We love our colour text but it can be difficult for visually impaired people to read, many of whom chose the Apple II back in the day because it didn’t have multi-coloured text or background colours. Also, some people have voiced a preference for strict black-and-white text to keep the microM8 experience more in line with that of a real Apple II.
In response to these concerns, we’ve implemented a ‘high contrast’ mode which strips the colours out of the UI, which is available via the ‘disk’ menu at the top left-hand corner of the microM8 window (it becomes visible when you approach it with the mouse.)
To turn on high-contrast mode, select High Contrast from the menu. To return to the land of colour, just click it again. This setting is persistent, and so when you launch microM8 later it will start up in high-contrast mode, if selected.
Filled Triangles in microLogo
Logo doesn’t just have to be about vectors; there’s no reason why other OpenGL elements can’t be used in microLogo. And so we’ve added the FT and FC (or SETFC) commands. FT draws a triangle in front and to the right of the turtle’s position using the same size units as vectors. In the example above, we’ve made a FT (filled triangle) of 40, then moved forward 40 – as you can see, the turtle is then at the top of the triangle.
The turtle does not move when creating a triangle. You can use the FC (or SETFC, for consistency with SETPC) command to change the colour of the next triangle you generate, to one of the 16 available Logo colours (same as SETPC). Combined with microLogo’s 3D movement commands, you can create some interesting designs, as in the example below.
If you have an existing copy of microM8, it should auto-update with the new features, otherwise you can download it from the Download page.
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