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Winteracter

Winteracter

See Addtitional Licensing and Pricing Information

Winteracter is a modern GUI toolset for the Fortran 90/95 programming language. It consists of various visual development tools and a substantial subroutine library. Versions are available for most Fortran 9x compilers.

Winteracter offers many advantages:

Create modern GUI based applications using the latest Fortran standard.
GUI features based on native Windows and Motif components.
Avoid complex mixed language programming. Totally Fortran based.
No low level API access required.
Visual tools simplify GUI design.
Meaningful names make for highly readable and easily maintained code.
Mature platform independent graphics and operating system interface.
Numerous graphics hardcopy/export formats supported.
Distribution of Winteracter-based programs is royalty-free.
Free technical support by email.

New V9 (July 10)

New look

Support for latest visual styles on Windows XP/Vista/7. Dialog controls can automatically adapt to native "look" of current platform. No changes required to calling Fortran code to take advantage of new styles. See the updated screen snapshots on the Image Gallery page.
Flat toolbar style on all platforms, including X Windows.
Three new sets of pre-defined 256-colour toolbar button bitmaps, in 16x16, 24x24 and 32x32 resolutions.
New colour scheme on X Windows (see the new screen shots on the X/Winteracter page). Much finer control over X colour scheme. New redistributable colour scheme configuration tool.
All the Winteracter visual tools use the new styles, toolbars, etc.
To see the new look in action, download the latest version of the Winteracter demonstration program.

Transparent images

IGrLoadImageData and IGrSaveImageData now support transparent images in PNG (alpha channel), ICO or CUR formats.
New WBitmapBlendData blends transparent image data into screen or memory bitmap drawables.
Improved visual tool support for transparent image files.
Control over degree of transparency in image data, allowing for semi-opaque images.
New colour conversion functions which allow for transparency.
Convert between transparent and/or non-transparent formats (e.g. ICO to alpha-channel PNG).

Visual Tools

The resource editor has been updated. In particular, the toolbar and image editors have been substantially overhauled:
- The toolbar editor now mimics the newly adopted flat toolbar style. More spare images can be loaded and displayed. The depth of the undo buffer has been increased. Separate options to load the pre-defined 16x16, 24x24 or 32x32 button images. Documentation and screen updating have also been improved.
- The image editor benefits from much improved screen updating and memory management. Undo buffer increased to 12 levels. Improved handling of region selection and cut/copy/paste. New image rotation tools. Improved drawing colour selection. PCX and PNG files can now be edited, when operating in "standalone" mode. Documentation substantially updated.
- The mimic display in the menu editor has been reworked, providing more accurate replication of the menu's runtime appearance, particularly on Windows Vista/7.
- On Windows XP/Vista/7, the dialog editor now uses the current system's visual styles to display dialog controls in both edit and test modes.
WED, the Winteracter text editor, now provides a search string history, new toolbar buttons for Save All and Change Case options, better integration of the Find-All function with the other search/replace functions and an "insert #" function in the X version for Mac users.
The data viewer, WinterView, can now display the contents of ICO/CUR files or transparent ("alpha channel") PNG files. When viewing gridded XYZ data, the raw co-ordinate list can now be viewed in a separate window. The number of recent files on the File menu has been increased.
The Windows version of our development environment, WiDE, now includes a manifest creation option, to enable use of the latest visual styles. Compilation is faster on Linux and Mac, particularly when compiling multiple small files.
SetupEd and the generic installer now allow for external programs to be run during installation (e.g. a license manager or installation configuration tool).
The appearance of the contents/index control in HTML/Javascript help file sets created by the help editor, HelpEd, has been upgraded. See the Winteracter release notes for an example of such a help file set.
PlotConv can now display transparent images in ICO/CUR or PNG (alpha channel) formats.

Database interaction

Interrogate available data sources.
Interrogate table/column names and types.
Put string/number routines.
Undefined value support.
Improved error reporting.
Raw SQL command execution.
New general purpose data source viewer example program.

Common dialogs

Colour selector: Program control over custom colour buttons (these are also a new addition in the X version). Title selectable.
Directory selector : X version now includes "home directory" and "parent directory" buttons, plus better support for long pathnames.
All the common dialogs benefit from the improved look noted above.

Grids

Built in grid-window toolbar upgraded to 256 colours.
Find string and associated options now program selectable.
Improved error reporting.
Multi-cell/multi-column operations now more efficient (e.g. due to elimination of repeated validation checks).
Runtime grid redefinition now allows column width control.
Interrogate number of visible rows, original number of columns and Find option state.

Editor windows

Built in toolbars upgraded to 256 colours.
Find and Replace strings and associated options now program selectable.
Documentation reorganised and expanded.
Interrogate Find/Replace option states.

