Ed & Simon have been working on using a new graphics toolkit to drive the underlying drawing functions. Version 4.8a will be compiled using the graphics toolkit GTK+. This new graphics system works with newer 24Bit display monitors and has some other advantages. Otherwise you should only experience different looking menus and popup dialogs.

Ed has been working on the column selection in the FMAP (sequence) display. Column settings are now preserved for any new sequence displaying in the same window.

Fred has been working on the TableMaker, mainly in order to integrate the existing table-display with the new query language AQL.

The TableMaker window should look a little friendlier, but all the functionality should still be there. The table results display is now disconnected from TableMaker and appears in it's own window. Unfortunately due to this separation the column width information currently doesn't get transferred to the table display. Your entry in the [Width] field in TableMaker is therefore currently not used - this will be fixed soon.

The buttons in the table result display have also changed. It is now not possible to get back to the definition window or re-run the TableMaker - but of course since it is a different window, you still have the TableMaker window on your screen.

The buttons to sort and and switch columns are slightly different, but we'll try to get all the old functionality back soon, and add more useful features to this window.

There is now a simple window to run AQL queries in the graphical acedb (xace). The menu-item to start this window is called 'AQL query' and you find it in the long main-menu on the old-style main-window, or under the menu on the [Edit] button in the new-style main-window.

The way to edit a query is still extremely rudimentary, so it is advisable to compose a query in emacs and then cut'n'paste the finished query into the yellow entry box, and select [Run query].

Find out more about AQL at http://www.sanger.ac.uk/Software/Acedb/whelp/AQL/

The xace program can now be remote controlled by a small program called xremote.
You can now send tace or giface commands to a running xace process and make it pop up a sequence object, or parse a file. The communication works over the X-display (make sure setenv DISPLAY is set correctly).

The command you send to xace are the usual tace or giface commands. All giface commands have to be prepended by the keyword 'gif'. A complete session has to be sent as one command line, commands are separated by a semi-colon ;

   % xremote -remote 'gif seqget XYZ ; seqdisplay '

The seqget command can be called without a sequence name in the remote-control context, it will then try to grab the sequence in the active FMAP window marked 'Selected DNA'

The textual output from such remote commands is printed in the window where you typed xremote. The communications protocol isn't very secure yet and will probably be improved very soon.

Simon has taken advantage of a few nifty bits in the new graphical toolkit and added some useful features to the tree-window-update-mode and the read-ace-file window. You can now edit multiline text, by clicking on the text-tag once (in update-mode) and then selecting 'Edit' from the pull-down menu. This will bring up a little note-pad style text editor, which makes text editing easier than the yellow box which used to provide just a single line.

The same notepad editor is also used in the read-ace-file window. You can click on [Enter text] and type in or cut'n'paste some acefile text into the little note-pad. When you click OK it will be read just like an acefile.