How I Spent My Day

I spent the better part of the afternoon chasing down what we think is a compiler bug. It took me about three hours to get to the point where I had ruled out everything else, and then I turned it over to Mars. Needless to say, I was in a pretty foul mood and not too keen on working on the IDE. So for the rest of the day, I did framework stuff (in C++).

I ended up making the window editor for RB 6 call into the framework to actually draw the window (instead of having a real live window -- think of it as a picture of a real live window). It was pretty interesting since it meant I needed to draw all the stuff by hand which the OS ususally draws for me.

I found a somewhat handy API called DrawFrameControl which lets you draw the little widgets in the upper-right of the window. The annoying part of that API is that you need to remember to set the text alignment properly before using it. I figured it out after watching the contents of those widget get drawn in the wrong place time and again. Oops!

One I figured out how to draw the gradient caption bar and all the widgets/icons for people like me who hate the nasty bubbly crappy XP theme stuff, I had to figure out how to make it work for said theme stuff. Bleh! Thankfully the theme functions are pretty easy to use. It took me a short amount of time to modify the code to be theme-savvy, and away I went!

The crappy part about the theme functions is that they don't really report the correct information. For example, the theme APIs claim that the close widget is something like 25 pixels tall, when in fact, the system drawn one is more like 20 pixels. What's funny is -- if you go into the display properties and see what they draw for previews, it's 29 pixels. :: sighs :: So basically, the theme drawing functions do not match directly with what the window manager actually draws. How nice. So our theme-savvy code makes things out to be a little larger than they really are, but people will just have to live with it. They shouldn't be using those nasty themes in the first place. :-P

Do you use a theme with your OS of choice? Or just go with whatever happens to be set when you first get the computer?