Managed to get a few more features going one of which fixed something that was annoying me.

It was annoying to me to continuously having to click in the message text area to put the cursor in there. And when clicking on one of the buttons to manipulate the text (adding bold, italics and/or underline tags to your text) the cursor would be outside of the text area so you would have to click on the icon to put the tag into the textarea and then click in the textarea to resume typing your message. I've added JavaScript to the body tag to keep the cursor in the textarea and added a line to each Javascript function which will always return the focus to the textarea after clicking on the manipulation button. So far two testers have verified that it was working properly but we will have to keep on testing it but it should work in any newer version browser. Anyone using a browser that doesn't support this feature will have to continue clicking in the textarea box each new message that they type and when they click a text manipulation button.

And then I added the ability to save a conversation. Each IM window with your conversation with a different pal now has a disk icon you can click to save your consersation with that person. Clicking the disk icon will open a window which in the background saves your entire conversation as a text file in a temporary directory and a link will open the text file in another window. This text file may open in Notepad (or another text editing program your system has set as the default) or it will be opened by the same browser you are using for the IM system. In a text editor you can go to File -> Save and select where you want to save it and what you want to call it. In a browser you'd most likely do File -> Save Page As... and then you'd also select where you want it and what it should be named. You can then view the conversation any time that you want on your harddrive. Even if you aren't connected to the IM system or even the Internet for that matter. Each temporary saved conversation text file will be deleted whenever you log out.

There are a handfull more features that I want to add. But not a whole lot and none of them are very extensive. At this point I will consider The Mercury System to be out of the programming stage and fully in the testing stage.

Stay tuned for more updates.

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After a slow start after coming home from work i was able to get the text manipulation project underway. Text manipulation would be a program's way of allowing users to easily affect text easily. Such as bold, italics and underline. Like a word processor would do. But an even more likely example would be an HTML editor where you click a button for bold and it enters the HTML tag for bold so that you don't actually have to memorize the HTML tags.

I pondered exactly how I wanted to achieve this goal and at first I was thinking a form for each button that would change from to after you'd clicked on it to use it. And when you clicked on the to close the bold tag it would revert back to . This would help you remember to close all tags that you may have accidentally left open. But there was a problem with the number of forms and how they had to be used and messages were being sent empty. You could see that a message had been sent but after the user's name it would be blank.

So then I decided that I would have to use images and javascript to place the tags into the message box. Of course I would have to create images for both a tag open and tag close state and have them both show. I may be able to figure out a way have only open or closed tags show and have it switch to the other state after it is clicked. But it wouldn't be essential or even all that important.

And there is also a URL link. Upon clicking on this image a javascript text box will popup. It has a field to enter the URL that you want to send a link for. You click the OK button and it generates the HTML to send them the link to where you wanted them to go. The link will open the URL in a window outside the IM window.

So now the average IM user can easily alter their text to call attention to certain words in a post.

It's elementary!

Comment! (3) | Recommend! | Categories: IM [t], Mercury System [t], text manipulation [t]