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Is it possible for the GUI to be updated?

Is it possible for the GUI to be updated?

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Posted by

Meerkat (8 posts)

Date

Mon 29 Sep 2008 07:27 PM (UTC)

Message

It'd be really cool if MUSHclient would support the latest Windows-specific GUI enhancements. I use Windows Vista (64-bit), and this app looks a bit out of place. The buttons, for example--not themed. The program just generally screams that it is an older application. I love the functionality of MUSHclient, but if it were modernized I think that would help it catch on. I understand that you'd like to support a broad variety of Windows software, but isn't it possible to theme based on do a version check? A lot of Windows apps these days are dropping support for Windows older than XP. I don't think anyone serious about computing should be using anything older than 2000 by now...

Another thing, I'd like to be able to be able to ctrl-c while I am highlighting text in the chat history. Having to right click Copy is a bit annoying.

Posted by

Zeno USA (2,871 posts)

Date

Reply #1 on Mon 29 Sep 2008 08:26 PM (UTC)

Message

For copying, read this:
http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/bbshowpost.php?id=8052

As for the GUI, I could care less. It's functional, it's organized, it works. It is open-source, if you want to create a new GUI go for it.

Zeno McDohl,
Owner of Bleached InuYasha Galaxy
http://www.biyg.org

Posted by

Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts)

bio Forum Administrator

Date

Reply #2 on Mon 29 Sep 2008 08:48 PM (UTC)

Message

I wonder if there is a setting I can tweak that would let it apply themes? Under XP the titles have an XP look, but I agree the buttons look older (not that it really matters, but if it can be easily changed, why not?)

I'm not sure if it is even the .exe or the resources file. A while ago the resources were separated out into a separate DLL, maybe if someone edited that with a resource editor it would be possible to upgrade that, and everything would be solved. Maybe.

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

Posted by

Worstje Netherlands (899 posts)

Date

Reply #3 on Mon 29 Sep 2008 10:00 PM (UTC)

Message

I think all it takes is to make a 'manifest' file and include that with the application, although I think the preferred way is to put it in as a resource somehow. There's tons of stuff on the net about getting that done tho, I read about it years ago.

Posted by

WillFa USA (525 posts)

Date

Reply #4 on Mon 29 Sep 2008 10:14 PM (UTC)

Message

Manifests are for .net code.

Posted by

Worstje Netherlands (899 posts)

Date

Reply #5 on Tue 30 Sep 2008 02:00 AM (UTC)

Message

I am pretty sure it isn't. I know Delphi's implementation for Win32 uses manifests, so that's really the way to go.

Posted by

Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts)

bio Forum Administrator

Date

Reply #6 on Tue 30 Sep 2008 03:50 AM (UTC)

Message

Note to me:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cpp/xpstylemfc.aspx

(Can't try it right now, will get back to it in a week).

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

Posted by

Cage_fire_2000 USA (119 posts)

Date

Reply #7 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 07:10 PM (UTC)

Amended on Wed 01 Oct 2008 07:14 PM (UTC) by Cage_fire_2000

Message

Excuse me, nobody serious about computing should be using anything older than 2000???? Excuse me, but not all of us can afford to buy the latest and greatest stuff, and I find that a little annoying, you're talking just like those jerks that manufactor computer equipment that have totally thrown out the idea of backwards compatibility, even most software developers have given up on backwards compatibility and personally being stuck with an older OS myself(one that has worked perfectly well for as long as I've had it) and not being able to even buy a new printer(even though I don't think the drivers could have possiblity changed that much over the last 10 years or so, an ink-jet is an ink-jet) because they want to force people to upgrade to something newer even if it doesn't really give them much they didn't have before and actually makes it harder to run some of the older classic games and software they might have. Also, in my experience many people who play MU* type games are older and not many younger players are getting into it(mostly because they don't know they exist and/or are off playing the fancy graphical online games) so it's entirely possible that somebody running an older computer and OS will be playing MU*s. That's one of the beauties of these games, you could play them with a 100 Mhz computer running Win 95 and a dialup modem if that's all you had(I know the dialup part personally since I had one until last year, although my computer is a lot faster than 100 Mhz).

Anyway, if you could put it in without losing backwards compatibility I couldn't care one way or the other, personally I never liked the fancy buttons and curved corners of XP(It just made the windows bigger and left less space on the screen) and I always changed it to classic style. I can't say that I've had a chance to use Vista and I've kind of been staying away from it from what I've heard of how much more resources, processor, memory, and HD space it uses up compared to running the same program on an older OS. Personally to me, all that matters is functionality, having fancy themes and such is just wasting computing power.

