Gareth Simpson

iTunes 4.7 has been released and it has 2 minor but significant improvements: Native support for Always On Top Minimize to system tray I’m almost sad that iTunesOnTop is obsolete, but really it should always have been there. Even a cursory look at Winamp would have told them that.

Daring Fireball is picking at the Aqua v Brushed Metal scab again. As a Mac user, I can’t say how strongly I agree with this. Safari should be Aqua, and it’s just insane that it’s not. That said, as a Windows developer, I’m pretty envious that there are only two themes to have to try and live with. Add to that he fact that the development tools allow you to fully implement them and life in Mac-land looks even better. ‘Cause in the Windows world, life just isn’t like that. Take windows XP for example. It has a theming engine and if you write your application sensibly, you can give your application a full on XP look and feel. You can even do this with ancient tools such as VB 6 which predate XP. So far so groovey. Unfortuately Microsoft can’t bring itself to use it’s own themes. Every new eddition Office brings a new theme to the table that is at odds with the platform it’s running on. And it’s not just Office, tools as niche as the new versions of Visual Stud...

Microsoft did not see fit to ship Visual C++ Express with any windowing framework (MFC, ATL, WTL …). They clearly want to steer people down the .NET road. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In theory all you need is the Windows Platform SDK which is freely downloadable from MSDN. In practice, you also need a GUI framework and I’ve found that wxWidgets (né wxWindows) fits the bill perfectly. Unfortunately it doesn’t work quite as smoothly as using the full on Visual Studio. There are a lot of linker errors to combat, but it can be done if you follow these (overly) simple instructions: This is a revised (and much simpler) set of instructions. Thanks to Vadim Zeitlin and Gordon Klos for pointing out some flaws in the original 1. Download and install the Windows Platform SDK Tragically you seem to need IE to do this, but never mind. It’s titled “Windows Server 2003” but it covers all the current versions of windows. You need core SDK and potentially Internet Develo...