Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 11:13 pm Post subject:
And for history's sake and over 10k total posts later, I link to my definitive mantra/rant of why I walk the road I do. After all this time, I'm now on step 15, even if it's solely due to standing on the shoulders of giants.
Well, really, it's their fault. They should've done their history research. The one thing that makes me productive is getting me really pissed off.
As always, if you see Tony S. in the streets
Yeah, I was just thinking about ol' Tony recently....
OPENSTEP wrote:
make offerings of myrrh and fruit at his feet for he has shaped the present in ways he probably never thought possible.
Not sure I'd go that far if I saw him, but I'd sure shake his hand and thank him for being such a self-aggrandizing jerk and pissing Ed off back then.... May well have been the best thing that ever happened to "OOo on the Mac"
I wish the current big man would spend a little more time on QA and a little less on other things...OOo 2.0.x seems pretty buggy, and from all reports, waaaay buggier on the Mac than on supported platforms (and the bugginess delta seems greater in 2.0.x than in 1.x versions that were built/released by now-departed personalities)....
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 11:25 pm Post subject:
sardisson wrote:
I wish the current big man would spend a little more time on QA and a little less on other things...OOo 2.0.x seems pretty buggy, and from all reports, waaaay buggier on the Mac than on supported platforms (and the bugginess delta seems greater in 2.0.x than in 1.x versions that were built/released by now-departed personalities)....
The biggest loss there was probably asxless. I myself prefer to move *really* slowly with new apps. Just like Scotty, underpromise and overdeliver. Not only makes you a "miracle worker" (go doohan), but also makes the end-result generally seem more professional as well since you consciously try to exceed everyone's expectations.
When I did OOo X11 releases, I tried to impose upon everything my own concepts of a more traditional release cycle involving prerelease, alpha, beta, and GM cycles with a healthy amount of QA time inbetween. I figured that even though it was open source, it still deserved to undergo the same full testing and QA process as any commerical software package.
Those are but my opinions, and they're not shared by all software engineers. After all, isn't gmail still in beta?
As I believe I said somewhere above, pretty screenshots does not a functinoal product make. I've got some /C screenshots living around as great living proof
Actually, the Yeti and Goblin ones seem to have gotten lost in the server move (at least the ones we were using in the wiki)
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 11:58 pm Post subject:
C**p. I've got the shots on the old server, hadn't realized I f'd them up too. I won't be in the physical presence of that server until mid next month so will try to restore them then for reference
Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 607 Location: Australia
Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2006 4:36 am Post subject:
OPENSTEP wrote:
Well, I don't know at all how ShapeShifter works (and hadn't heard of it before, actually). At present, everything is drawn using HITheme and higher level APIs, so anything that shifts the control appearance at a low level (read, future OS X system updates!) will have no problem since these are all native widgets. The one I know how to do offhand is to flip to the graphite theme option in the Appearance system panel. Relaunch, and voila:
ed
Must say I prefer the graphite to the blue. I'm pleased that the change is so easily achieved! but I'll wait till it's behaving itself better. KUTGW.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2006 4:56 am Post subject:
It's the OS that does the change, not our stuff. IIRC, I think the Aqua theme was the default for OS X Client while the Graphite one was for OS X Server. Did it start with 10.1? I forget.
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sat Apr 29, 2006 10:51 am Post subject: scrollbar thumb size fixed
OK, I finally tracked down the problem with scrollbar thumb size. Turns out it's more because Carbon kind of works bassackwards. Normally you'd think min is the smallest value of the range, max is the largest value of the range, and viewsize would be the amount of data visible. Not true...in Carbon for proportional scrollbars, max corresponds with the maximum allowable value for the start of the visible range instead.
Anyway, this is poorly documented in the Carbon docs, so here's the link that helped me for reference:
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 8:25 pm Post subject: spinboxes
After spending hours trying to track down a stupid error, an initial implementation of "spinners" is now complete. These are the little stepper up/down arrows with an edit box that allow the value to be incremented and decremented:
There's still some work to do with the bounds and the like, but it's coming along and the arrows hit test and hilight accordingly.
Most all of the salient controls within NWF are now completed in a rudimentary form...excepting tabs. That's the next major hurdle. Beyond that, NWF itself needs to be extended to cover the additional controls I want to add.
Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 8:47 pm Post subject: Re: spinboxes
OPENSTEP wrote:
Most all of the salient controls within NWF are now completed in a rudimentary form...excepting tabs. That's the next major hurdle. Beyond that, NWF itself needs to be extended to cover the additional controls I want to add.
After that comes the bug fixing and optimization
Send that man some more beer!
Smokey _________________ "[...] whether the duck drinks hot chocolate or coffee is irrelevant." -- ovvldc and sardisson in the NeoWiki
Joined: May 25, 2003 Posts: 4752 Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Posted: Sun Apr 30, 2006 10:10 pm Post subject:
Another problem with most all of the widgets (scrollbars excepting) is that they suffer from what I call the "cheap whore" look. It happens with a lot of things that are appearance/HITheme based and can be found in professional apps as well. The problem is tha the shadows around controls on OS X are drawn through alpha blending. The problem is that if you keep redrawing the control without erasing the background (or properly clipping...) the shadow will continue to draw and draw and draw and after reapplication a few times it looks like too much eyeliner has been applied around the button/control.
NWF needs to be extended to take this into account, either by the implementor being able to return in a runtime dependent manner a flag to force erases prior to widget drawing or a flag passed only on first render of a widget after an erase.
This is but one example of how we extend OOo with new core functionality. I've already done it for scrollbars, and more will come. It's also why I put this off until 2.0 since now instead of backporting an entire framework I can just make requisite extensions.
I know I've been in the shadows lately, but I had to come out to say nice work, ed.
I swear, watching you and patrick is like going to Preservation Hall... no, not that you're old.. you're like two jazz masters just doing your thing, and I get to hang back and appreciate it as a fan without entirely undersanding what it is exactly you're doing.
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(at least the ones we were using in the 
