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Firefox 4 and Direct2D on Windows 7

Right now, I'm testing the 3rd beta of Firefox 4 and so far, I like what I'm seeing. I turned away from Firefox when it started to become more and more bloated - a development that culminated in version 3.5 and that made me switch to Google Chrome because of its more modern and sleeker design.

Now, after a while, I wanted to see what the next major Firefox version will bring and I'm pretty impressed. First of all, the UI is much improved, although it doesn't seem that FF will bring new innovations, it merely copies a few things from other browsers, especially Chrome and that was to be expected, because Chrome did introduce some new and fresh things to the browser world.

I've put up new builds for the most recent code changes. It fixes a few outstanding issues with task bar thumbnails and aero peek previews - they are now ALMOST complete (for group chats, a few things are still missing, so don't report them, I know it's not yet as it should be).

Noteworthy changes in this build

• The custom warning dialogs.
• Improvements for the Aero Peek features.
• Some bug fixes
• Icon pack version number updated. You will receive a warning when using an old and possibly incompatible icon pack. New icon packs are included in the downloads.

Also, support for ANSI build was dropped. There won't be any ANSI builds for TabSRMM 3 - all ANSI specific code was removed and the build targets deleted from all project files.

Download from my googlecode site.

No more ANSI build for TabSRMM 3

Well, sometimes it is necessary to make some decisions and this time, it is on of the lesser attractive ones. Nevertheless, I postponed it for a while, because I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea or not.

However, because quality matters, I made the decision to completely drop support for the ANSI builds in the upcoming release of TabSRMM 3, because:

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Better usability always matters, so I've added another thing to improve it. It is only a minor feature and (hopefully) most users will never see many of these warning or informational dialog boxes, but it is also a well-known thing, found in most modern applications.

Whenever TabSRMM must complain about some serious problem or wants to tell you something important, it will use a small, non-modal dialog box with a "do not show this message again" option. When you check this option, you will never again see the same warning dialog (of course, only with the current profile, because the information about which warnings should be hidden is saved in your profile database).

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Following the release of Miranda 0.9.alpha#10 a few days ago, I uploaded new alpha builds of TabSRMM version 3 to my googlecode site.

The main reason for this release is an important crash fix which was introduced a few commits before. Unloading or reloading a skin can cause a crash later on, because it incorrectly frees some important stuff in the plugin.

There is also a main new feature - support for custom task bar thumbnails and generic support for "per tab" task bar buttons when running on Windows 7. This feature was recently announced here.

Noteworthy changes

• fixed a crash related to unloading skins.
• Windows 7 task bar support - changed method of activating the tab from the task bar button.
• Changed logic for calculating relative path names for skins when NOT using the folders plugin. You will most likely have to reload your skin.
• fixed default value for the Aero Peek option (Options->Message Sessions->Advanced tweaks).

Please make sure, to check the detailed change log. It contains more information and all the important changes since the last build.

As always, only Unicode builds for x86 and x64 platforms are available. Debug symbols are included for both builds, please use them before posting a crash report.

Download from my googlecode site.

After considering and postponing it for quite a while, I've finally added Aero Peek thumbnails preview to TabSRMM 3. This gives you per tab preview on the Windows 7 task bar and works pretty similar to other applications supporting this new Windows 7 feature. Examples would be Internet Explorer 8 or Opera 10.5x.

However, there is one important difference: The previews do not show a simple thumbnail of the message window itself, because this would be next to useless. Unlike web pages, all message sessions are looking pretty much the same, so it would be quite hard to identify a single session by looking at a small representation of its window contents.

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I've uploaded new Alpha builds from current SVN. As always, only Unicode builds for x86 and x64 are available and they need the VC 2008 runtime.

Also, you should only use this with a recent Miranda build. Officially, only Miranda 0.9 is supported for TabSRMM 3, but recent builds of 0.8 should work (there is no guarantee though).

Noteworthy changes

• some bug fixes (info panel avatar drawing, own nicknames when none was set in the protocol options).
• More custom colors - see this article.
• New log rotation code for group chat logs. The old log truncating wasn't working as it should for a long time anyway.
• Updated some dialogs for more translation space.
• some small improvements for the side bar

Download from my googlecode site

In TabSRMM 2, skins were the only way to completely change the look of the message window. While skins have a number of advantages, they also come at some cost:

• They can slow down the UI, because they involve complex drawing operations.
• They can be hard to modify and tweak

TabSRMM with custom colors (no skin)

In TabSRMM 3, skins are still supported, but the UI is much easier customizable by using another method: Colors. With a few color settings, you can change the look of most UI parts, including the info panel, the tool bar, the tabs and the generic background color. No need to edit a skin and any change you do will be immediately visible in open message windows. Color settings are saved to the database and there is a feature for easily exporting and importing them. The only elements which cannot be customized with this method are the title bar and window border(s) - these are rendered by the operating system and will therefore use the current Windows theme (either classic theme or a visual style).

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In short words...

It's a jargon term for writing an if condition in a programming language using bad looking grammar while keeping it syntactically correct. Pretty much the same thing, Yoda does when he speaks :) He screws up grammar, but his statements are still making sense and can be understood by most people familiar with the language he uses.

So, instead of writing

if ( foo == 0 )

.. some C and C++ programmers insist on writing

if ( 0 == foo )

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Share this!

Social bookmarking is everywhere. Whether you like it or not, you cannot ignore it, because users tend to love it when they can easily share a link, video, image or blog article with their friends.

Share this

The entire thing with sharing stuff started years ago with services like Technorati or delicious.com and today we have dozens of social networks that allow their users to share noteworthy things they find on the net.

A sharing widget commonly refers to an element on a web page which allows visitors to submit a piece of content (for example, a blog article, a video or an image) to a number of well-known social sites. The result of sharing a piece of content are different and depend on the site - no need to go into detail here, as most people know how it works anyway. Read more...