• I fixed the bug causing some videos to show up as broken images. This is actually a bug in Pownce’s API, which categorizes video content as “photos.”
• YouTube videos are now embedded inline.
• I added support for the new bang-user construct, so links like !andrewwatt will remain links in Ounce’s feed. Also, I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s funny that that could reasonably be pronounced as “bang Andrew Watt.”
• There is now a second feed available that contains the public notes of just your friends (and, ostensibly, people of whom you are a fan). If you have a lot of friends and want to follow all of them via RSS, this is probably more convenient than adding each feed to your reader individually. To get your friends’ feed URL, simply append “/to” to your own feed. Or generate it directly from Ounce.

• I created a new logo, as shown above, explicitly for the purpose of submitting Ounce to Pownce’s tools/apps directory.

All of these changes are effective immediately, so no action is necessary on your part (except for the new friends feed, if you want to use it).

Behold echefsoftware.com, the new home of eChef online! This new site is almost a complete rewrite. Neither Megan nor I were ever totally satisfied with the first one: it was too static and was designed in a way that was not at all conducive to being extended. We were running separate web apps for the store and the news blog, and the download link had to be manually updated every time we released a new version. Overall it just wasn’t the caliber of experience you’d expect from a company that makes software.

Most of my favorite new features sit on the admin side that I can’t really show off, but I will point out a couple of things.

• Snazzy new logo!
• The screenshot previews on the organize, compose, view, and print pages use a modified version of FancyZoom to do that cool inline viewing thing (we made it somewhat more compatible with old versions of IE and more screenshot-friendly).
• We use sIFR to get that custom font in all the main page headers.
• The store is actually just an updated version of the one we had embedded in the old site back in July.
• All the pages have validation links, because I made sure everything was valid XHTML from the get-go this time around.

• Everything is running together as a single Rails app!

So go have a look around and tell me what you think!

Sets the instance variable named by symbol to other_obj, thereby frustrating the efforts of the class’s author to attempt to provide proper encapsulation.

And then I decided that perhaps I should find a better way to accomplish what I was doing.

I’m a little worried about my bank account this spring, because there are a bunch of killer-looking Wii games slated for release, and on top of that, I still haven’t picked up Zack & Wiki.

1. Super Smash Bros. Brawl

Who isn’t looking forward to this one? The lucky bastards in Japan who already have it, I suppose. This is the sort of game that, if Nintendo wasn’t already having enough problems keeping Wiis on store shelves, would probably create that problem for them. I might camp out for this.

2. Mario Kart

Not many details about this have slipped out yet, except that it’s slated for a spring release and will have a steering wheel wiimote attachment. But it’s pretty fair to reason that this one will be awesome, based on the fact that it’s Mario Kart.

3. Okami

I loved Okami the first time around, but it’s easy to see how it would have been a better fit on the Wii. From the calligraphy mechanic to the cell-shaded graphics, this guy was just begging for a Wii port. And it’s the sort of game that I had actually started a second playthrough on already, so the fact that it’s recycled content is—at least for me—not a problem. The only bad part about is that its scheduled release date of March 25 is way too close to Smash Bros. Give me some room to breathe here, guys!

4. No More Heroes

This one is probably the riskiest selection of the list. The previews I saw made it look like a really unique title, and the Wii doesn’t have a lot of those yet. It was actually released already last week, and the reviews so far have been strangely polarized. I generally tend to side with the positive on games like that, so I’m not hesitant to put this one on the list.

5. Wii Fit

I already take back what I said about No More Heroes—this is the title with the biggest potential to flop. The concept seems so utterly gimmicky, that if anyone but Nintendo was attempting it, I would immediately write this one off. But Nintendo can apparently pull that sort of thing off, and it certainly does look fun, so I’ll inevitably pick this one up.

Honorable Mentions

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Not a Wii exclusive, but man does this game look awesome. It’s been a while since I’ve played a good Star Wars game (not that there haven’t been any).

Rock Band. Just announced! Whether this comes out decent will depend entirely upon whether it supports online play and downloadable content like the PS3/360 versions, or if it’s crippled like the PS2 port.

Allow me to introduce Haruhi dude and his friend Mickey Mouse.

I got a Flickr Pro account for Christmas (thanks Caroline and Tom!) and bought an iPhoto FlickrExport plugin license back in December when there was a discount code on Daring Fireball. So I don’t really have the I-hate-my-web-gallery excuse anymore for not getting all my old photos online. My new excuse is that I like to hand pick photos for posting online—throwing out boring ones, setting titles, making sure each is cleaned up if necessary, and adding descriptions to most of them—and that shit takes time.

Anyhow, I’m still working on finishing those Japan posts, and getting all the photos online, as well as moving my old ones to Flickr and replacing my site’s embedded gallery. So don’t even think I’m done talking about Japan. This recent series of non-Japan posts has been a fluke, and nothing more.

And of course there were a few bugfixes as well. Kudos to Tek Rotzen for reporting a bug that I never would have found: apparently it didn’t work when a user had less than 2 notes. Remember, you can send feedback for Ounce to ounce@wattornot.com.

Below is a cropped screenshot from eChef 1.1. This is a new recipe window to which I have just added 1 cup of flour as an ingredient.

