Nicer Notifications

This is something really not that important in the grand scheme of things but notifications produced by wxNotificationMessage used to look relatively ugly under Unix as they appeared just as a normal window:

And this wasn't especially nicely looking and, even worse, inconsistent with all the other notifications shown by the system.

As I'm currently on vacation and don't feel bound to work on "important" things, I've finally decided to take time to change this. Switching to libnotify to show the notifications as everybody else does was very simple and the end result is much nicer:

or, to show an example of multiple active notifications:

Unfortunately fixing the rest of the problems due to lack of integration with Linux desktop turned out to be less trivial, for example I totally failed in my attempts to get notifications about the system going to sleep and waking up that I'd really like to implement for wxGTK. The only other thing I managed to do during this vacation was a couple of minor wxWebView enhancements but more about this in a future post.

MSVS 2012 RC Installation Experience

As an update to my previous post about building wxWidgets with VC11 beta, I'd like to say a few words about my experience with installing the RC version of the same compiler -- now known as MSVS 2012.

First of all, the installer doesn't tell you anything about having to uninstall the beta yourself before running it but you really must do it. Otherwise the installation will succeed but the IDE won't open afterwards with an "invalid licence" error (see this known issue, apparently beta has a higher version number than the RC).

Second, and much more annoyingly, the installer also doesn't warn you that it's going to break your existing VC 10 installation. This is also an apparently known problem and can be fixed by installing SP1 for VC 10 but if you're unaware of it it may not be completely obvious that the mysterious LNK1123: failure during conversion to COFF: file invalid or corrupt errors you now get when building any MSVS 2010 C++ projects in debug build are due to VS 2012 installation.

Hopefully knowing this in advance will make testing MSVS 2012 less aggravating to the other wxWidgets users than it was for me. Unfortunately you will still need to reboot your machine a couple of times to install it but then clearly not having to reboot for a compiler installation would have been too much to expect.

Ah, and as for building wxWidgets with VC 11 RC -- nothing to say here, it still works, just as it did with beta and I didn't notice any real changes affecting wxWidgets. The new IDE look is pretty ugly but all the features are there and the profiler is rather nice. Pity it's only included in Premium edition and later.