Aqua-Soft ForumsIntro
It's been a long time ago since you've heard something from the AveDesk-side. Therefore, I've writting this small status report on what, where, how, when, whatever relates to avedesk.
Around January, I was working really hard on a new version of AveDesk, lot's of new features came into my mind. I started to implement some, finished one or two, but the majority of them are done half or not done at all. After a couple of weeks working one or two hours on this new version of AveDesk, I got really busy: didn't have enough time during normal weekdays, nor in weekends. Result: avedesk's development stalled.
New Site
Because of Needlemen going down suddenly, the site has moved. Thanks to Tim, you can now find avedesk at http://avedesk.aqua-soft.org. Thanks for all the others for making me offers to host them, including Judge, Alang and others!
Features working on
- New 'add a desklet'-dialog, taking advantage of multi-threading, preview of desklet, drag-'n-place, etc.
- Better seperation between 'icons' and widget, stuff that doesn't need a label won't get it.
- More UI-controls, listbox, etc.
- Integrated debug-console thingy(herd)
- Internal stuff, making creation of desklets easier: container-layers/child-layers, support for different other things
- Integrated On Line Library of desklets, just browse desklets that are on line like they are regular desklets. Once you see a desklet that you want, simply drag it onto the desktop, and it will be downloaded, installed and instantiated automatically.
- bugfixes, bugfixes, bugfixes
- more and better integration with avescripter
- some special things for SysStats widgets: to make them react and behave better when hosted inside avedesk.
Add a desklet dialog
Coding, coding
More busy-ness
The next couple of months, I'm still too damn busy with other stuff to do any serious development on AveDesk. Herd - my partner in... desktopwidget-crime - is also losing interest in the whole business of desklets, aqua stuff etc and has been moving towards the evil side (Linux).
Visual Studios Problems
The following small piece of code that checks if an item matches at least one filter made me switch the AveDesk project files from visual studio 6 to visual studio 2003 (vc 7.1 compiler). Visual Studio 6 has lots of small problems with templates and STL constructs, whereas vc 7.1 is much better with respect to that.
However, besides some small conversion problems, I have now hit a serious wall: the vc71 compiled version crashes with a bad_alloc exception. This exception is being thrown, because an std::wstring wants to allocate an insane ammount of memory on assignment. I traced this problem down to a problem with a class-member having a different offset, and thus memory-address, in two different usages. Basically, the code thinks that the string-class is located 3 bytes further in memory than it actually is, so a small number like 7 gets "shifted" by 24 bits, and grows incredibly.
I still need to find out what the cause is, some sources tell it's a conversion-error from vc6 project-files to vc2003, others say it's due to the _alloca() [allocate on stack] and exception unwinding.
Until I find out what the problem is, I really can't do anything.
return std::find_if( filters.begin(),
filters.end(),
std::bind2nd(std::mem_fun_ref(CDeskletFilter::Matches), item) )
!= filters.end() || filters.size() == 0;
What to do?
I'm not sure on what to do now. I probably won't be able to do any serious work on AveDesk for at least half a year (3 months internship + 3 months summer(job) ). People, including me start to loose interest in this whole widget thing, so avedesk might just die a slowly dead together with the whole 'widget hype'.
On the other hand, I enjoy some parts of this project still and really want to implement some ideas (integrated online library e.g.).
PS
No selling it to is not a realistic idea.
.
And I really mean it. Software people never think their software is done, they are always working on the next best version (me included). Makes you wonder...