{"id":792,"date":"2009-06-10T21:59:34","date_gmt":"2009-06-10T21:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=792"},"modified":"2009-06-11T09:17:49","modified_gmt":"2009-06-11T09:17:49","slug":"improvements-to-twittoday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=792","title":{"rendered":"Improvements to TwitToday"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing too much Java at work recently, so in the interest of keeping my hand in with some low-level C++, I picked up the code for my mobile twitter client, TwitToday<\/a>, again. <\/p>\n

I originally wrote it at a hackday<\/a>, but I’ve since come back to tweak it a couple of times to get it to spawn background worker threads<\/a>, add SIP on-screen keyboard support<\/a>, and improve support for sending special and accented characters<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After another evening of tweaking, I’ve added a few new minor features:<\/p>\n

Transparent text box<\/strong><\/p>\n

When not in use, the text box is now transparent. When it has focus, it is coloured in white as usual.<\/p>\n

A few people commented that a bright white text box could dominate a dark Today screen too much, so this is hopefully a nice aesthetic improvement.<\/p>\n

I did this by creating a custom windows procedure<\/a> for the text box. <\/p>\n

The windows procedure needed to handle a couple of events: <\/p>\n

Handling WM_PAINT<\/code> by using SetBkMode<\/code> to make the text box TRANSPARENT<\/code> <\/p>\n

Handling WM_ERASEBKGND<\/code> by using TODAYM_DRAWWATERMARK<\/code> to draw the background over the text control’s rectangle.<\/p>\n

Keyboard navigation<\/strong><\/p>\n

You used to need to tap inside the text box to use it. <\/p>\n

Now, you can use the phone’s D-Pad to scroll up or down to the TwitToday text box. <\/p>\n

When the TwitToday line is selected, the focus is set to the text box so that it is ready for you to start typing. <\/p>\n

I did this by altering the value of the Today Screen item’s Selectability<\/code> registry key to ‘2’. <\/p>\n

I then used a custom windows procedure<\/a> for the Today Screen window to capture WM_TODAYCUSTOM_RECEIVEDSELECTION<\/code> events. At which point, I use SetFocus<\/code> to set the focus to the text box.<\/p>\n

I added a separate custom windows procedure for the text control itself, and when selected, capturing WM_KEYDOWN<\/code> events to look for VK_TUP<\/code> and VK_TDOWN<\/code> keys – at which point I deselect the Today screen item and allow the selection to pass to the Today Screen items above or below me.<\/p>\n

‘Enter’ to send<\/strong><\/p>\n

You used to need to tap the ‘OK’ button on the screen to send a tweet. <\/p>\n

Now, pressing ‘Enter’ moves the focus to the ‘OK’ button for you – from where pressing ‘Enter’ again will send the tweet.<\/p>\n

I did this by using the custom windows procedure for the text control itself, capturing WM_KEYDOWN<\/code> events to look for VK_TACTION<\/code> at which point I use SetFocus<\/code> to move the focus to the OK button.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

And that’s it. Download it here<\/a>. It makes the client a little less obtrusive, and saves you having to get out the stylus to use it. Minor tweaks, but they do improve the usability quite a bit. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I never got around to doing anything clever around notifying users of updates, so most people who use my Twitter client will never know that I’ve made these changes. Whoops \ud83d\ude42 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing too much Java at work recently, so in the interest of keeping my hand in with some low-level C++, I picked up the code for my mobile twitter client, TwitToday, again. I originally wrote it at a hackday, but I’ve since come back to tweak it a couple of times to get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[46,151,243,397,19],"class_list":["post-792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","tag-mobile","tag-twitter","tag-twittoday","tag-win32","tag-windows-mobile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}