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Comment by bithush | Hacker News Reader

Ahh yes Dina! I tried it out long ago but have been using Consolas since its release. Just installed Dina and I have to say it looks rather lovely at 8pt on a dark theme! Is that a custom theme you have in VS or something from vsstyles?

The animations in Bvackup are very OS X like. They are beautiful. It has been a very long time since I clicked a button in a Windows app and went "ohh that is sexy!" haha. Also your /wip is very interesting. The level of detail is impressive. I ended up spending about half an hour reading every entry.

Are all the animations completely home baked then?

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It's not a theme, just some basic color palette with green for preprocessor, yellow for keywords, cyan for string and numbers and white for the rest. Dark gray for the comments.

Re: animations - yeah, they are all custom, but there's not really much to them. The hardest part was to do flickerless fade-ins and -outs, the code for that just ain't pretty. Window transformations are just DeferWindowPos with the right combination of flags and a bit of painting cooperation from custom controls. Still though... the amount of work required to get these animations working was ungodly compared to $('div').animate({ ... }); :)

Yeah I can imagine. Win32 was never designed for animations like that :) You appear to have done a pretty remarkable job though as they are some of the best I have seen in Windows outside of things such as WPF. Well done!

Do you blog at all? I imagine you have some very interesting things you could talk about in regards to Win32 programming. Understandably there are fewer and fewer pure Win32 developers these days and even fewer who take the time to really make a Win32 application look good.

Purely for personal curiosity I have decided to learn C (and most likely C++ as well) as I have no real experience with native development and it is something that has always bugged me. Would it be incredibly rude of me to maybe shoot you an email for a little chat one to one? I totally understand if you are unable too. Thanks!

* Whoops, thanks, my brother's tablet :-/

No, sorry, don't blog and can't mentor you. I just don't have time for either.

No problem, I totally understand. Best of luck with Bvackup.

PS I realised you are the guy behind Hamachi. I used that a lot a while back so thanks for that also!

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