Issue 132 July 2001
Liquid Crystal Delight

Start • Working Glass Hero •Quarter Horse •Software To Boot •Widge Warrior •Highway Star •Beta Site •Take It Easy •Sources & PDF

BETA SITE
I remain impressed with the mid-range positioning and overall web-in-drag concept of Amulet’s Easy GUI, although I have to admit that there are some issues, not to mention a few rough edges.

One such issue is that switching between EEPROM programming and normal operation requires toggling a DIP switch, which is mounted on the bottom of the board. It doesn’t sound especially unreasonable, but actually runs counter to the easy blow-and-go approach the technology encourages. The good news is that it takes only a few seconds to edit and recompile your project. The bad news is that it also takes a few seconds each time to turn over the board and fuss with the DIP to switch to Programming mode and flip it again to check the result. If it must have a switch to differentiate modes, I suggest something like a dedicated toggle switch that’s easily accessible from the top.

A nagging concern lies in the possible complications as a result of ever more bloaty tendencies for desktop web tools and HTML feature creep. This is reflected in Amulet’s recommendation that it’s better to use a simple web page editor rather than the latest and greatest version.

In truth, after I had roughed out my interface with the web page editor, it wasn’t long before I found myself editing the raw HTML directly rather than going through the web editor. For instance, with the web page editor, tweaking the parameters for a widget required navigating a sequence of menus, lists, and dialog boxes versus a few seconds to edit the HTML with Notepad.

Another reason I drifted away from the web page editor was based on the observation that it was not quite as WYSIWYG as I had hoped, with slight differences in the formatting of the desktop and LCD versions of my interface. Perhaps more experience with any or all of the tools would enable reconciling the difference, but I’d rather spend time getting the LCD display to be the way I want it than figuring out how to coerce the tools.
Ironically, I recently wrote a column opining that the PC market is weak because our beloved boxes now have so much horsepower relative to typical users’ needs, leaving little reason to upgrade.

But I must say that by the time I had everything running—web editor, browser, Amulet compiler, and protocol simulator—things started getting noticeably pokey. Hard to place blame, but it seemed as if emulating the Amulet widgets in the web browser imposed a fair amount of stress.

Photo 4—A recently added serial port simulator allows the PC to stand in for the host. In the RS-232 monitoring window, you can see the periodic rpm message exchange and, near the end, the message that was sent when the Tach (function 1) button was pressed.