SportTracks Plugins by Old Man Biking

Overview

Features

GettingStarted

Manual

Bugs & Wishes

News & History

General Features of my Plugins - Manual of Common GUI Elements

Trial Versions [new as of March 2009]
Installation
Tool Tips
Help System
'Activit edit' Actions
Plugin Information
Your "Donation Wallet"
Automatic Update Check
Undockable Controls

Trial Versions [ as of March 2009]

Some of my plugins can only be used by those of you who have donated to me or they expose a limited set of functionality to non-donators.
You can try out these plugins for a trial period of usually 1 month.
Plugins with a trial period are marked with

on the plugin's home page.

When you try out a plugin for the first time, a window pops up which looks like one of the two windows below, depending if you've already donated to me.

If you have not yet donated.

If you have already donated, but this plugin will offer additional functionality for donators who have given more than you have.

You can use the plugin during the trial period without restrictions. When the trial period ends, the plugin will stop working and pop up a message when SportTracks is started:

Note: You must be connected to the internet in order to use a trial version.

Installation

All my plugins come with a full blown multilingual installer. Installing them just takes a few mouse clicks.
No "install this DLL to folder XY, install that file to folder Z, ..." instructions.

The plugins leave uninstall information, so that you can remove them, using the standard Windows mechanism.

This is how the installer starts ...
		... and a few mouse clicks later

Note: Plugin versions released before March 2009 have been installed in a subfolder of "...\Program Files\ZoneFiveSoftware\SportTracks 2.0\Plugins".
Newer plugin versions install into the "...\All Users\Application Data\ZoneFiveSoftware\SportTracks\SportTracks\2.0\Plugins\Installed" and try to remove old installations from the path named above.

Tool Tips

Most of the elements in my Plugins' GUI offer tool tips which help you using this element.
What's a tool tip: a tiny pop up that will appear, when the mouse cursor is placed over a GUI element for a short while.
img/st_tooltips.gif

Help System

My plugins come with help pages for all GUI elements. Simply press the help button and your browser opens with the help page.
The plugin tries to open the online help page in your language.

There are two possibilities how the help button can look like.

Controls which are embedded in the SportTracks GUI

This applies to:

activity detail pages
settings pages
views

Look for a

icon which typically appears in the upper right corner of a page.
Click on it to let the plugin open the online help in your web browser.

Dialog Forms

Dialogs have a "?" symbol in the dialog windows title bar - this is common Windows look and feel.
Click on it to let the plugin open the online help in your web browser.
You can as well press "F1" on your keyboard to open the online help.

Offline Help [ as of December 2008]

My plugins try to access the manual pages on my plugin home page to access the most up-to-date information.

Should you be offline, the plugins fall back to a copy of the manual pages which was installed on your PC with the plugin.
This is in fact a local copy of my plugin home page with some items removed to save space - pages outside your current plugin scope won't show any images.
This offline help might not be as up-to-date as the online version and it is only available in English.

Note: This offline help system was added in December 2008 and will be built into all plugin versions that are released from then on.

'Activit edit' Actions

'Activity edit' actions can be executed on

one activity (in the "Daily Activity" view of SportTracks.), or on
many activities (in the "Reports" view of SportTracks).

They usually display a dialog window, while the action immediately starts running.

The dialog window contains:

a status bar which tells you which activity is currently being processed
a progress bar
an "Abort" button to abort the action. This is valuable for long-running actions performed on many activities.
Note: some actions cannot be aborted. Their abort button will be grayed out.

When the action has finished, the buttons change their appearance.
Now there are:

an "OK" button to commit the action
an enabled "Cancel" button to cancel the action and leave the logbook unchanged

Note: The OK button counts down for 10 seconds and automatically closes the dialog (and BEEPs). This prevents that some unconfirmed dialog that is "lost in space" (to be exact: hidden in the background) lets you think that SportTracks hangs.
Note 2: Hover your mouse over the OK button to stop the count down.

Plugin Information

You can find the plugin information on the bottom of my plugins' settings pages.

The plugin information comprises:

a copyright notice
exact version information (version number, build number and build date) which are necessary when you report a bug
links to the plugin homepage and the plugin forum page
credits to whoever contributed
4 buttons:
- Check for Updates: when you click on this button, the plugin searches for updates
- Donations: opens the Donation Wallet
- License: opens the license information that has been installed on your PC [ as of March 2009]
- Read me: opens the readme file with information on recent changes [ as of March 2009]

Your "Donation Wallet"

The "donation wallet" is a form where you can store and validate your donations.
To open the donation wallet, click on the "Donations" button of the settings page of any of my plugins.
Note: The plugin must be built after June 12, 2008.

See the Validating your Donation page for a step-by-step explanation of the donation wallet.

Automatic Update Check

From time to time I will release new versions of my plugins, providing new features and bugfixes. Each time SportTracks starts, my plugins check, if a newer version is available on the download server.

When a new official release or beta release is available, the plugin informs you and offers to download and install the new version. When you decide, not to download the latest version, the plugin will ask you again after a week or two.


		... after you click on the "Install ..." button, there's a check if you're sure, ...
... while the setup file is being downloaded, progress is displayed, ...
		... before installation takes place, the plugin will you ask again, ...
... you are asked to close the SportTracks application, before the installation can start, ...
		... now the installation starts as described above

You can manually trigger the update check. Go to the plugin settings page and click on the "Check for Updates" button in the "Plugin Information" area at its bottom.

Undockable Controls

Some of my plugins (as of March 2009, the Dot Racing plugin and the Power Analysis plugin) allow that parts of their activity detail pages can be "undocked". This means that they are no longer confined to the activity detail page area of SportTracks, but become free floating windows that you can move where you like.
This is especially helpful for dual monitor configurations.