One simple and good reason for the alpha channel support: Desktop Icons. And that’s really what I’ve put the support in there for. 16bit color can look very nice but if you take all this great imagery and then slap in the hard lines of a 24bit desktop icon instead of a fully blended one, it really detracts from the overall look.
And as far as embedded resource remember this is an OS, what I put on this is all that will ever need be put on there, everything else will be loaded externally. Which includes, for the most part, those alpha blended icons.
That’d be great Gus. I’ll be busy for the next little while w my dad’s 60th and these burst pipes but whenever you get that to me I’ll take a look. PS still waiting on that email
The next beta of Pyxis 2 is coming along nicely so I thought I’d give you all a bit of a glimpse into what you can expect:
Pre-Rendered Fonts: Since I don’t currently have RLP for Cobra I’ve come up w/ this little solution to render nice fonts. In the future perhaps I’ll have RLP for Cobra and have true AA fonts or simply support them on CWX; we’ll see.
AppDomains: Applications are now loaded into their own AppDomains for clean unloading
32Bit Icons: Simply throw a PNG or whatever into our free Image Converter to prepare it for Pyxis2
No More WPF: This is a BIG one! The WPF is completely removed from Pyxis and you can see it in the faster render speeds and touch responses.
Managers: We’ve added quite a few new static objects to help you along; SettingsManager; DriveManager; NetworkManager; etc.
New Controls: Listboxes and Comboboxes make their first appearance in Beta 2.
Modals: Yes you can now prompt the user and interrupt all other threads until they respond.
Faster Boots: Pyxis 2 Beta 2 installs, configures and boots incredibly fast compared to the last beta, oh and you no longer have to power-cycle the device to adjust your LCD size.
“Modals: Yes you can now prompt the user and interrupt all other threads until they respond.”
Why block other threads? Modal dialogs in windows block setting focus to parent form until closing modal, not block other threads. Maybe I just reading something wrong. It would seem like MS Async would be dream for making these kinds of shells. The compiler support would already work for MF, just need minimal library support with the required non-generic types (i.e. Task). Hope they port it in near future.
@ William There are different levels of Modal. There’s form level; which only blocks the form GUI thread and there’s System modal which blocks the entire app until response. Threads in other apps and system threads remain unaffected in either case. Sorry, I should have been more clear.
@ Eric, Web Apps are still growing. Right now they’re very simple HTML like pages that define elements to be created and through the use of tags Pyxis responds to events on those elements by doing POST/GET requests or performing other basic functions.
Useful for RSS readers, image sharing, forums, weather apps, etc.
We’ve gotten a lot of really good changes in and we’re writing the apps that will make it really useful right now. For example; File Finder will be completed today. Have a sneak peak below.
Is that a combobox, treeview and listview I see? ;D
New code has been uploaded to Beta 2. Here’s the short list of changes:
ChipworkX support
Active Device detection
System Tray in the menubar
Icons update w/ Drive Mount and Network Connect/Disconnect
Fixed quitting from application menu
Added OpenFile dialog
Fixed treeview glitch
Apps now always launch in new threads
Updated Modal blocking to support multiple levels of block
Added “Pages” to desktop
Added Image Viewer
Added "Create Link"
Desktop now loads from stored link files instead of apps (= faster loading)
Dialog shows while app is loading
Added Solitaire
Added file associations
Bound filebox to associations
SystemUpdates is now supported
ETC
you could really use it