Hi! A couple days ago I was a little bored and decided to take a look at insaneSums again.
There always were a couple of small things I didn’t like about the way insaneSums worked. Primarily there is the fact that the main window of insaneSums (being a Qt-based application) is not actually a QMainWindow. It’s a QDialog… or rather was. It was pure intuition to use the QDialog as a base class, because the window was always supposed to be small and dialog-like.
However, this has changed. Ever since I’ve been using a Mac-style theme on my KDE desktop, I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of a global menu bar. While it is still not necessary to actually have a menu bar in insaneSums, I must say it would actually make sense to build one.
That’s how it used to look like (at least under Windows 7). By the way, the highlighted label at the bottom was inspired by the Enigmail Addon for Thunderbird.
Even though I still like the idea of highlighting the result to give fast feedback, that label doesn’t really fit in there. It doesn’t look native. Also the About button is placed a little weirdly. A friend noticed that this position is usually reserved for the almighty primary action button, normally labeled Start or Go or OK. Yet, here it was the only available position left for the least important function: opening the About dialog.
So, after thinking about this for quite some time, I finally decided to do something about it. I have no screenshots to post, yet, but suffice it to say that there will be a menu bar with the primary functions of the program, including the Help -> About entry and a status bar at the bottom.
This will effectively replace the bottom-most row, i.e. the highlighted label and the About button. Since I have reworked the window into a QMainWindow, this update will not only feature these cosmetic changes, but (depending on your window manager) also some behavioral changes, because it will no longer be treated as a dialog window.
I still plan on including some kind of fast visual response for the user. Instead of changing the background color of the status label/bar, I will probably change the background color of the comparison field. If someone has a suggestion, please comment below.
I don’t have an ETA for this update and since I don’t think anybody’s life depends on it, I will not give one. Suffice it to say that most of the work is already done.
