New Expression Editor for Multimedia Fusion

These days, Microsoft Word has a really good equation editor built into it:

On the other hand, look at Multimedia Fusions expression editor:

I thought it’d be great if Multimedia Fusion had proper equation editor. If you typed something like “1/2” it would automatically turn it into a fraction, or you could use buttons like in the first screenshot. Furthermore, I envisioned a tree on the right where you could drag-and-drop icons from, which would represent expressions. Clicking an expression would show a pane at the bottom of the screen with various options. I thought that perhaps an icon could also have some descriptive text associated with it.

The final difference is you’d be allowed to introduce variable names and at the bottom you could define them. This can make expressions a lot easier to read.

I actually programmed most of this, and I made something which translated MMF expressions to a visual display. However, I am now at the stage of making them editable and I just can’t be bothered anymore. I pretty much want to get out of all this MMF programming, at least until MMF3.

Another idea was a similar editor for editing strings, built around the idea of a jigsaw puzzle style interface where you join things together, and also apply functions to sets of jigsaw puzzles (denoted by a background). I didn’t even start programming this, however.

Whilst I am here, the latest news with Ini++ is as follows: The undo features are all finished, as mentioned in this post. However, the Load Object function was crashing (in either normal or Unicode version of MMF), so I am looking into that, and we’ll have to see what Yves says. I’ve also a request from somebody else to add another feature, and I’ll see if I have to do that. Some of the Unicode versions bugs have been fixed, however. For instance, saving global strings now works (even if loading global strings does not). When this is out the way I can finally get the Chart object out, which I am really keen to do.