No worries, mate.
I've sent another pm with hopefully a compatible version for xp. The app itself is half finished, so don't be too harsh on it. :-)
I know, the UI kinda looks childish to some people, but I hate boring UI's that look like they were built in a hurry for windows 98.
I've been discussing with a couple friends of mine who are now independent developers. See, I was going to put a license, license check, and all of that DRM good stuff in my programs. They have convinced me not to do such thing. Why? Because my apps will get pirated no matter what. Making my buyers jump through hoops will only deter them from buying. My friends took a vow never to put DRM in their programs. And they have been quite successful, actually. Ever since they stopped putting DRM in their apps, those apps have stopped showing up on torrent sites. I guess because it wasn't a challenge anymore for hackers.
I've just taken that vow myself. I'm in the process of removing all the DRMs from my already published apps.
Added by edit.
This modification is nothing.
So, I recently ported an app from the desktop environment over to windows 8 metro interface. It's a productivity app, so you have to be able to print, right? Well, on the desktop side, it took 4 lines of code to format the documents and print it out on paper. Simple.
Last night, when I started I was surprised that my codes didn't work with the new windows 8 metro interface. So, I began to search everywhere for tutorials on how to print a document in the new interface. That was when I came across hundreds... thousands of cries of anguish from developers before me who also tried to write a printing protocol for the new interface but failed.
There is a printing sample code by MS, but it is probably the most confusing code I have ever seen. It is the embodiment of spaghetti code. Impossible to read and make useful.
Then I found this blog by a developer who finally figured a way to write out a print protocol. His code was 120 lines long! I kept on searching and this was the shortest anyone has ever made it. So, I implemented his code and what do you know it worked. But then my app crashed when I tried to print more than 1 page.
I emailed the guy and he said he was aware of that, but since it took him way too long to figure that out he gave up on printing in his windows 8 apps.
So, I really concentrated and about 70+ lines of codes later I was able to format and print single or multiple pages of documents.
Think about it. On the desktop, it took 4 lines of code. To do the same in metro, it took 200+ lines of code!
I emailed a windows 8 development team member and released some steam. After all, it took me 5 hours to write a printing protocol for my app. What the hell were they thinking?
This morning, I got a reply. He said people have been spamming his mailbox from day 1 about this issue. That's all he said.
Can you believe that? 200+ lines of code just to print a damn "hello world" text string.
This morning, I did some more searchings, and as I suspected there is no other way to print in the new interface.
You see, before with the desktop we could print by sending the string text directly to the printer. The new interface made it impossible. Now, we have to create a new page, format our texts, put everything in the new page, and print an image based on that page. And that's for single page printing. That's as far as that guy got before he gave up. To solve the multiple page printing problem, I had to add in an overflow page to receive the texts that didn't all fit on one page. So, with each additional page, more memory is taken up. This is an extremely resource consuming process.
Who's the genius behind MS's metro team that decided to make printing this complicated? Do they just want us to use facebook all day instead of being productive?
Edited by yenmor, : No reason given.
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