News: Z-Net 3 Progress... Part 2

Sunday, November 25, 2012

In the time since my last post, I've found that I've become somewhat used to a routine of working on a project only a little bit here and there each day, getting little to maybe nothing done each day. I'm surprised how used to working this slow I've gotten. I still want to dive in more so, but my slow work plan is working so far, so great!

Mentioned in my last post, I have been working on creating a custom window frame. I wasn't having much luck for awhile, getting stuck on early stages of this task. But I finally learned enough to start making more educated guesses about the problems I was facing, and I finally figured things out myself. From there it's been only mildly rocky. But for the most part things have gone smoothly to the point were I got all the basics of the idea implemented with the custom window titlebar and borders. In my development project for this code, things look and work almost exactly how I could want them to now. From here, it's just fine tuning things. Like getting rid of a bug or 2, and covering a few loose ends.

I'm not certain what I want to get working on next. Either custom drawing some client controls like I would want, outlining the Z-Net 3 design I have in my head into a resource editor, maybe IRC message encryption, or tinkering with how I might go about addon support.

The latter 2 because it would be a change of pace from what I have been working on. The design outline, just because I'm thinking it might be good to get the things out of my head at this stage, just so I can fine tune my ideas as I'm working other things. And the first, because I learned a lot with the title bar/frame stuff, and I should be able to apply what I learned to that.

But I have time to think about all that, as I still have some work left to do with my current task.

I'd post a pic of the work on my custom frame stuff, but all the work has been on the code. Not the imagery itself. For development I've been using Bitmaps from the skin files of some commercial skinning libraries. I don't think their would be any copyright issues with me just posting a pic of me using them outside of their intended libraries, but I'd rather not show it just so that the frame looking like that isn't expected. I don't want to mock up my own quick crummy bitmaps either. Sadly, this type of work only looks as good as the images I display with it. I may change my mind about this later.