apankrat

Joined 16 years ago

Karma

984

Submissions

224

Member since

Mar 25

https://swapped.ch

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 7 months ago

Screenshots are made on Windows 8.1 box, the windows chrome comes from there.

Plus the whole thing is meant to work on ancient Windows versions (like, Vista and WS2008 ancient), so that ultimately defines the minimal common UI denominator.

Comment · 7 months ago

Let me chime in and say that plain Win32 API is a perfectly viable option if you are using C++ (or another "OO" language) and if you are willing to sink a couple of weeks into writing your own MFC-like wrapper.

Clearly this is not an option for those who are just starting up with Windows GUI work, but with little experience it is really a matter of 2-3 weeks of ground work and then you have full control over all nuances of the UI, yours to extend and mend as you wish.

If there's one thing that Microsoft is really good at, it's ensuring deep backward compatibility. So anything that's based on Win32 API is going to be stable. If it works now, it will work later.

I have some examples from 10+ years of development updates accumulated here - https://bvckup2.com/wip

Comment · 1 year ago

I did something similar 15+ years ago to use as an avatar in forums, twitters and some such - https://swapped.ch/#!/personal-mark

Comment · 1 year ago

Yes, I wrote one [1] and others did too, e.g. [2] and [3].

The gist of it, as mentioned in [4], is that you need to have a web server that implements checkStatus and saveConfig PUTs, and PUT and DELETE for saveBoard.

[1] https://github.com/apankrat/nullboard-agent

[2] https://github.com/luismedel/nbagent

[3] https://github.com/OfryL/nullboard-nodejs-agent

[4] https://nullboard.io/backups

Comment · 1 year ago

Grocery and ToDo lists. That's Nullboard's primary purpose.

Comment · 1 year ago

I showed it around to people that would listen, but otherwise, no, I didn't market it per se.

Comment · 1 year ago

This is mine.

FWIW here's a Show HN from 2019 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20077177

Comment · 1 year ago

Well, I didn't have a need to add or to change anything since then.

Here's the full timeline to get a general sense of the development pace - http://nullboard.io/changes

Comment · 2 years ago

Thanks for the mention, this is mine. Did a ShowHN few years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20376437

Comment · 2 years ago

A Kanban board - https://nullboard.io/preview

A GIF screen recorder - https://iobureau.com/ugiffer

A calorie/food tracker - https://i.imgur.com/bSFBFcE.png

It was easier to write exactly what I needed than to try and adapt to existing options.

Comment · 3 years ago

This can be remedied by using tools that can do block-wise (delta) copying of large files, e.g. https://bvckup2.com/kb/delta-copying

Comment · 3 years ago

The GP made generic dismissive remarks on a spherical cow in vacuum and under a blanket assumption that the other person is an idiot.

That's not how one starts a "constructive conversation".

But, yeah, that's just like my opinion too, man.

Comment · 3 years ago

> What’s the upside for the user of a nested sequence of modal dialogs anyway?

That's it. Allowing changing things in place is exactly one of the goals.

Comment · 3 years ago

The sidebar is an index of several additional option pages, shown to the right of it. The first one is "Common" and it is shown by default.

This design didn't actually make it into the production release, it was replaced with https://bvckup2.com/wip/r82-rabbit-hole-x.gif.

Pi is a reference to a (really corny) "hacker" movie from the 90s called The Net. Same thing as the Pi at the bottom right of every page on Reddit.

Comment · 3 years ago

All of them are using a custom framework.

Most transitions are trivial to implement - you have a state A of your dialog that looks like this and a start B with your target look/layout - so the framework figures out what needs to move where, what needs to be hidden/shown and then animates that in a quick loop.

The complicated part is the fading of controls. There's no fine-grained control over when Windows repaints controls exactly, so unpainted parts of the background showing through is a nasty issue. Requires basically per-Windows version voodoo, because what works for W8, doesn't work for W10 and vice versa.