New and gooey!

OT: A Little Info for Those New to the Two Main Web Browsers

2008-01-23T14:36:00.000-08:00

Internet Explorer
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has been one of their key tools in dominance of the software market. The browser, notorious for its security problems and poor support of web standards, has for a while been tightly interwoven with the Windows kernel, making it impossible to completely remove the software. This decision on the part of Microsoft has been the subject of several lawsuit attempts, once resulting in Microsoft settling by offering to place links to their competitor’s (at the time, Netscape) products on the desktop. The latest IE (version 7) has moved somewhat away from the integrated approach but still has numerous hooks into the core of the operating system.

Mozilla Firefox
Firefox, technically superior and more secure than Internet Explorer, was a breath of fresh air to the web. Though the Mozilla Suite had been knocking about for years, which a rich feature base, it was relatively bloated and slow, and did not have a particularly large user following on Windows. Up until 2004, Internet Explorer was used by over 95% of web users. When Firefox was released, the figures changed dramatically, with Internet Explorer’s market share rapidly dwindling. It is currently estimated to be at around 80%, with over 10% of the remainder representing Firefox users. In countries such as Germany, the Firefox usage figures are even higher, peaking at around 25%.

Conclusion

Just a quick overview there for anyone new to this game. Remember: stay safe out on the big wide web. If you have to use IE, make sure you've got a nice big firewall and ActiveX disabled ;)

New and Gooey Dead.

2007-02-19T04:35:00.000-08:00

Sorry guys, but New and Gooey won't be happening anymore, at least not in this form.
a) I have no time at the moment for these projects
b) A new contact list has been chosen, you're probably familiar with it, it's in SVN.
c) The chatwindow is probably gonna be written by myself and some other develoeprs using TkHtml, a html engine for Tk (no shit :P) and once it's mature enough for us to use, we will be able to have chat windows themed with html (so, backgrounds in chatwindow etc)

Sorry again
Tom

Adapt to your environment

2006-02-24T12:36:00.000-08:00

Hello all,
This is KaKaRoTo, it's my first post on this blog, I'm stressed :P
The subject is about "adapting to your environment"... what the hell would that mean ? humm.. maybe I'm here to talk about a new (unfinished, unstable, unreleased) plugin that's called 'Chameleon'? oh yeah, that might be it.
Chameleon is a plugin that lets you 'change your skin', or I'd rather say 'adapt to your environment' to avoid any confusion with aMSN's skins.
The plugin is still in development and is not yet finished. I don't have that much time to work on it right now, but I'd like to share my work with you and get comments until I finish it up.
Chameleon uses the 'tile' extension for Tk, you'll find more info about it on : http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/
It is totally independant of aMSN skins, those define the images to use, and the different little GUI tweaks, while Chameleon completly changes the GUI itself.
The following screenshots were both taken from a Windows machine, as well as the two images in each screenshot. The image on the right is aMSN preferences window without Chameleon plugin loaded, the one on the left, is with the plugin loaded.
The plugin should be 100% platform independant, I didn't test it on Mac, but I did on Linux, and it works great!
This is a real image taken with the plugin, which means that so far, this is what the plugin can already do.
Here's the first screenshot, Chameleon was configured to use the "Windows XP" theme :

And here's the second screenshot which is using the "Clam" theme that I pretty much like :

I hope you all liked it!

EDIT : Finally stable and released, follow it all up at : http://amsn.sourceforge.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=618

KaKaRoTo

Call for help

2006-02-09T11:49:00.001-08:00

Hi,
At the moment I don't have much to do, and so I have decided to ask you, the reader, to help me out.
I want emails/comments with ideas for GUI features - no protocol features, please. This means things which will make using Amsn easier, or more fun. Here's the main thing, though:
I don't care how silly, crazy, or obscure your ideas are. I want them all!
(If you've read Enders Game by Orson Scott Card, think of it like Bean's little toon in Ender's army.)

Whenever you get an idea or something just comes to mind, email me with it. In a week or so, I'll write up a list of the ideas I like most and attempt to code them.
You can email me at:
bluetit {at} users [dot] sf (dot) net

Thanks!!
Tom

Chat window

2006-02-08T15:59:00.001-08:00

Long time no see! Sorry about that! Life has been a bit hectic recently.
But not so hectic that I haven't come up with something new for you!
So, here you are, the future (I hope) of the chat window! Obviously the yellow statusbar and mypic yourpic stuff is only temporary until I've done those bits properly....
Screenshot:

Tom

group backgrounds

2006-01-20T14:41:00.000-08:00

nice, huh?
have a cat sitting on my lap so cant type much!

Tom

Contact list

2006-01-18T07:16:00.000-08:00

Hey!
Have been playing around with the contact list (ok, I totally re-wrote it but hey) - and it's fun! Also note truncation of nicknames is supported - and it's fast! Even when you have like 200 contacts on your list. So woohoo for that.

Screenshot (look slightly familiar? :P):

2006-01-14T08:29:00.000-08:00

Hi!
Menus now support underline-accelerators.
This basically means you press alt+f to open the file menu, etc.
Thanks to Donal K. Fellows of the Tk team for pointing me in the right direction :)
Screenshot:

All that remains to do now (I think!) is:
1) Keyboard shortcuts printed at right hand side of menu (eg Ctrl+O for Open)
2) Bindings for option buttons.
3) Moving menus in-screen if they are posted (partially) off-screen

Tom

Example

2006-01-03T08:30:00.000-08:00

Hey there,
I thought I'd see how the new widgets looked in Amsn. This turned out to be a nice exercise in debugging as lots of problems came to light with the widgets that I wasn't aware of...putting the widgets into amsn is, I suppose, the best way of testing them to see if they match the tk ones. Anyway, I think I've squashed most of the bugs, and here's a screenshot to show how amsn can look with a bit of work. Bear in mind that all I've changed here is the buttons, checkbuttons and radiobuttons, giving them a clean gtk-ish theme. When I have completed the tabbed window widget that I have underway, the prefs window will look nicer still. (Although in the future it'll be using a mozilla prefs style widget).

