thanks to various contributors, this can be easily enough added through Javascript (see http://adomas.org/javascript-mouse-wheel/ for a native Javascript method or http://plugins.jquery.com/project/mousewheel for a JQuery plugin), but once the messages are being received, that is where the fun really starts.

A "partially 64-bit" release of WaterSums 1.1 is now available with a new patch release of WaterSums. The version reported by the About box is 1.1.0.11 and it can be downloaded from the downloads page in 32-bit or 64-bit versions. The release notes are also available describing the fixes made in this patch.

WaterSums is currently a 32-bit application because neither Microsoft Silverlight, nor Adobe SVG Viewer are available in a 64-bit version. WaterSums 1.1 runs on 64-bit versions of Windows in 32-bit mode. A version of WaterSums that does the analysis in 64-bit mode is slated for public release today. The download will be slightly larger, and testing so far indicates that the performance is almost identical. Not a very compelling case to move to a partially 64-bit version, but it will be there if you want it!

Now is the time to introduce Ben Morgan to readers of this blog. This WaterSums admin blog is written by Mark Morgan and Ben is one of my sons. He is doing a software engineering course at university, but his skill at finding obscure bugs was finely tuned before ever he started any formal training! Whenever you read about the fixing of any obscure bugs in the release notes, Ben is probably the one who found them. For example, he has recently found that clicking to the right of the histogram area in the pattern editor will cause WaterSums to crash. This will be fixed in the next release, but by then he will probably have found some others as well.