Cardbox on the Eee: 4 – what doesn’t work

You have installed Cardbox on Wine on the Asus Eee, and you have set things up so that you can start Cardbox.

This means that you can create your own databases, edit and search them, and access databases on Cardbox servers on the Internet (or on a local LAN server).

Despite this, not everything works. The problems come from the partial nature of Wine’s implementation of some Windows functions.

We would welcome your help with this. Would downloading or installing additional software make a difference? Are there changes to the configuration that will make Cardbox work better?

We are giving away the Cardbox Home Edition licence on the Asus Eee because we want every Eee user to have the benefit and enjoyment of having Cardbox available. Help us to make this happen!

Programming note: tooltips again

This posting is of historical interest. It exists to help other programmers who may come across a similar problem.

When you move your mouse over a toolbar button, a small tooltip pops up to tell you what the button does. If the button is disabled then Cardbox also shows a yellow box next to the button, telling you why it’s disabled, in the same way that it does with disabled menu items.

On Windows, the tooltip and the yellow box are adjacent, so that you can read them both. On Wine, the tooltip was in the same place as the yellow box and obscuring part of it.

Programming note: WS_EX_TOPMOST

This posting is of historical interest. It exists to help other programmers who may come across a similar problem.

When you move your mouse over a disabled (grey) menu item, Cardbox tells you why it’s disabled:

On CrossOver Mac, the yellow explanatory window hid behind the main Cardbox window and couldn’t be seen.

Bugs: viewing online help

Windows Help behaves inconsistently in different configurations of CrossOver Mac.

To reproduce these bugs, open any Cardbox database and do Search > Select. When the search box has opened, press F1 (or fn+F1) to open the online help.

Under Windows you will get this:

Programming note: tooltips

This posting is of historical interest. It exists to help other programmers who may come across the same problem.

Once Cardbox was working under Wine, we found something very awkward about using it. Whenever you moved the mouse onto a button, intending to click it, Cardbox would lose the input focus and you would have to click the mouse twice: once to get the focus back to Cardbox and once to click the button.

Bug: no Help button in messages

Here is an error message from Cardbox running under Windows:

Here is the same message from Cardbox running under CrossOver Mac:

This is an irritation because the user doesn’t know when extra help is available for a message. The help is still available by pressing the F1 key (or fn+F1, depending on how the Mac’s system preferences are set up).

Technical

This is probably a bug in the underlying Wine implementation. It appears that the MB_HELP option of the MessageBox() function is simply ignored.