Quppa.net

  • When should a program’s UI animations be disabled?

    Modern frameworks like the Windows Presentation Foundation, its relative Silverlight and the upcoming Windows Runtime make it easy to add animations to a program’s graphical user interface. When implemented well, animations subtly improve the user experience and can demonstrate a high level of polish in your application. The Zune client software and Windows Live Messenger…

  • Theming & Visual Styles in Windows 8

    The following is based on the Windows Developer Preview and might not accurately represent the final version of Windows 8. A significant change in Windows 8 is the removal of support for Windows classic theming. In the Windows Developer Preview, there is no Windows Classic theme, and all themes (including Windows Basic and the four…

  • Windows Theme Fonts Redux & Sample Code

    View source on GitHub. In a post earlier this year, I investigated how to retrieve information about theme fonts in Windows. Briefly, the Visual Styles APIs can be used when visual styles are enabled, but values need to be hard-coded (to some extent) otherwise. Andrew Powell commented on my previous post noting difficulties in implementing…

  • Replacement Lisp Icon

    GNU CLISP under Windows sets the default icon for Lisp files (.lisp, .lsp, .cl) to this: I decided to make a new icon based on the style found in recent versions of Visual Studio: This is what I came up with: The .ico file includes 32-bit images at sizes 256x256px (PNG-compressed), 48x48px, 32x32px and 16x16px.…

  • Windows 8: Bypassing the Start screen

    After using the Windows Developer Preview (that is, Windows 8 pre-beta) build for a little while, I’m not at all sold on the Start screen as a replacement for the Start menu for keyboard-and-mouse users. I’m not giving up all hope yet, though – I wasn’t overly fond of the Backstage view when I first…

  • Installing an OEM Xbox 360 Wireless Controller Receiver

    Not wanting to pay the full retail price for a Microsoft Xbox 360™ Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows®, I bought a knock-off from eBay. It turns out that you do get what you pay for – the drivers that came on the 80mm Mini CD were very old and didn’t work with Windows 7. For…

  • Installing CUSP (Eclipse Lisp Plugin)

    Update (2011-09-28): My own instructions didn’t work when I tried to install Eclipse and CUSP on a new machine. After much trial and error, I finally got a working setup by downloading a newer version of CUSP from here (version 1.0.414). This seems to work with SBCL 1.0.51 and Eclipse 3.7 (I downloaded the Classic…

  • VCE Study Score Archive: Mid-Year Update

    Today I released an update to the VCE Study Score Archive: scaling data for 1998 and 2000-2004 is now included (I hadn’t realised that the scaling reports were available on the VTAC website). Download the updated files here. Note that the 2010 data has not been modified.

  • Changing the Synaptics ‘ChiralScroll’ Cursor

    The Synaptics Gesture Suite enables a variety of useful features for supported laptop touchpads. My favourite is ‘ChiralScroll’, which allows you to scroll by making a circular motion on the touchpad. Synaptics actually offers generic drivers on their website now, so you can download them directly without needing to go via the usual websites. Unfortunately,…

  • Windows Theme Fonts

    View source on GitHub. Update: See this post for a sample implementation in WPF. Have you ever wondered how to access the various font colours and styles found throughout Windows, such as that of the ‘Main Instruction’ text in the Task Dialog shown above? If you are using WPF, the SystemFonts class might sound promising…

Got any book recommendations?

Get In Touch