Screenshot: (once again, blogger has changed the colour of the text...seems to be a hobby it has..)

One thing I noticed whilst testing the widgets in amsn was they slowed it down a bit. I will have to work on optimising them!

Tom

Alright, you 'orrible lot

2005-12-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Stand to attention! More menu goodness, with menubuttons, and some normal buttons thrown in for good measure:

Menus are getting there!

2005-11-29T02:32:00.000-08:00

Done some more work, looksee:

Toolbars: Icons & Text/Icons only/Text only

2005-11-27T03:11:00.000-08:00

Okay, now you can change between icons with text, icons only and text only. Maybe later I'll add "text alongside icons" and "text under icons"

Screenshot:

Tom

More menu stuff

2005-11-17T11:12:00.000-08:00

Refined menu, now has "identify" method:

Menus

2005-11-12T06:09:00.000-08:00

Good news for all you freaks out there!
The same cms I used for CL and Signin is now going to be used to create........ Menus! Beautiful, pixmap, dazzling menus!
Here's the sort of thing I have so far (after just 30 mins work :D)

Canvas cycle widget

2005-11-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

Created a new adaptation of the tk canvas, so that pressing Tab cycles through the list of tags you give it... well in fact you give it a list of tags, and each tag has a -focuscmd and -unfocuscmd which you supply so you can add extra effects like focusing the tag and drawing a box around it.

Screenshot:

Loving the brushed metal!

Tom

ps I have no idea why the text is pink, google does something to images you upload...these screenshots look like jpegs but they actually be pngs. Oh well.

More sign in screen stuff

2005-11-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

I developed three new little toys, a button, checkbutton, and radiobutton that put themselves on the canvas of your choice. Means they can blend nicely in without having a solid background. So here is the updated sign-in screen. Hope it's satisfactory ;)

Tom

Sign-in screen

2005-11-04T09:55:00.000-08:00

A bit of playing produced this:

(Proud to say it uses the same CMS as the contact list!)

~Tom

2005-11-01T07:35:00.001-08:00

Not much new at the moment, just re-wrote cl code to be more flexible and general :) Turns out it'll be good for the sign-in screen too, so that's a lot of coding saved :)

~Tom

Just remembered!

2005-10-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

A contact list has that little thing on top doesn't it! Where you set your status and display picture and nickname and that innit. Good job I remembered, haha, how useless am I. Okay..so, latest screenshot:

Next on the agenda...

2005-10-25T12:13:00.000-07:00

Now I've worked out the structure and basic code for the contact list, I need to start on a new section of the gui. However, I'm on work experience at Newcross Hospital this week, so I probably won't get started until after I've finished there...
The next item I'll tackle will probably be the sign-in page. Unlike the current set-up, the sign in page will be a different widget to the contact list one.

I shall probably base it on a canvas, to get nice pretty effects :) It need only be a simple page, like the msn 7.5 sign-in screen. "Profiles" will be transparent - the user won't know they exist, but all the features will still be there if you ask AMSN to "remember you". You will also be able to have AMSN "forget you", whereupon you will be warned that this will remove all associated chatlogs and stuff for that account.

I look forward to starting it! :)

MSN increase contact list allowance

2005-10-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

I just heard that you can now have 600 contacts on your contact list. Great. This means the new gui code is going to have to be that much more efficient.
I still need to find a solution for truncating nicknames, other than(p.o.c):
foreach contact $contacts {
for i 0 to end {
set width [font measure [string range nick 0 $i]]
if $width > [width of groupbox]
then set nick [string range nick 0 [expr $i - 1]]
}
UpdateNicksOnCanvas
}

Doing that for 600 nicks is not going to be fun.
Oh well, I'm sure I'll come up with something.

More contact list

2005-10-21T06:57:00.000-07:00

Okayy... added all those lovely paddings and colours and stuff, and they're acessed through a settings object thing, like the ::skin::getKey in amsn.. which is what it will use when I integrate it.

The great thing is, it's still as fast as ever! It isn't lightning when you have like 50+ contacts in each group, but it still isn't slow at all :)
Screenshot:

Contact list

2005-10-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

The contact list is getting underway now, with working smiley replacement, group toggling and a nice modular code design so it's easy to add new features later on.

Screenshot:

I figure the gui side of it is pretty much finished... apart from all the little settings like padding, colours, group boxes, hover effects etc. Those can easily be added later.

All about new and gooey

2005-10-18T07:55:00.000-07:00

This blog is where information and updates about the re-writing of Amsn's gui will go.
Some things to note:
1) All screenshots posted here will be actual results of actual real live proper code, unless otherwise stated
2) Please dont comment asking "When is this gonna be in amsn?" or similar. It'll get in when it's finished. And it'll be finished when it's finished ;)
3) This blog is a playground for ideas and progress with those ideas. If you have any comments or thoughts on this or anything, please do post!

Anyway, enjoy :)

~Tom