Monday 1 January 2018

Making things look and feel good.

For the past couple of days I have been struggling to make the whole package more professional looking. First up was an installation package - primarily because I wanted the font installed automatically and the package ready to use with a couple of clicks. Not everyone likes zip files.

Great idea, but it exposed an issue - installing into the 'Program Files' directory made NPC Engineer fail at the first hurdle. It couldn't even copy its own default files to the main directory. A bit of experimentation showed that this was due to the directory - I could install to any other directory and things ran beautifully. It would also work if you ran NPC Engineer as an administrator, but of course this would involve right-clicking each time, and the nice Start menu entry or desktop icon (if installed) would be pointless.

Grinding my teeth and Googling like a boss, I eventually discovered something useful - applications should not write to their install directories; only installers should do that. It is a security thing. Instead, the application should write to the user's 'appdata' area.

This, of course, was news to me and requires rewriting of all the disc access stuff to take account of it. I'm trying to make it so that the user can select whichever directory they wish as well. Look out for the updates!

The next thing I thought of was updating my application icon. There were anti-aliasing issues with the original that showed up when the icon was on a desktop. Small things bother me, so I set to work getting a better, more indicative icon. Here it is:


I love it. Frankly, I don't want the application to actually DO anything any more; I'm going to reprogram it to just bounce the icon around your desktop until you love it too. :)

Look out for the next version as an installer and with a new icon.

Maasq




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