Recently I’ve posted about my pet project called KitchenTouch. Here’s the the latest status of it…
The last update as of Aug 18, adds support for skinnable GUI. Now styles (i.e. colors/fonts/etc) of buttons, tabs and other UI controls could be changed. For now the style lives in App.xaml, but the intent is to move the skinning to external resource that could be modified by end-user without the need to re-compile the app. Here’s a preview of the new styling. A big win for me is that I’ve finally figured out how to make the scrollbars wider (and therefore much easier to use with the finger).
A very basic validation (KTValidate.cs) was added to the values read from the XML config file (field validation never hurts, right?). Mostly, it checks the type of the values and existence of specified local paths. If values do not validate for some reason the default values will be used (no warning is given, but probably it should be added in the future).
I’m also considering abandoning the images that I’m using on the tabs and buttons and instead using some fancy font (like Webdings). This will allow to skin tabs more easily in the future.
The soft keyboard functionality (TouchKeyboard.xaml.cs) was finally fixed. Now it’s a modal window that returns a state and the result (edited text). At first I tried to implement it as a Custom Control, but that was obviously a wrong path.
The XML Settings file now stores the config version and the date saved. This might be useful in the future for migrating Settings from one app version to another.
This project is a free software developed under GNU Lesser General Public License (aka GNU LGPL). For now there are no binaries (aka Setup/Installer) to download, but the full C# source code is available for anyone interested from http://kitchentouch.codeplex.com.
Leave a Reply