Posted by

Larkin (278 posts)

Date

Reply #8 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 08:44 PM (UTC)

Message

Not to be rude or mean, but I disagree with pretty much everything you just said.

These newer user interfaces are not (usually) just prettier. They're also much more intuitive and make common tasks simpler, unless you're very resistant to change and simply refuse to try anything new.

Most people on the MUDs I play are under 18 years old, actually. Not all kids need graphics. Some of them just like having friends with whom to socialize.

Using old computer hardware has a few benefits, such as being able to run the really old software or work with other really old hardware. Really, though, upgrading your hardware every 3-5 years isn't extremely cost prohibitive any more, and 99% of new PCs will include a new OS for you.

Hearsay is a dangerous thing, too -> http://www.mojaveexperiment.com

Posted by

Cage_fire_2000 USA (119 posts)

Date

Reply #9 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 09:52 PM (UTC)

Message

Uhm, maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by newer interfaces. What I was thinking of was how in Win XP they made the title bar thicker and rounded off. Which in my eyes just made it use up more of the screen. This guy was talking about themed buttons, how exactly does that add functionality? I'm not exactly sure which features you're referring to. Like I said, I haven't tried Vista, I would check it out if I had the chance I suppose, if I knew somebody who had it. I don't think that I'm resistant to change, I just don't see the point of changing when my current system does everything I need it to.

And what exactly do you do for a living anyway that upgrades aren't cost prohibitive? I collect shopping carts at a grocery store for $7 an hour part-time. I clear about $100+ a week. I don't really have an excess of spending money, I could buy a new PC if I wanted to right now, but I just don't need to. My computer has done almost everything I've wanted to do on it just fine for the last 6 years without upgrading the OS or anything, I only upgraded the RAM once and the HDD, other than that I haven't needed anything else. I'm not the sort of guy who buys all the newest fanciest software. There's plenty of fun free games and apps on the internet that'll run just fine on my computer, like MUSHclient for example.

I don't know, maybe there's lots of underage players on MUDs, I don't really play a lot of those, I play on a MUSH, and most of the players there are older. There are a few younger players, but they are far from the majority of the playerbase. All I know is that I was out of high school before I even discovered the existance of MU*s, quite by accident in fact.

Maybe I'm just in unusual circumstances, I never had a lot of money, and the only computers I had before my current computers were garage sale finds. I had old commodore 64s and 128s, I had an AT and XT, once I had a 25 MHz processor, another time like a 133 MHz.

Anyway, enough of my life story, all I was saying is don't give up backwards compatibility. If you can add new features without giving up compatibility with older systems, by all means go ahead, makes no difference to me, but if it suddenly stops working with my system for a relatively minor feature like themed buttons, I'd be pissed.

Posted by

David Haley USA (3,881 posts)

Date

Reply #10 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 10:10 PM (UTC)

Message

Quote:
I don't know, maybe there's lots of underage players on MUDs, I don't really play a lot of those, I play on a MUSH, and most of the players there are older. There are a few younger players, but they are far from the majority of the playerbase. All I know is that I was out of high school before I even discovered the existance of MU*s, quite by accident in fact.

It's kind of dangerous to make assumptions about the demographics of all MU*s based on just one person's experience. When I was in HS there were about 6 of us playing on one MUD; many other players were also under 18. Many others were also over 18. Looking at the ages of people around me, and knowing how long they've been on the MUD scene, I know they have to have been younger than 18 when they started.

Obviously there are lots of people older than 18 as well, but there are apparently a lot more young people than you seem to think.

Anyhow, I think the take-home point of all this is pretty clear: it's better to remain compatible whenever possible, and if compatibility is to be broken it should not be done lightly at all. Is that a fair statement?

David Haley aka Ksilyan
Head Programmer,
Legends of the Darkstone

http://david.the-haleys.org

Posted by

Cage_fire_2000 USA (119 posts)

Date

Reply #11 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 10:13 PM (UTC)

Amended on Wed 01 Oct 2008 10:24 PM (UTC) by Cage_fire_2000

Message

As for the hearsay thing you said, are you referring to the using more resources thing, because I'm pretty sure that's a fact, I looked at the minimum system requirements for a game and it listed them from like 9x to Vista, and Vista's requirements were much higher than those of previous OSs. I thought at first it was a typo or something because it was such a large increase.