Now I’m going to drop down the Unit combobox.

Do you see it? The combobox grew in height by about 3 pixels, causing the bottom of the arrow to be cut off. This is very minor and superficial bug; it doesn’t affect functionality at all. But I am a perfectionist, so while I was working on some related code I decided to take a crack at it.

Warning: most of this post is very technical. Feel free to skip ahead to the conclusion if you’re not feeling nerdy.

The reason the combobox grows has to do with the way these grids work. We use .NET 2.0’s DataGridView class, which conserves resources by only instantiating one editing control for each column. When a cell is not being edited, it draws itself to resemble its control in an unfocused state. That’s what you see in the first screen shot: the cell has drawn a fake combobox at the correct height for this row (18 pixels).

When editing begins in the cell, the grid gives the cell the editing control, it’s initialized to hold the right value, and then it takes over drawing itself. That’s what you see in the second screen shot: a real combobox drawing itself. Unfortunately, the real combobox ignores the height of its containing cell, resulting in the cropping effect.

Naturally the first thing I tried was just setting the combobox’s height during its initialization, but it turns out comboboxes (at least in .NET) cannot be resized vertically. For some reason you can draw one at an arbitrary size à la unfocused cells, but you can’t make a real one be any height except 21 pixels. It was at this point that I started more serious experiments.

Since I knew I could draw a fake one at any height, I thought maybe I roll my own combobox control, and re-implement all the necessary functionality from scratch. It would mean reinventing the wheel, but it would give me complete freedom in rendering.

I was somewhat relieved to discover that this wouldn’t work. An editing control apparently can’t draw outside the bounds of its cell, so rendering the dropdown list proved impossible. I’m not sure how the built-in combobox actually accomplishes this; I suspect the DataGridView treats it as something of a special case, and passes the drawing duty on to some native part of Windows that’s not bound by this restriction.

So if I couldn’t draw my own combobox, I thought maybe I could override an OnPaint event somewhere and draw over the system one. Again, no dice. No matter where I hooked in, I couldn’t draw on top. Even if I overrode the OnPaint method of the containing form itself to ensure that my drawing happened last, combobox controls were unaffected. This provided further evidence for my theory that they are drawn by some low-level system routine; that is, by a cheater.

After a little more research, I found an API call outside of .NET that might work. I also decided to hide my combobox from the DataGridView by wrapping it in a custom control—the idea being that if the grid was the one responsible for passing off combobox drawing to the system, perhaps that I could sneak the combobox past it in disguise.

As it turned, out I could adjust the height of a combobox this way. The custom control I made worked like a charm: I finally had a combobox with an adjustable height. But, not when embedded in a cell. For whatever reason, as soon as I put it in a DataGridView, the combobox went back to its default height.

End of technical stuff.

After all this effort, I finally gave up. I tweaked our grids so that rows with combobox cells would draw 3 pixels taller to accommodate them. They now look like this when unfocused.

And like this when they’re dropped.

Which certainly looks fine, but is 3 pixels per row more than I wanted to sacrifice.

UI problems like this aren’t new for us. While working on eChef I’ve come across plenty of cases where the built-in UI components of .NET (and Windows in general) are simply not sufficient for what we wish to accomplish. Usually this is because we want something to work The Way It Works in iTunes, which is obviously not something Microsoft goes out of its way to support or sanction.

The solutions vary in complexity: sometimes it’s a simple tweak, and sometimes we have to rebuild basic functionality from scratch. But this weekend I experienced the first case where I absolutely could not attain the desired effect; success was impossible. I had to cut my losses and compromise a solution. This was both frustrating, since I’d dumped too many hours into a lost cause, and depressing, since, well, that is the nature of concession.

Anyhow, I haven’t had a real blog article in like two months, so I thought it might be a good time lay out what I have to look forward to so far in 2008, and maybe examine some of my old predictions as well. Of course, I am referring specifically to the domain of video games.

Back in the end 2006 I made a Wii Buyer’s Guide with my most anticipated titles of the time. I think we’re sufficiently far out for the ol’ hindsight to focus now, so let’s see how I did.

Andrew’s Complete Wii Buying Guide Postmortem

1. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Oh yeah, nailed this one. Probably my favorite game of 2006. 1 for 1!

2. Red Steel

Whoops! I think this caught a lot of people off guard. Great concept, awful execution. Well, here’s hoping they do better in the sequel. 1 for 2.

3. Trauma Center: Second Opinion

Yes! It was unexpectedly difficult, but I loved playing this game. 2 for 3.

4. WarioWare: Smooth Moves & Rayman Raving Rabbids (tie)

I have only played Rayman once or twice but it seemed like a great party game. WarioWare on the other hand… WarioWare was so much fun that it made me forget where I was standing, and jump into my basement ceiling. I had a nasty bump and actually dented the metal corner of the overhang that I hit. 4 for 5!

6. Excite Truck

Hmmm… I heard some good things, but never actually played it. Does half a point sound fair? OK: 4.5 for 6.

7. Elebits

I guess I just got too excited at the potential of this one to consider how incredibly stupid it looked in every video I saw. 4.5 for 7.

Yikes, 64% accuracy is lower than I would have hoped. I’ll have to do better this year.