Long time no talkie

So, it's been a while since I've last decided to bore those untold millions who visit this lonely piece of Internet real-estate with the inconsequential musing of an incoherent mind. The simple truth is that I haven't had that much to say. Still don't.

So, what's up in my world?

Feed Demon is a wonderful News Aggregator. Still in the final stages before it's official 1.0 release, the reader is a free download. Once 1.0 is released, the cost will be $30 to $40. It displays news feeds in user-defined channel groups using an Outlook-style Folder/news item/preview pane kind of way, with a nice newspaper-style display of all news feeds in a given channel. Best I've seen so far.

I'm still using iTunes. I don't know why, but Napster 2.0 just isn't thrilling me that much. iTunes can win me over if they just improve the music playing aspects... I don't keep collections of playlists around. I decide spur-of-the-moment that the next album I want to hear is X. The next time I sit at my computer, I will have completely different musical desires. I do LOVE the auto-playlists for listening to highly rated music, or not-recently-played music, or music from a given decade, but GUESS WHAT? Windows Media Player can do that too. I prefer the AAC format, and that's the only failing for WMP. I guess if the next iteration of WMP has AAC support in the Media Library (I can play them now, but I can't add them to the library), then iTunes becomes just a store and a way to play purchased music. Unless Microsoft can write a nice DRM provider for iTunes...

iTunes... neat, but NOT a media library manager

After hearing how iTunes was touted as the be-all, end-all music library management system, I was excited to try it on my Windows PC. I really wanted something to replace WMP9 or Winamp 2.x (nothing can replace Winamp 3... it'll never be good enough to install, much less replace). After installing it and using it, I truly appreciate the ability to purchase music on a song-by-song basis. However, I HATE it's interface. iTunes has no concept of a play queue. I started an album playing, then began to manage my library, importing MP3s ripped into WMP and adding album images to them if they didn't have one. Once the first song of the album finished... the playback stopped. After some experimenting, I realized that songs queued to play only continue playing if they remain displayed in the browse window! There is no concept of a song queue, no ability to work with the media library while listening to it as well. Utterly annoying...

PocketPC programming... now with menus!

So, it's been a few days since I've had anything worth talking about. Whether I still do or not is questionable, but I'll try it anyway.

I'm trying to pick up developing on my PocketPC. I've gotten the WM2003 SDK and eVC++ 4 (with SP2) installed, and I can make something run on the emulator. It's definately harder to work with than Win32... I chose a dialog based app for a quick test app, and I haven't been able to figure out how to add a menu to the bottom menu bar (the "TaskBar", "CommandBar", or "MenuBar", depending on which documentation you read... a common terminology would be nice, especially since those same docs tend to use one of the OTHER naming choices to talk about the TOP bar). I can make my own CommandBar and add the menu to it, but I lose screen space, since it's created in the client area of the dialog. All the documentaiton that uses the bottom MenuBar talks about doc/view applications and CFrameWnd derived classes, and CDialog is derived from CWnd, not CFrameWnd. Most mention "Oh, yeah, and you can do something similar to this with a CDialog based class", but none go on to educate me further.

There, now that I've bored the non-programmers to tears, maybe I should give them something to read. Or not. I haven't read my daily news articles yet, so not much to talk about. Maybe I should change the order I do things in the mornings...

Update: (Like you care)
I've figured out how to deal with the menu in a PPC Dialog! Apparently... CDialog on the PPC already has a nice shiny CCeCommandBar created and waiting to be filled with menuy goodness. Much easier than I thought. I HAVE found one distressing thing, though. I can't have a nice empty non-popup menu entry on the bar... if there's no sub-items, it doesn't get rendered! So, to have a button that says "Add" on the menu bar, I have to create a graphical ToolBar, and add a BMP with the word "Add" drawn on it. Very silly, in my opinion.

Obligatory Autobiographical post

OK. So, first a little about me. I work for Rainbow Studios. I make video games. PS2 games, to be specific. I'm a programmer, and yes, programming the PS2 is much more difficult than it should be, I think. I'm married, and happy. Most of the time. I mean, I'm always married, but no one is always happy.

The FIRST entry!

Alright, this blog thing is getting popular, and I'd like to get with the times! Not much to say right now, but watch this space for all the things you don't care about!