X/Winteracter resource compiler

All bitmap, icon and cursor image files are now stored in the compiled resource file on Linux/Mac in 24-bit/Zlib compressed format, rather than 12-bit/RLE-compressed as previously. This has several effects:
- 24-bit colour images now display in dialogs with full shading.
- Compiled resources containing multiple images or large images are typically much smaller.
- Resource compilation time with Intel Fortran is significantly reduced.

General

g95 support on Linux and Mac updated to "0.92 stable (July 2009)" release.
Nine new demo programs, several others updated.
2D scatter plots with point-specific colours.
New "find nearest colour" and "count colours" functions.
Various new information items, including an extensive set of system colour reporting options (e.g. menu and dialog colours), Print Manager printer name/port and X server vendor/release.
Status-bar sub-divisions size can be in pixels.
Better error reporting for errors originating from other APIs such as OpenGL, MAPI, Zlib and ODBC.
Direct control over background colour when creating and clearing memory bitmaps.
The vertex limit on shaded polygons has been eliminated.
New "Message Types" section in Programming Reference, detailing each possible message type on a separate page.
Improved clipboard management on X Windows.
Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) now officially supported.

Customers who purchased v8.0 on or after 1/June/2010 will normally be entitled to receive a free v9.0 update. Qualification for free updates from 8.0 is based on the date of shipment from us and in any event is at the sole discretion of I.S.S. Ltd. Free updates are normally shipped automatically and do not need to be requested.

Additional Updates

June 22nd 2010

Various previously inaccessible Winteracter updates for versions 4.0 through 6.0 are now available once again on the Updates page.

Absoft Pro Fortran v11.0

December 11th 2009

Winteracter 8.0 has been successfully tested with the recently released Absoft Pro Fortran 11.0 compilers on Windows, Linux and Mac OS/X. The existing Absoft Pro Fortran 10.x support in Winteracter 8.0 on Linux and Mac is also suitable for use with the 11.0 compiler. Winteracter documentation and WiDE have been suitably amended at the 8.0g update to take account of this additional compatibility. As usual, existing Winteracter 8.0 licence holders can update via the Updates page.

Windows 7

November 5th 2009

The current version of Winteracter (v8.0) has been tested on Windows 7. No issues have been identified, so there appears to be no need for an update to add support for this platform. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions of Winteracter 8.0 have been successfully tested on Windows 7. Compatibility testing has including testing of Winteracter based applications built on earlier Windows platforms (e.g. XP). These also appear to execute as expected on Windows 7.

No Windows 7 specific Winteracter update will therefore be issued, though the 8.0g update includes minor cosmetic amendments to the documentation, reflecting the additional compatibility with this platform. In general, existing v8.0 users should simply read any existing Winteracter documentation which refers to Windows Vista as meaning "Windows Vista and Windows 7".

Any users planning to develop Fortran based applications on or for Windows 7 should note that it is advisable to update to a recent version of their preferred compiler. This is not a Winteracter requirement as such, simply a compiler compatibility issue. The compiler versions used in our tests were:

IVF 11.1.051
Absoft Pro Fortran 10.2
Lahey Fortran 7.10.02
FTN95 5.40

Other compiler versions may also be compatible.

Intel Fortran 11.1

June 26th 2009

Support for Intel Fortran 11.1 has been added to Winteracter at the 8.0e update. In particular, the Windows versions of the Winteracter Development Environment (WiDE) have been upgraded to support Intel Visual Fortran 11.1.

Existing Winteracter 8.0 licence holders can update in the usual way, via the Updates page.

Intel Fortran 11.0 and Visual Studio 2008

January 8th 2009

Support for Intel Fortran 11.0 has been added to Winteracter at the 8.0c update. In particular, the Winteracter Development Environment (WiDE) has been upgraded to support Intel Fortran 11.0 on all of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. On Windows a new IVF configuration mechanism has been added to WiDE, allowing selection between multiple installed compiler and Visual Studio versions. The Windows version of WiDE 8.0c also adds support for Visual Studio 2008 as the provider of tools/libraries for use with IVF 10/11. Additionally, WiDE 8.0c now allows VS2003 to be used as a debugger, as an alternative to idb, when using IVF 10/11.

Existing Winteracter 8.0 licence holders can update in the usual way, via our Updates page.

V8.0 (July 16th 2008)

Winteracter v8.0 is now available. Upgrades are available from any previous release.

