News - 07.11.2019

fotoXplorer for Windows - News

Thursday, July 11th, 2019 @8:19PM,   News

A quick status update!

A few weeks ago Comcast initiated a system upgrade which took down the internet connection, TV and phone service for over 7 hours.  It was at that time I had planned to research social media marketing (Twitter Promoted Tweets) and boom...no internet.

So I decided to try something with fotoXplorer based on things I have read lately.  There seemed to be a push towards building software with dual themes (Light & Dark).  I figured it would be easy enough because I use the registry to store colors (for specific controls) and have a global structure that defines application colors.

After a few minutes of coding, I had a dark themed version of fotoXplorer.  However, this didn't include many controls (owner-drawn and those not covered by the OnCtlColor() message).  The hard part, as it turns out, are scrollbars!  I spent a good week and a half just creating a custom, owner -drawn scrollbar (vertical) and then more time integrating it into the various controls (Tree Control, ListBox, ComboBox, Edit Control, and finally, the ListCtrl).  Each introduced a new problem which required additional time to solve.

Solved it I have!  So now I have created owner-drawn versions of nearly all controls (as mentioned above plus SpinButtonCtrl, Tab Control and many more).  I've been working on upgrading all dialog boxes using the new themed-dialog-box design and wanted to share a few screencaps!

Also, an important feature I added to my custom scrollbar is the Scroll-to-Top Button and Scroll-to-Bottom Button! It's a feature I haven't seen on any other OS, but it comes in handy.  Imagine if FireFox had it.  Web developers wouldn't need to add that floating "back-to-top" div. Anyways, you can see the top-arrow-with-a-line and bottom-arrow-with-a-line on the Main Window screen caps below.

In closing...development is coming along.  I know I'm a good year or so behind in releasing it...but since I code products I use (except for Easy Realty Flyers - I'm not a Realtor), I wanted to create something that is special and really, really fast too (multi-threaded speed | Direct2D Hardware Accelerated Rendering)!



fotoXplorer - Main Window - Light Theme


fotoXplorer_light_theme



fotoXplorer - Photo Album Properties - Light Theme


properties_light_theme



fotoXplorer - Main Window - Dark Theme


fotoXplorer_dark_theme



fotoXplorer - Photo Album Properties - Dark Theme


properties_dark_theme