Evolución del estilo visual de Chronos

Hoy por curiosidad me he puesto a revisar las imágenes antiguas que hay en el blog, de Chronos, y ver como ha ido evolucionando visualmente y la verdad es que ha cambiado mucho.

• Mayo 2009

• Agosto 2009

• Noviembre 2009

• Diciembre 2009

• Enero 2010

• Febrero 2010

• Noviembre 2010

Chronos 2.0 Beta 2 available for download

Release Notes

• Added cached composition on windows & widgets for Render Tier 0/1 machines (this should help to improve window & widget dragging performance).
• Added a simple widget configuration system.
• Metro theme design time fixes & improvements
• Restyled login window with a zune-like style.
• Shell window header changes to bring it to front when the mouse is over it
• Bug Fixes.

The download is available here.

WPF 4 Cached composition tests with Chronos

I have been doing some tests with the WPF 4 cached composition in chronos as a way of try to improve performance when dragging windows and widgets on Render Tier 1 machines.

Using cached composition on windows and widgets improves the dragging performance dramatically, but, the text maybe rendered a bit blurry, while it remains perfectly readable (it’s the first time i use the cached composition support of WPF 4 so maybe i have done something wrong).

I have done the test on a Rendering Tier 1 machine with Windows XP at 1280×1024, using two fonts:

• Segoe WP (It’s the default font on Chronos v2.0)
• Segoe UI.

The Cache mode property in the WorkspaceWindowStyle and WidgetStyle styles has been set as:

<BitmapCache EnableClearType="True" RenderAtScale="1" SnapsToDevicePixels="True" />

And finally the TextFormatting mode has been set as Display for one of the tests.

<Setter Property="TextOptions.TextFormattingMode" Value="Display" />

The screenshots shows the Chronos Navigator widget

• Without using cached composition.
• Using Cached composition.
• Using Cached composition and the Display Text Formatting mode.

Here are the results when using Segoe WP.

And here when using Segoe UI.

Text rendering was better when using Segoe UI font, but that was expected.

Hope i will include cached composition support on widgets and windows in the Beta 2 of Chronos for  Rendering Tier 1 machines.

Update: Test on Rendering Tier 2 machine, Windows 7 at 1920×1200, using the Magnifier Tool at 300%, using Segoe WP font

Chronos WPF 2.0 Beta 1 available for download

Release Notes

Chronos v2.0 Beta 1

• Metro theme
• New Digital clock Widget
• Solution reorganization
• Changes on MVVM support
• Logging support changed to use NLog
• Improved XML documentation comments
• Lots of minor changes & refactorings

Source code, binaries, introduction document and ClickOnce installer are available here

 

Chronos 2.0 sources available in codeplex.

Espero publicar la Beta 1 pronto. En la versión 2 se incluyen entre otras novedades el theme de Metro y documento de introducción a Chronos (XPS en inglés)