Documentation: The Programming Guide has been integrated into the main documentation set. The entire documentation set is now supplied in a single format, under a common contents/index. The documentation set now provides numerous hypertext links to/from the Programming Guide for the first time. Integration of the Programming Guide ensures that all of the supplied documentation can now be searched via a single interface.
Bitmaps: Half-toning is now supported in bitmap stretching operations on most platforms, giving much better quality bitmap rescaling. WBitmapPut, WBitmapResize, WBitmapLoad and IGrLoadImage all beneft from this change. WBitmapPut now also supports bitmap stretching on X Windows. New bitmap file format conversion routine added.
Latest O/S versions: Improved support for recent operating system releases such as Vista, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and Fedora 9.
X fonts: X Windows font support has been substantially reworked to reflect the fonts which most current Linux and Mac OS X installations actually provide. Changes also take account of font rescaling quality, which can vary depending on platform. Font selection in dialogs/menus, editor and graphics text output all benefit from these changes. Graphics applications should particularly benefit, since X fonts will be used much more often in preference to substituted "software" fonts.
Information functions: Rationalisation of the the various information functions in the IF group has been completed, including various improvements to the graphics reporting functions.
Presentation graphics: Substantially improved grid interpolation algorithm. More hatching options. Better missing data handling in filled contour plots. User scaling limit eliminated.
Help files: WHelpFile (Win32) no longer relies on external DLL to display CHM files in IVF, LF95 5.7/7.x and Absoft 10 versions.
Visual tools: Many new menu accelerator keys added to most of the visual tools.
WiDE: Simplified OpenGL linking. Option to open files in system associated app on Mac OS X. Improvements to Project and Switches dialogs.
Resource editor: Toolbar editor allows selection from more images. Dialog editor alignment grid improved on Vista. Better resource identifier file/module naming conventions. Improved dialog put/get code generation dialog.
WED: Better tab key handling. More edit buffers. HTML symbol insertion. Improved printing option management. Command line "goto string" option. Improved dialog put/get code generation dialog in WiDE version.
HelpEd: Project source format (RTF-to-HTML) conversion option. HTML symbol option insertion options, as for WED. Better topic identifier file/module naming conventions. Additional help options in topic editors.
SetupEd and generic installer: Various improvements including better Vista support, optional licence agreement dialog, support for PNG or PCX bimaps, administrator privilege check, all-user/current-user shortcuts choice and more.
WinterView: The data viewer provides better management, recognition and display of missing values. Displaying large XYZ data sets is much faster thanks to the improved grid interpolation option. Better local decimal point character support on Windows.
Compilers: Updated compiler support. Intel versions now built with v10.1 on all plaforms. g95 support on Linux and Mac updated to latest 2008 "0.91 stable" release. (Note: MS PowerStation is no longer supported as of this release.)
Installation: Various improvements to installation procedure on all of Windows, Linux and Mac. Better Vista support. Improved Windows shortcut creaion. New "Apps" directory generated on Mac allowing easy invocation of tools and documentation via Finder. Prompt for preferred documentation/web browser on Linux.
Pixel co-ordinates: Mouse and keyboard messages now also include raw pixel co-ordinate values. Graphics units to/from pixel conversion routines now include top-left origin option, for consistency with other library routines which use pixel co-ords.

Customers who purchased v7.10 on or after 20/May/2008 will normally be entitled to receive a free v8.0 update. Qualification for free updates from 7.10 is based on the date of shipment from I.S.S. or a recognised I.S.S. reseller and in any event is at the sole discretion of I.S.S. Ltd. Free updates are normally shipped automatically and do not need to be requested.

Additional Licensing and Pricing information

Commercial Licences

A Winteracter commercial licence entitles the purchaser to install a single copy on a single CPU. Linked executable programs developed using Winteracter under a commercial licence may be distributed without further royalty or run-time licence payments to ISS.

Academic Licences

An educational discount is available to qualifying institutions, subject to the following condition : Software developed using Winteracter under an educational licence may only be distributed to other educational and research establishments, on a non-profit making basis. i.e. the only charges should be for media and handling. An Educational licence can be upgraded to a full commercial licence for the difference in cost plus the currently applicable one-off upgrade fee.

Multi-item Discounts

When purchasing multiple licences or upgrades, a discount of 20% is available off all but the most expensive item ordered. Orders must be placed at one time to qualify for this discount. Multi-item discount is not available on split orders.

Hardcopy/Export Drivers

Winteracter includes a full set of graphics hardcopy/export drivers at no extra charge.

Support

ISS operates a free Winteracter technical support email service. Registered Winteracter licence holders may submit bug reports and other Winteracter related enquiries by email to this service. ISS reserves the right to vary the nature, availability and lifetime of this free service at our sole discretion. In general, we aim to respond to technical support enquiries within one working day of receipt.

Compiler Transfers

A Winteracter licence applies to a specific vendor's compiler(s) on a specific platform. e.g. A single Winteracter licence provides versions for all Lahey Windows Fortran 9x compilers (LF90, LF95 and Elf90). Existing Winteracter licence holders who wish to transfer their licence from one vendor's compilers to another, on the same platform, may do so when purchasing a Winteracter version upgrade, subject to the following terms:

The licence holder must agree to cease using the version for the previous vendor's compiler(s) at the time of the upgrade.
Future technical support for that licence will apply only to the version for the alternative vendor's compiler(s). Support will not be available concerning issues which relate to the previous compiler.

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