I’ve mentioned Feedling before. For those of you who can’t be bothered to click on links or with a broken mouse, Feeling is an RSS reader for windows that quietly sits on the desktop behind everything else.

Wen I first wrote it, I had a quite clear idea of what I wanted it to look like. I wanted to blend it with the desktop wallpaper - it had to sit behind everything without fussing, and just appear as if it were an interactive part of the desktop. Naturally, this means overlaying text directly on the wallpaper image and this also means transparency. And doing transparency means per-pixel alpha blending. If you know what that means in this context, great. Bear with me.

Computer display areas are digital affairs - you have a grid of pixels which you can colour anything you want. However, real world shapes (circles, triangles, text) have edges that don’t run on the grid. Therefore, if you want to draw a solid line at an angle to the pixel grid, you need to be smart about how you colour the pixels so that you give the illusion of a straight line and not a jagged one.

The problem with the winforms library is that it’s not particularly good, mostly because it’s quite old and cannibalized. One thing it really doesn’t allow you to do is to have a transparent form with controls that are properly anti-aliased against everything else. However, I discovered (through this article on CodeProject) that what you can do is draw properly anti-aliased images with transparency. You’ve got to much around in native-Win32-land for a bit, and it’s not particularly elegant. However, I basically used this and used GDI to draw text directly onto the form, giving some semblance of prettyness.

Enter WPF, which seems to be Microsoft’s attempt at saying “That winforms stuff, chuck that, use this”. It’s much, much, much better. All that faffing about with transparency has been reduced to sticking some labels on a form, making the form transparent, and just having it work. Even cool things like colour animations are quite neatly handled. I’ve cut down on both code lines and bugs, and ended up with something a lot more stable. I’ll be releasing v0.8 soon, then everyone can revel in it.

It’s not all sweetness and roses yet, WPF is still missing some key desktop controls, such as NotifyIcon, a decent color picker, any sort of font chooser etc. You have to steal these from winforms still. That said, it’s a better app now, and mostly that’s Microsoft’s doing.