Edit: Yeah that's the point I was trying to make. Maybe I shouldn't of said that most players are older, but we can all agree that there /are/ plenty of older people playing right? And even younger people can still have older systems if they're anything like I was and had to get computers from garage sales.

Edit Again: Forgive me if I come across as a little miffed, but some very useful programs have been becoming useless to me lately because of sentiments like this first poster had about most people having newer OSes so it doesn't matter if older OSes are supported anymore. I just recently tried to upgrade to the newest VLC and it seems to only work on XP and above now, I tried downloading a patch that they said might of fixed it but it didn't and I just get an error when I run it, so I had to go back to a previous version and have to watch certain video formats on my laptop now. I can't buy virtually any new hardware from the store anymore because of the same sentiment even though it really shouldn't be that hard to create a driver for an older OS for things like a printer. and it makes no sense for like a network printer not to have backwards support for OSes because not every computer on a network is guaranteed to have specific OSes.

Posted by

David Haley USA (3,881 posts)

Date

Reply #12 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 10:37 PM (UTC)

Message

Quote:
I can't buy virtually any new hardware from the store anymore because of the same sentiment even though it really shouldn't be that hard to create a driver for an older OS for things like a printer. and it makes no sense for like a network printer not to have backwards support for OSes because not every computer on a network is guaranteed to have specific OSes.

Put yourself in their shoes. How many clients won't or can't upgrade their hardware, and how many sales will be lost because of that, versus how much time (and hence money) would it take to figure out how to talk to an old OS that is hardly supported by its own vendor?

David Haley aka Ksilyan
Head Programmer,
Legends of the Darkstone

http://david.the-haleys.org

Posted by

Cage_fire_2000 USA (119 posts)

Date

Reply #13 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 11:39 PM (UTC)

Amended on Wed 01 Oct 2008 11:41 PM (UTC) by Cage_fire_2000

Message

OK, while I have done some programming work before, I can't say I've ever written a device driver, however, I can't imagine that it'd need to be completely rewritten or anything extreme like that just to support an older OS. I could be wrong, like I said, I've never done it, nor do I really know how to do it, but unless it uses some newer OS specific features to do its job, it's probably as simple as changing a few lines of code and recompiling. Again, I could be very wrong there, and if it is more complicated than that, then I'm sorry, but I've seen printer/scanners with support for like every Windows OS ever written(from 9x on) for like $40, and prior to XP if memory serves, virtually everything was backwards compatible, and it never costed anything extra, but all of a sudden when XP came out, everybody stopped supporting almost all versions before it(for a while they still made drivers for ME, but they stopped soon after). I'd like to ask, if anybody reading this thread has written device drivers before, please let me know how hard it is to make them compatible with older OSes? I mean if it needs a major rewrite then I'll be able to understand why people stopped doing it, but if it's relatively minor I'll continue to hate them.

Edit: I guess if they wrote it in .net it'd be harder to make backwards compatible. I've never used .net so I don't know. That's about the only thing I can think of.

Posted by

Nick Gammon Australia (22,975 posts)

bio Forum Administrator

Date

Reply #14 on Wed 01 Oct 2008 11:58 PM (UTC)

Message

Let me make it clear that I wouldn't take away functionality for Windows 98+ users just to make buttons slightly rounded, that would be crazy.

However if for 100 bytes extra XP and Vista users can get their nice user interface, and it keeps working for Windows 98 (or 95 even), then I see no harm.

BTW - I don't want to get into a Vista flame war but I was surprised to see that Warhammer Online recommended 2 Gb of RAM (in itself a lot) for XP users, and 2.6 Gb of RAM for Vista users. So purely by having Vista installed (and keeping everything else the same) you have, apparently, lost 600 Mb of RAM!

I remember when even owning a 600 Mb hard disk was a lot, let alone RAM of that quantity. I mean, to compare, Windows 3.1 needed 4 Mb of RAM I think, Windows 95 needed 8 Mb, Windows 98 maybe 12 Mb, and I think by the time Windows 2000 came out the recommended minimum memory was 16 Mb.

Suddenly Vista somehow consumes 600 Mb *extra* over XP - where did the operating systems that only use 4 Mb go?

I know RAM is getting cheaper, but I wonder what on earth the core operating system needs to do, that it needs another 600 Mb of RAM compared to XP?

- Nick Gammon

www.gammon.com.au, www.mushclient.com

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