Yesterday was the first time Vista crashed on my laptop. No blue screen of death, though. Just a black screen with an underscore character. At that time i had a few programs running, including Firefox, Eclipse, WinCVS and Omea Reader. In addition, i was running the semi-automatic OS update process that was installing a Windows Defender upgrade and an optional upgrade for Intel drivers (i specifically chose that one out of curiousity). And then it crashed.

No biggie, right? Hit the restart, choose to boot normally, the OS comes alive and pops up a window with suggestions to address that crash (except that the window was empty)… Next, back to Omea to continue reading through the day’s feeds. What the [blip]? My feeds are gone.

Yes, gone. Gone as in try remembering them all, searching for them in Firefox and readding them one by one. Gone as are the excuses for forgetting your wife’s birthday. Gone as is the Sunday morning sleep after you have your first baby. But i digress. Mind, it’s not that i follow hundreds of feeds, but still. Even when the OS crashes, a program (especially from such a well-regarded vendor as JetBrains) shouldn’t end up with its settings wiped out. WinCVS hasn’t done this. Eclipse hasn’t done this. Firefox has kept all its settings and plugins. Perhaps it’s better that i use Eclipse and not IDEA then :)

Some speculate that Apple is porting Carbon to Windows. It started with iTunes and QuickTime, and now continues with Safari. I don’t know the implementation details, and how rich are the Windows APIs that Apple uses (I’ve been able to run Safari not only on XP and Vista, but also on Windows 2003), but there are some interesting visual quirks. To see what i’m talking about, resize Safari window and move it to the lower left part of your screen. Now, double click the title bar and watch the top part of the screen closely. It takes about 2-3 seconds, during which Safari is all over the place. Here is the screenshot of what happens under Windows 2003 (click to view fullsize version):

Before you say that 2003 is not officially supported, pretty much the same is happening under Vista (except the title pane buttons). As you can see, the original window is split halfway, showing the right part right next to the screen top border, the title pane buttons are replicated, and the toolbars are maximized ahead of the main window itself. Does this mean that each part of Safari “header” is implemented as a top-level window, which are then carefully “glued” together to create an illusion of a seamless window? I’ve never seen a Windows application behave like this, not one written in Win32, not one written in Delphi and not one written in Java.

Pushing Pixels is the natural continuation of my blog at java.net. Currently, it’s in the setup stage, where everything is new to me. Most probably, a lot of stuff will change as i make myself comfortable with WordPress, and you’re welcome to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Mostly, this blog will track the progress of my open-source projects such as Substance look and feel. Feel free to leave comments about what you would like to see here.