For some reason or other I didn't do a journal entry each day of the Thanksgiving holiday, so I'm gonna group all of them together like this...

Icon Mangler (Thursday & Friday):

Some progress, but now I'm stuck...

All of Thursday was spent trying to figure out how to do a text inside of a placard. I quickly realized that this wasn't possible, and the best way to fake it would be to use a static text field right over the placard. I added that, but for some reason the text was overwriting the placard underneath it, so it didn't look very seamless. I spent an hour fooling around with text modes, thinking that it was something to do with that (text modes let you do inverted text, text where the white space behind the letters is transparent, etc). It turned out that the Control Manager determines the drawing order by the relative positions and sizes of the controls. I had made my text field the same size as the placard, and the Control Manager interpreted that as the text field totally covering the placard (instead of showing the placard through the gaps in the letters). I made it a few pixels smaller, turned on the control hierarchy, made the static text a member of the placard, and everything worked.

The next day I was trying to improve the refereshing. First I focused on making the controls disable/enable properly when the application was put into the background. It turns out that this event isn't included in the activate event, so I had to add another event handler, the suspendResumeEvent. Then I went to improve the control drawing process. I got it so that it only used one region instead of two, and made it so that it refreshed properly when the window was in the background (before this I wasn't clipping, and the icon would get redrawn and overwrite stuff in the foreground). But then weird things have started to happen. I have to call Refresh() twice in the beginning in order to get the zoom display to draw properly. But event when I leave in one Refresh(), there's a problem with the initial drawing of an icon opened. It flashes on the screen for a split second, the the image well where it's supposed to be displayed goes white. If I cause the window to refresh again (by collapsing and expading the window, or by resizing it) then it draws properly. I wasn't able to figure out why this happened....

Glypher (Saturday and Sunday):

Many miscellaneous enhancemenets. First I redid my file open/saving routines, so that I don't have to write a new function for each file type that I want to save/open. Now I have two functions, NewFile and GetFile, which use the Navigation Services where possible (if the library is installed) and return a file spec for the file selected/created. I've added them to my commonfunctions.c set of functions, but I have to redo the rest of my programs to use them.

I've made is so that you can reposition the little badge on top of the icon by using the mouse or the arrow keys, in addition to using the buttons in the dialog. This isn't as easy as sounds, I ended up having to write an event filter for the dialog, so that it caught the key down events and processed them as necessary. Ironically a couple of days later I found this article in MacTech about the exact same thing, but I think that it was more meaningful to me because I figured it out myself (well, with the help of Inside Macintosh and the Macintosh C reference).

I've also started working towards the finalized version. Since I'm going to make this program free for clip2icns users, I've made it check at startup for the existence of a registered copy of clip2icns (by looking for a "clip2icns Preferences" file). If the file isn't there the icons that the program outputs have a little G in the corner, so that the user can get an idea of how the program works before actually registering. I've also done the about box, and it looks really cool (I just had to add an easter-egg for it now).