I recently bought your product because I lost a bid for a large purchase of one of our products.  While our product has 10 times the features of the competitor, they had an Office 2007 style UI and we had flat Windows 98 UI.  They gave up a ton of features to buy the competitors nicer looking product.  I have friends inside the purchasing organization that told me straight out, the decision makers liked the look of the competitors product.

 

Features matter, looks matter more.

 

Again, Great job Codejock!!

 

 

Also I am using custom-built DLL that does NOT export all functions like CodeJock own. My DLL is HALF the size of Codejock, because CJ exports everything and it exports by NAME which bumps the size of DLL.

Microsoft was smart enough NOT to export MFC by name (they export by ordinal) and their MFC DLLs are much smaller even if they export similar number of functions.

To do custom built of DLL that does NOT export all functions but only selected ones, you MUST modify the original sources (mainly headers EXT_CLASS markers).

And FYI: I am using DLL because static linking to xtreme toolkit is not an option since I must conserve download size and I use xtreme lib in more than one EXE. Also it is good practice since shared DLL uses memory once, in contrast to statically linked lib to EXE.

 

I know that library is scalable and well written so one can extend it - I did it several times and provided code to Codejock as a suggestion and they included some of it in few recent versions.

 

The problem with customizations is that you have to RE-DO (re-apply) them with every upgrade of xtreme toolkit. I hate doing the same thing over and over again, so that's why I am asking for things that should be included in the library (sometimes even providing CJ with the code).  I already have way too much customizations and it is real pain to reapply them.

 

I have found the libraries to be exceptionally scalable. If you need to do it, you usually can. I just posted an implementation of the single-click issue that works in 10.3.1. The full implementation is 21 lines long, counting spacing lines and comments.

 

Personally, I find the visual features to be the hardest to do right. I would rather have time spent on visual effects and fully functional themes than little features that can be implemented with a couple dozen lines of code.

 

That said, I find the functional aspects of the software invaluable. Can you imagine trying to do the whole PropertyGrid from scratch? Even for a top notch developer this is no trivial task. Congrats to all involved for a useful highly scalable architecture.

 

John

 

For me it seems like all Codejock developers time is now going into "cool" Vista visuals and usability gets no attention !

 

 

How about promised single-click property item activation:

Is it still on 10.4 list ???

 

I just received an e-mail from Codejock staff asking me to renew the maintenance license. Is next year going to bring ANY important usability improvements or only Vista-glass-thingy?

 

 

 

It will work like in Office 2007 - for Vista when Aero theme is set.

 

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