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TABBING TABBING TABBING. Hooray for tabs! It also no longer crashes when you delete all text in the box. Bullets will display but are not saved to file (this is a pain in my ass…)

I spent an hour or two working on some sort of icon for Mercurial beyond the scribbles that I had originally used. I finally settled on an icon much like the standard Windows XP Icons. Following (sort of) the steps from here, I decided on two application windows stacked on top of each other. It symbolizes what Mercurial does reasonably well, and looks clean. I wasn’t sure about getting the perspective stuff working properly, but after a little bit of tracing I had some lines to follow. From there it was just getting an application screenshot (I used notepad), tracing outlines, filling with colors and lots of resizing. Creating Windows XP icons isn’t too bad, although the instructions I linked to aren’t the best I’ve ever seen.

Either way, here’s what I ended up with. It looks pretty good on the desktop but the system tray version suffers a little bit. I need to figure out how to clean up the edges some, but that really isn’t all that many pixels. Definitely not a high priority.

Here’s what I accomplished today:

• New Icon, it’s much prettier
• Created TitlePicker dialog, used when renaming notes or creating new ones without using a link
• Ability to rename notes
• Made settings + titlePicker more like dialogs
• DID I MENTION A NEW ICON?!?
• Deleting a note makes sure that there is a backup first
• code cleanup around renaming/deleting, since a lot of that can be shared
• Double-Clicking systray icon now creates a new note
• If note is not changed and closed the saving step will be skipped

And here’s my revised to-do list:

• Context Menu Item to show all notes on screen at once?
• Make settings changes apply to all open notes
• More testing of link insertion code, appears to still be a little wonky
• try to track down slight flashing bug. I still don’t know what is casing that…
• Some sort of note browser that allows for viewing all notes and choosing which to open
• searching titles + text of notes
• plugin system

I’m specifically not posting this one to Planet ResTek because I think Sitzmar’s getting annoyed with me putting non-ResTek stuff on there.

Here’s what was completed tonight:

• Settings Form design
• Specifying default values from config for settings form
• Config singleton, pulls values from config.xml
• cleaned up link parsing
• added code to reduce flickering (haven’t licked it yet…)
• Updating dropdowns for font/fontsize automatically update sample text
• Added FolderBrowserDialog to allow for changing folder for note storage
• Wrote config saving function, saves on exit

Here’s what I know I have to do in the near future:

• NoteForm.cs (213): TODO: Add URL ability in here somehow…
• NoteForm.cs (238): TODO: implement note renaming (do I have to create a form? BOO)
• Context Menu Item to show all notes on screen at once?
• Make settings changes apply to all open notes
• More testing of link insertion code, appears to still be a little wonky
• try to track down slight flashing bug. I still don’t know what is casing that…
• More robust file existence checking in all cases, but especially file backups!

I spent a good chunk of time this evening implementing some of the smaller things that Mercurial needs to be able to do. Stuff like:

• global hotkey to open a new note
• deleting notes
• dialog confirming note deletion
• saving notes when you close them (via the menu item or the “X”)
• keyboard shortcuts for deleting/renaming notes
• Sorting recent items list by last changed instead of name
• Settings menu item (doesn’t do anything yet)
• Some code cleanup

I still need to find time to read up on plugin stuff, but I think that getting this running solidly would be a better use of my time right now. The ultimate test will be when classes start up again. I’ll pull a Microsoft and be “eating my own dogfood” and try to use this as much as possible in class. That’s really the best way to get an idea of what changes need to be made and what features need to be added. I’m honestly a little scared to entrust class notes to this right now, but I’ve made sure that it does pretty robust file backups when you do things like writing out a new copy of a file or deleting. Hopefully I won’t need them, but it’s nice just in case.

I’d like to start working on some sort of configuration stuff next, but I’m not sure how I’d go about it. Perhaps I’ll just create a config class that reads in the configuration info from an XML file. I can just create a Singleton called Config or what have you, and use that to read the XML and provide getters/setters for config stuff. This is exciting stuff, I wish I didn’t have many hours of driving ahead of me tomorrow so I could get to it.

This week has been an interesting one. I’ve made more progress on my Tomboy clone then I ever really thought I’d be able to do. I usually get stuck on something really tricky and get distracted by something else, but I’ve been able to stick this one out. Partially due to some dumb luck, partially due to some help from a couple of people, partially thanks to the MS Newsgroups.

So now I’ve got it doing about what it did the last time I mentioned it, but now it does it BETTER. That’s an important distinction, really! Basic stuff like proper minimization to the tray (this was a bitch and a half), linking, maintaining link status on note reloads (also a pain), etc are all done. I still need to work on sorting the recent items list and figuring out how exactly a plugin setup works. I really want to support plugins for this, I’ve just never done it before.

My assumption for plugin systems is that you provide a plugin interface which’ll define the methods that plugins should implement. You have to provide a default, no-op implementation in case the plugin author doesn’t want to do it. Aside from that, I guess you create something like an ArrayList of all the plugin classes that implement the interface, and just iterate through them? I really have no clue. Another thing to add to my “I should read about this” list, it’s growing longer than I really have time for lately.

I played around and extended my Samurize config this evening. Using this guide I created a new background for it in the oh so tasty Aero style. I usually hate extraneous eye candy, but there’s just something about the glassiness of Aero that gets me right where it counts. Plus I had to resize it anyways after pirating bits of the cool WRT54G samurize script that I was linked to earlier today.

So I managed to end up with something that works pretty well. I don’t usually put Samurize and Winamp right next to each other, but it worked for the shot. The edges could use some resizing and the config spacing needs to be worked on, but I really like it.