Curiosity got the best of me and I finally downloaded the code. On this note, it may be a good idea to mention the approximate package size somewhere here next to download links - 18 MB for the code package was quite… surprising. On the same note, maybe those 21 MB (when unpacked) MP3 sounds could be replaced by MIDI sequences, which would significantly decrease the package size.
About the code:
• I like that the OSD tooltip shows when hovering the tray icon, I like the fact that it can show the long date on click, but I don't like that it doesn't stay on long date. I mean, it'd be nice to have it on toggle, so if tray icon was clicked once it should always display long date afterwards on hover until clicked again.
• When volume is very low - I don't want to scare off my kittens or upset the neighbors - the tick-tock sound can't be heard. Dunno if it's doable but I guess it should have its own volume level independently of the main bell/chime volume. Well, with MIDI I think it could be done by setting each channel's volume and/or notes' velocity.
• I'm not sure how exactly the "progressbars" in the About window should look like, but here on XP they don't look very nice. Maybe I don't have the right font face/version… (didn't look through the code yet)? Why not use standard progressbars…?
- CBT-progressbars.png (646.59 KiB) Viewed 6379 times
EDIT: After looking through the code and performing some tests I found out that XP doesn't natively have any font that can display the characters used in those fake progressbars. However, there's chance that the user may have installed additional fonts, at least one of them being capable of displaying those characters. On my XP system I found - by using BabelMap, a good free application - that there are four compatible fonts installed. Adding the following before the two corresponding lines of code allowed a much better progress display:
Code: Select all
Gui, Font,, Arial ; only as backup, doesn't have all characters in XP
Gui, Font,, Symbola
Gui, Font,, Segoe UI Symbol
Gui, Font,, DejaVu Sans
Gui, Font,, DejaVu LGC Sans
There may be many other (free) fonts out there capable of displayng those characters but relying on the user having any of them installed or using the latest OS version is kinda shady; I'd go with a GDIplus-drawn progressbar if you want those markers, otherwise a regular progressbar control should be enough for the purpose.
- 20181211112233.png (646.59 KiB) Viewed 6373 times
/EDIT
• Bible quote interval can't be set for one hour or larger than 12 hours; why? Someone might want it every hour, someone else might want it once a day (every 24h) either at fixed or random time.
• The list of holidays/celebrations doesn't look very nice and the fragmentation Easter / Other seems forced. Maybe a ListView would be better, would allow some text alignment? And if you wanna keep the Easter / Other format, a tab control should probably do the trick.
Also, maybe it would be a good idea to have a tray menu item to display that list more quickly and without the additional burdain of having the Customize window cover other windows.
Otherwise, for the little time I tested the script it works well as far as I can tell. Maybe in time I'll find some other things that can be improved. As I said before, I'd like it to be some kind of framework upon which
any kind of calendar (hint, hint!
) could be built, not necessarily a religious one. That way, users could build their own packages complete with dates, names, pictures/icons, text/quotes, sounds, and feed the desired one to the script. Even multiple packages could be loaded and used simultaneously or one at a time, upon user choice. But maybe I'm stretching too much.
Well, good luck ahead!
EDIT, @ JoeDF and/or any other admins: Sorry to bring back this issue but image uploading is still screwed up for me, at least with the
prosilver theme under
QtWeb 3.8.5 in
XP-SP3:
- AHK board upload issue.png (1.02 MiB) Viewed 6373 times