I thought I’d share some before and after screenshots of the work I’ve done so far.
Here’s the main screen of the application before:
And here is the after shot:
You’ll notice two of the emails look like gibberish both in the before and after shots. Those were test emails I created with subjects in a single foreign language (one is in Hebrew, and one in Greek), so Outlook decided to encode them with the encodings windows-1255 and iso-8859-7 respectively. This is a case I’d like to handle better in the future. But even without that, still a much more usable version.
And for fun, here’s another screen I’ve been working on. It is supposed to look like this (in the old version of PopTray):
But if you’re using Vista or above, and using the Aero theme, because of some screen refresh bugs (not specific to the app) usually it looks more like this:
So my changes to this screen include moving the alignment of the buttons to “cling” to the right side of the window, and adding code in the window resize to stretch the textboxes when you resize the window. Textboxes that are too small that don’t resize when you make the window bigger is a pet peeve of mine. So I thought I’d fix it.
And while I was at it, I looked into workarounds for the refresh issues, and found that adding a call to refresh the inner panel (aka “frame” in delphi) with the missing labels and buttons on create and after the window is resized reduces the problem by about 95%, as in, it displays correctly on load and it’s only a problem now if you drag the window off the screen and back, but if you resize the window it redraws it properly, so it’s much easier to work around. If I ported the app from Delphi 7 to a newer version of Delphi this problem would probably go away entirely, so it’s not really worth the investment to try to workaround that last 5% issue.