While I'm on the Subject of Tabs...
When Firefox came out with tabs implemented, one thing was immediately obvious: this would save real estate on my screen. Even at work, where I have two monitors, I don't have enough space to have multiple browser instances open. I have a hex editor and a text editor (Crimson Editor) that both use tabs to handle multiple files, and I've never wanted them to work differently.
What I don't understand is why more applications aren't making use of this new mechanism. Actually, just about every modern spreadsheet does, except that the tabs are pages in the same spreadsheet, rather than different documents. Adobe Acrobat almost gets it right - all documents load into the same window, but you have to use the "Window" menu to switch betweeen them. I'm sure there are many other examples of apps that are halfway there, but what I'm really intested in are the apps that are all the way there. GAIM, for example. I would love to see tabs in OpenOffice.org.
Yesterday I had the functionality to support tabs in wmamp working, but the visuals weren't there. Instead only the name of the active tab was shown. I spent some time today implementing some general-purpose tab routines, and I think I spent almost as much time getting them to look right today as I spent making them work yesterday. This is probably why I don't like UI programming very much. What I considered to be the "interesting" code was already done and working, having "pretty tabs" (okay, pretty is relative here) is just so much chrome. But it's done now, and I likely won't look at it again unless someone decides to make me some nice graphical buttons to replace the text. And I would appreciate said graphics. In terms of audio playback functionality I believe that wmamp now at least matches (and possibly exceeds) the functionality of the original Linksys player. It does not, however, look as nice. A fellow by the name of Ben Frost (for whom I have no contact information) did the original wmamp logo, and I quite like it. I'd love to have tab graphics with a similar look, but until someone can hand them to me implementing something like that will be a low priority task.
In the mean time, I'm going to rework the listview code. I've been able to determine that in almost every case the items fed into the listview are already sorted the way they should be. listview jumps through all kinds of hoops to do things like moving to the previous or next element (never mind paging by 10). This code would be so much cleaner (not to mention leaner) if it used arrays, so I figure I'll take a stab at that. The only other outstanding features I can think of then are "play once/loop" and a shuffle feature. Okay, so Linksys' software has those features and we don't, so I guess we really don't have feature parity yet.
Once those are done, I think that iTunes playback is essentially complete. After that is the next project I'm keen to work on: enabling SHOUTcast and icecast playback.
What I don't understand is why more applications aren't making use of this new mechanism. Actually, just about every modern spreadsheet does, except that the tabs are pages in the same spreadsheet, rather than different documents. Adobe Acrobat almost gets it right - all documents load into the same window, but you have to use the "Window" menu to switch betweeen them. I'm sure there are many other examples of apps that are halfway there, but what I'm really intested in are the apps that are all the way there. GAIM, for example. I would love to see tabs in OpenOffice.org.
Yesterday I had the functionality to support tabs in wmamp working, but the visuals weren't there. Instead only the name of the active tab was shown. I spent some time today implementing some general-purpose tab routines, and I think I spent almost as much time getting them to look right today as I spent making them work yesterday. This is probably why I don't like UI programming very much. What I considered to be the "interesting" code was already done and working, having "pretty tabs" (okay, pretty is relative here) is just so much chrome. But it's done now, and I likely won't look at it again unless someone decides to make me some nice graphical buttons to replace the text. And I would appreciate said graphics. In terms of audio playback functionality I believe that wmamp now at least matches (and possibly exceeds) the functionality of the original Linksys player. It does not, however, look as nice. A fellow by the name of Ben Frost (for whom I have no contact information) did the original wmamp logo, and I quite like it. I'd love to have tab graphics with a similar look, but until someone can hand them to me implementing something like that will be a low priority task.
In the mean time, I'm going to rework the listview code. I've been able to determine that in almost every case the items fed into the listview are already sorted the way they should be. listview jumps through all kinds of hoops to do things like moving to the previous or next element (never mind paging by 10). This code would be so much cleaner (not to mention leaner) if it used arrays, so I figure I'll take a stab at that. The only other outstanding features I can think of then are "play once/loop" and a shuffle feature. Okay, so Linksys' software has those features and we don't, so I guess we really don't have feature parity yet.
Once those are done, I think that iTunes playback is essentially complete. After that is the next project I'm keen to work on: enabling SHOUTcast and icecast playback.
Labels: hacking
posted by zar' at 21:28
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