Cantabile Development Blog

Slow Progress

The new UI for Cantabile is still progressing, but slowly. I've now done:

• Support for the new File menu, including functioning MRU file list and MRU file list pins.
• Half integrated plugin and rack manipulation with the new UI.

I've had some issues with SkinLib's layout system - getting things to appear, disappear and resize correctly in the main plugin/rack area just hasn't gone smoothly. For what seems such a simple problem it's actually quite difficult because the layout is driven from both inside (eg: adding a new rack or plugin) and outside (resizing the main window). Also the layout calculations can get quite expensive so I've added a mechanism to do delayed layout, reducing the number of times these calculations are done.

The other problem which took me almost two days to resolve was a strange repaint bug in the skin rendering:

Notice the standard Windows minimize, maximize and restore buttons have been painted on top of the custom skin and the line across the round application menu button. For some reason adding a new menu entry to the standard system menu causes this to appear in certain circumstances. I don't understand this but for now will simply remove the "Always on Top" command from that menu an put it somewhere else. Weird.

On other things, if you didn't notice, there's a new build of Cantabile 1.2 now available with some minor fixes/enhancements.

Posted on September 27, 2007

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