hukka's development blog

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Hi! This is where I'll be posting about things I've been working on.

Today I wrote some fail-safe and "64-bit aware" replacements for certain standard file access routines. Tomorrow I'll be continuing from there with similar registry access routines, which I anticipate will be somewhat tougher to implement.

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My Windows installation started bluescreening at booting today and fixing it ate a large chunk of the day. Wasn't able to finish the registry stuff yet - maybe I can get some more coding done tonight.

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Finished with the registry stuff, although more extensive testing still needs to be done.

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Today I made a simple, imageless text version of the Macecraft website front page. Then I started on a modification to an "info box" routine to display text messages inside a window. It's not ready but I think the hardest part is pretty much done now.

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Finished with the "info box" thingy, which in more accurate terms means that I modified a separate, docked "message log" window to show as an integrated panel inside any window.

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Today I did some modifications and feature additions to a list component which will be used to replace various older components. A couple of functions left to add tomorrow.

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Still need to finish one feature that proved to require much more work than it initially seemed. In addition, there's a bug with a certain component that I should find a way to reproduce. I also wrote a binary search routine which Jv16 then managed to make a lot faster.

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Finally done with the feature additions to the list component, I think.

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Worked on the list component a little more to fix a couple of issues, then got to work on the main GUI component of PowerTools to improve icon display. I have screenshots!

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Added a feature to a tab control to draw a small overlay icon on modified tabs' icons. Also another small tweak to the main GUI.

I'm now testing a different software installer tool to possibly replace the one used previously.

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Oops, I'd forgotten to update this for a while. I've been working on the installer, and trying to implement printing functionality to the list component I talked about before.

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Today I was going through PowerTools 2009 to hunt for visual bugs and things to improve. I also added mouse wheel scrolling support to the scrollbox widget used in the System Optimizer tool, hopefully.

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Lately I've been mostly doing some small bug fixes and touch-ups to various things, like adding alpha-blended PNG support to the tab component. That should make certain icons look much nicer. I don't have a screenshot of it in actual use in PT, but maybe Jouni will post one in the future...

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Since my last post I've been mostly doing testing on the PT 2010 test builds and fixing the occasional bug. Now I'm working on testing/fixing some routines plus code to retrieve some common as well as program-specific download locations of software such as some browsers, p2p clients and download managers.

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Whoops, I've been neglecting this blog for quite a while. I've been doing various utility functions to be used in PT2010, such as a function to merge two menus together, browsing to a specified file in Explorer, browsing to a specified location in Registry Editor, a function to try and determine whether a given sentence is in English, etc. I also did some work so that tab icons could be PNG images for a nicer look.

Currently I'm working on something explained by Jouni in this post. I have two algorithms, one more accepting with no false negatives but a bit too many false positives, and another with no false positives but currently way too many false negatives. I was hoping to finally get the second algorithm finished today but all the ideas I had for reducing false negatives would on second thought cause false positives which is what I'm really trying to avoid. Well, more on this later...

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Today I was only able to worsen the algorithm - it worked perfectly with a smaller sampling of the test data, but overall with the complete test data it's not nearly good enough. Tomorrow I'll get the "more accepting" algo back to its former state and see if I can improve the false positives a little before handing it in. At least Jouni has written separate implementations for the same purpose, so the final results will be the mean result of all the algorithms.

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Been mostly working yet more on the same thing I mentioned in previous posts, plus some small utility functions like automatically shrinking a Label's font, message dialog centering, and an implementation of the FNV32.1 hash.

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Working on implementing some visual candy.

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Since my last update I did some scripting on the new installer for PT2010, and I'm now working on a visual revamp of the menus used in PT. Not sure yet if it'll make it to the first public beta, but it will be in the second.

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The revamped menus already found their way to the PT2010 betas with screenshots available on the relevant threads. Here are screenshots of a new tooltip component and some panels to be used as information/warning boxes. They'll optionally fade out and disappear when you click on them.