by stax76 » Fri Feb 03, 2017 3:47 am
This was intended as reply to a PM I received from PetrCBR about a bug report but since these private discussions and bug tracker issues weren't very effective before I decided to add it as another public rant to my previously posted rant, bear with me those rants have much room for improvement social and language wise, I have more talent for the tech it talks about.
You can reproduce it with vmware/virtualbox by setting 144 DPI in the client OS, you can also include vmware/virtualbox in your debugging environment for instance with a script to copy files from host to client and to start the app in the client, and for hard cased attach the debugger remotely or setup a dev environment in the client OS. That is how I've build and tested my apps for different platforms and environments. I've explained all this before both in PM and public forum and not much has happened. The fact that MM hasn't working high DPI support ten years after Windows Vista introduced that feature 2007 show that there is little interest in finally getting it done and doing it right, currently there is little reason to have confidence that the situation will improve in coming years, there is a better UI framework now with MM5 but the core problem off not developing and testing for high DPI remains. It's exhausting to make bug reports and waiting countless days for a new build just to learn that it's as severely defect like it was before. I fixed hundreds of bugs and glitches uploading a test build in less then 2 days, often within 3 hours after it was reported, I've scripted building and uploading test builds and included the script in a keyboard driven app launcher to make uploading a fix a matter of a shortcut key. I reported the app TreeSize being broken on high DPI this week, the same day I got a kind and professional reply thanking me for interest and reporting and giving a link to a test build of the upcoming major release which completely fixed it.
If you don't work and test with at least 144 DPI then likely issues will linger for months if not years until more people use high DPI, why there aren't more complains about MM is beyond me, maybe people don't report them and use MusicBee instead which looks pretty good on high DPI, only sub dialogs have a couple of issues, according to spy++ it's WinForms/WinAPI based which surprises, it makes the impression being based on something more modern. I stopped testing it however when I saw the poor and ugly extension API.
Maybe many people don't use high DPI because they are young and have good eyes, I don't know why apparently I'm the only user with 288 DPI, I tested the last MM5 build in vmware with 144 DPI and 1920x1080, it's not working correctly so I conclude there is not a single MM dev using or testing more then 120 DPI, seriously, I don't get it.
Every time I see the MM issues which is everyday and no solution in sight I automatically think if it's finally time to do something to leave the issues behind, the most simple solution would be a basic WPF based front-end on top of MM4, a complete UWP app with XAML or HTML or a app based on electron/chromium with dart or typescript would be more ambitious, maybe too ambitious, I contribute to free software since 15 years and have little motivation to start a big project so I build things for personal use only like my personal video player, I wrote lately about it
here.
This was intended as reply to a PM I received from PetrCBR about a bug report but since these private discussions and bug tracker issues weren't very effective before I decided to add it as another public rant to my previously posted rant, bear with me those rants have much room for improvement social and language wise, I have more talent for the tech it talks about.
You can reproduce it with vmware/virtualbox by setting 144 DPI in the client OS, you can also include vmware/virtualbox in your debugging environment for instance with a script to copy files from host to client and to start the app in the client, and for hard cased attach the debugger remotely or setup a dev environment in the client OS. That is how I've build and tested my apps for different platforms and environments. I've explained all this before both in PM and public forum and not much has happened. The fact that MM hasn't working high DPI support ten years after Windows Vista introduced that feature 2007 show that there is little interest in finally getting it done and doing it right, currently there is little reason to have confidence that the situation will improve in coming years, there is a better UI framework now with MM5 but the core problem off not developing and testing for high DPI remains. It's exhausting to make bug reports and waiting countless days for a new build just to learn that it's as severely defect like it was before. I fixed hundreds of bugs and glitches uploading a test build in less then 2 days, often within 3 hours after it was reported, I've scripted building and uploading test builds and included the script in a keyboard driven app launcher to make uploading a fix a matter of a shortcut key. I reported the app TreeSize being broken on high DPI this week, the same day I got a kind and professional reply thanking me for interest and reporting and giving a link to a test build of the upcoming major release which completely fixed it.
If you don't work and test with at least 144 DPI then likely issues will linger for months if not years until more people use high DPI, why there aren't more complains about MM is beyond me, maybe people don't report them and use MusicBee instead which looks pretty good on high DPI, only sub dialogs have a couple of issues, according to spy++ it's WinForms/WinAPI based which surprises, it makes the impression being based on something more modern. I stopped testing it however when I saw the poor and ugly extension API.
Maybe many people don't use high DPI because they are young and have good eyes, I don't know why apparently I'm the only user with 288 DPI, I tested the last MM5 build in vmware with 144 DPI and 1920x1080, it's not working correctly so I conclude there is not a single MM dev using or testing more then 120 DPI, seriously, I don't get it.
Every time I see the MM issues which is everyday and no solution in sight I automatically think if it's finally time to do something to leave the issues behind, the most simple solution would be a basic WPF based front-end on top of MM4, a complete UWP app with XAML or HTML or a app based on electron/chromium with dart or typescript would be more ambitious, maybe too ambitious, I contribute to free software since 15 years and have little motivation to start a big project so I build things for personal use only like my personal video player, I wrote lately about it [url=https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1795640#post1795640]here[/url].