| What is it? |
| SysPal is a widget which displays the system
hardware palette in display modes with 8-bit
colour depth, either as a strip or a grid. The
palette can be saved to disk or copied to the
clipboard. SysPal has an Office 97-look user
interface and can dock to the side of the desktop
area. Select the "Docking View" menu
item or double-click on the palette to enter
docking mode, then drag the palette to the edge
of the screen. Click here
for screen-shots. |
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| Let me at it! |
| This is MFC bloatware so I must apologise
immediately for the huge size of my executable -
about 150KB when zipped. Get it here. |
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| Source Code |
SysPal is probably not particularly
interesting unless you happen to be writing a
palette-aware application. However, it
demonstrates a number of things that programmers
may find useful:
- Office 97-style menus (including context
menu)
- Office 97-style toolbar (customisable)
- AppBar (dockable with desktop window)
- Tracking datatips
- Scheme for persistence of user settings
(including toolbar state)
- A class for extracting version resource
info
- Various other bits and pieces
A project file is included for Microsoft
Visual C++ 5.0. Get it here (about 73KB).
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| A Bit of History |
| SysPal dates back to my
multimedia days. It started life as a sample
program in the Windows 3.x SDK which displayed
the display's hardware palette in a window. Very
handy for seeing what your palette manipulation
code is really up to. The sample was rather
spartan so I started making some improvements.
Things got out of hand and SysPal took on
something of a pedagogical nature. I
reimplemented SysPal using MFC and learnt the art
of applying the document-view model to anything
other than a "Scribble"-style
application. I ported SysPal to Win32 and
experienced the delights of maintaining
compatibility with Win32s on Windows 3.1. I am
glad to say that developing software that runs on
Win32s is something I am no longer burdened with,
and SysPal now requires Win32 proper. A while
back, I had to do some Macintosh porting using
the Microsoft Visual C++ Cross-Development
Edition. Again, SysPal was the perfect vehicle
for learning the essentials of Mac porting.
Microsoft have since ditched Visual C++ for
Macintosh, and I have removed Mac support from
SysPal, though you will still find the occasional
"#ifdef
_MAC" directive in the
source code. SysPal features my implementation of
Office 97-style "cool menus" and flat
toolbars. Since I did that, MSJ have published a
coolmenu implementation, and I believe the
Stingray Objective Toolkit now supports
coolmenus. Well, it was bound to happen. Most
recently, I made SysPal into an
"AppBar" - an app that docks to the
side of the desktop window. Like Jeffery Richter,
who wrote an article in MSJ (March 1996) about
AppBars, I found this to be one of the trickiest
things I've tried in quite a while. Finally,
writing a nice 'About' box is always fun, and
SysPal's was no exception. |
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