If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

Carlos — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:00:17 GMT

Reading this, I wondered why you didn't prototype the Windows 95 shell on Windows NT; this would have saved maintaining a 16-bit version. But it's clear from the previous comment that early Windows 95 development must have predated the first release of Windows NT in early 1993, although it seems that betas of NT might have been available?

I second Yuhong Bao's suggestion: a post on the history of Windows 95 development with the dates of key milestones and how it related to NT development (if at all) would be interesting.

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

Yuhong Bao — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 07:28:41 GMT

"Windows 95 included both the 16-bit and 32-bit versions of the common controls library, and they both built out of the same sources, with a little #ifdef WIN32 action here and there to deal with the places where 16/32 source code compatibility didn't quite cover everything."

So that is why the 16-bit version of the common control library were updated to support the new common controls in Windows 95, yet this fact were undocumented!

You should blog more about the early builds of Windows 95, such as builds 58 and 73. I wonder what version of Visual C++ was these builds built with. WinSock support, Win32 support, Shell namespace, and so on... And perticularly about why the networking support in these builds were the same as WFW 3.11's networking support. Does this web page recall any memories of these builds?

http://toastytech.com/guis/c73.html

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

Yuhong Bao — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 07:27:16 GMT

So that is why the 16-bit version of the common control library were updated to support the new common controls in Windows 95, yet this fact were undocumented!

You should blog more about the early builds of Windows 95, such as builds 58 and 73. I wonder what version of Visual C++ was these builds built with. WinSock support, Win32 support, Shell namespace, and so on... Does this web page recall any memories of these builds?

http://toastytech.com/guis/c73.html

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

Jonathan — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 22:25:08 GMT

To Selfhost - To use your under-development product for production uses.

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

Starfish — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 21:53:29 GMT

Not much imagination is needed anymore - as there's no compelling reason to change the initial orientation (it barely matters performance-wise), it seems obvious to keep the format already in use and save many developers from headaches.

*dons 'dunce' cap

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

db48x — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:50:10 GMT

Actually, the best solution in a situation like that is for the artist to produce one image for each button, and have the build process assemble them into a combined image. Doing that lets you change the format of the combined image if you need to. Still, in general the largest benefit comes from combining the images, and there's essentially no performance difference between different ways of combining those images. (Animations show the difference better than toolbars)

Also, scripting languages like perl or python are quite a bit better than they used to be, so today it's a lot easier to whip up a little script do do that sort of thing than it used to be.

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

Mike Dimmick — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:49:43 GMT

Southpaw: nice conspiracy theory, but Raymond is talking about the bitmaps which contain the button-face images, and whether they're like a compact camera filmstrip (horizontal), or a movie filmstrip (vertical). You can orient the resulting toolbar either way.

benkaras: it's not exactly hard to write a program that converts from one to the other - I did it myself when Raymond published the original articles. There was no appreciable difference in performance between the two approaches, in my scenario, so to avoid the code churn, I backed out the change. Might be worth another look now I know that BitBlt recolours monochrome bitmaps when blitting to a colour DC.

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

Southpaw — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:33:11 GMT

Interesting how there is no mention of how Vertical tool bars went with the OS2 License. The MS contract with IBM is the real reason MS couldn't use vertical tool bars in Windows.

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

benkaras — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:40:06 GMT

There is a level of inefficiency that you are forgetting about: The artist.

An artist wants to draw all the artwork and just hand it off to the development team. But now they must ask, "Is this for an imagelist or a toolbar?" Then the artist heads back to the office and arranges the images vertically or horizontally as appropriate. A simple flag would cut this step out of the development process.

re: If vertical strips are better, why do toolbars use horizontal strips?

AC — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 19:48:19 GMT

We've always used the term "self-host" as "being good enough to have on your primary machine". Perhaps they mean that it's good enough to use as their operating system on their primary machine at that point.