Where to start, where to start?
Judge of Character
So I’m talking to a potential employeer/client about something entirely unrelated to all things Llama. I mentioned that I enjoy contracting because I can work 20 to 30 hours a week on client work and then 20-30 hours a week on my personal projects (Llama, Meadows Design, etc). We also talked about a local IT jugernaut — for lack of a better term — and his new foray into the MMO space. This was interpreted as “I bill my clients 40 hours a week while I only work 20 and all I want to do is write video games”. To anybody that knows me, this notion is absurd. Comments taken out of context? Unlikely as the conversation lasted 10 minutes at the most. My guess is people hear what they want to hear and judge people by their own actions or intent. I’ll vent more on my own blog, but in the end I don’t really want to work with people that are such bad judges of character so it all worked out for the better.
WinForms not ready for prime-time
For my work with Meadows Design, I’m working on a new event viewer for Windows. While I know I should be writing this to be OS native, I wanted to get a little more familiar with the WinForms functionality available in .NET 1.1. Being a big .NET advocate after spending years in the Java world, I’ve come to the conclusion that WinForms just aren’t ready for prime-time.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a huge improvement over AWT/Swing and it’s going in the right direction but it’s just not there. For instance, I want to owner-draw my tabs. Well, if I set the tab page to owner draw I can paint pretty rectangles, etc within the tabs but the tabs themselves stay the same “blech” brown. To completely make them owner-draw, I have to use P/invoke code. Want to change the background color of your menu? Well, again, the built-in owner draw functionality falls short. I can make the “File” text a lovely shade of yellow, but it’s chased to the end of the window with that same “blech” brown. For me to change the menu bar color, I have to use P/Invoke code again and call the Win32 API function DrawMenuBar. Of course, there are the subsequent GDI brush calls, etc.
Why not 2.0 you may ask? I’ve already narrowed the market by writing this in 1.1. The 2.0 install base in nowhere near as pervasive as I would need it to be to make this application nothing more than an exercise of how to write software that nobody would use.
Cocoa Calendar Control
Ok, this has been bugging me for a while. I have an idea for an OS X piece of shareware but the Calendar control just annoys me because I can’t resize it in the designer (visual tools make you lazy, you know that, right?). Anyway, I think I have a way around it and if it works I’ll post it up here.
Random Thoughts
- Check out the Prototype JS library. It’s pretty slick.
- Rico’s pretty nice too, though it has some Safari problems.
- Llama work is progressing nicely. Gonna keep that quiet though.
- WTL will probably be the framework of choice for the next version of my event viewer. A good tutorial can be found here.
andy .Net Development, Rant, Software