Monthly Archives: January 2007

Moving back to XP SP2 aka Vista is not yet ready

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After having eagerly downloaded Vista from MSDN and installed it on my home machine last month, I am formatting my disk today and going back to XP SP2, the biggest problem for me is the extremely slow internet experience, while everything was working smoothly on XP, Vista for some reason is not allowing me to access the internet at a reasonable speed, it must be a problem with the drivers or my hardware, but for whatever reason this is one problem I cannot live with. So bye bye Vista till SP2 rolls out ;)

Picasa rocks

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Recently I downloaded Picasa from Google to manage my huge collection of photographs, I was totally blown away by the great experience of using such a great piece of software. Everything was so intuit, and the UI was really slick and well organized. Being a developer the first thing that came to my mind was to see what toolkit they were using, I looked at the application directory to see if there were any obvious clues, not finding any I fired up the trusty Spy++ and found to my surprise that the whole Picasa UI is just one big window with a class name of “ytWindow”. This means that they custom draw everything i.e. use their own GUI toolkit.

Personally I would have never gone in for such a solution but now taking a look at how well the application has come out, I am definitely going to give this option a more thorough analysis.

In the process of finding the UI toolkit for Picasa I researched a lot of other UI toolkits. Seems like QT is a good option these days but is ridiculously expensive for anyone other than big enterprisey clients, GTK 2 seems to be the best among the open source alternatives. Also I read some good reviews on FLTK, might be interesting to take a look at it for developing prototypes.