Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

pastebin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 135 posts

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#71

Post by prox »

Alopis wrote: post #6

My favorite part is > If you add some obscure code such as below, to this or any other app, even if it has only the teeniest chance of being less blindingly obvious to someone else than it is to you at the time of writing, please please please add a fing comment. This rings as true now as it did then and its my favorite comment so far out of this whole leak. I've reached a point where my comments are there to remind…

I watched Adam13531 on Twitch a lot, and the way he comments is very extensive, but complete. Ever since I started doing the same. Quite helpful to yourself.

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#73

Post by devenblake »

cobalt wrote: post #30
cm2187 wrote: post #9

Lecturing on keyboard shortcuts when windows media player is the only video player in the world not using the space bar as a shortcut for play/pause.

WinAmp doesnt

Fortunately Audacious does, and you can use WinAmp skins with Audacious.

Doesn't at all discount your point, just wanted to help out anyone who's still using WinAmp because of the skins (I was up to last year).

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#74

Post by devnonymous »

iokevins wrote: post #25
EasyTiger_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have never come across the word before either. Makes you think - did the person say the word to convey some kind of meaning? Or to sound super-smart to their peers?

Alliteration. They wrote "paragon of pulchritude", which to me sounds like smart, dry humor. It works.

Precisely. The phrase is pretty popular in prose, particularly when prefixed with 'perfect'.

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#75

Post by devnonymous »

grumple wrote: post #31
leephillips wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could just be that the developer’s native language happens to be English, reads books, and he/she used a familiar word without thinking twice about it. Because this is, in fact, a fairly common word.

I’ve read at least several hundred books in English, and probably hundreds of thousands of news stories and blog posts, and don’t recall encountering it before. It seems to appear mostly in searches for its definition and gre prep...

If you search for the exact phrase you'd see it is fairly commonplace in literature.

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#77

Post by ogurechny »

exikyut wrote: post #49
dijit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re mistaken, YouTube (in all the forms I use it with a keyboard at least) supports spacebar as a pause key. Your browser might try to pop you down half a page if the thing that is selected or highlighted on the page is not the video player itself though. But it works 100% of the time in fullscreen.

YouTube's keyboard handling is Insanely Intuitive™, I must absolutely agree. Usefully, the up/down keys don't change the volume unless the player is also focused. What's incredibly sad is that j/k/l were agreed upon to rewind/pause/forward the video, and these generally work unless you're in a textbox... but dedicated keys were not similarly approved to control the volume. -- My current winner for Absolutely Favorite…

Not sure if whether it is intended, or a weird combination of my browser and extensions, but right now, if I click on the play/pause button on Youtube video page, it becomes focused (with a visual clue of a blue box), and then pressing space bar starts and stops (or stops and starts) the video in rapid succession because it is considered a keyboard command and a button activation at the same time.

Actually, not quite at the same time, and that returns us to the old question of viability of reinventing GUIs in Javascript. I guess that even around 1990 window messages of some kind appearing with such a delay from a single action would mean the GUI is based on wrong principles, or the programmer doesn't know how to use it.

It's even funnier to imagine what happens when you press and hold space. The button icon is mostly in in-between animation state from all the repeated presses, but the video starts or stops only on first press and on release. Guess how much fun people have programming window system inside a virtual machine inside a browser using window system inside real machine.

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#78

Post by iforgotpassword »

rbrbr wrote: post #76

Pretty much what I am expecting from Windows based software considering the mess windows always was and is to this day.

Eh, I've seen similar stuff in the Linux/UNIX world. Whenever different software components interact there's a chance you need some stupid stuff to get them to play nice. As some issues get fixed over time, new ones arrive since something gets swapped out for the next big thing. The interaction of X, the display manager, logind and dbus on session start comes to mind. There's been stupid stuff in Xsession.d et al over the years while these evolved.

xscreensaver also comes to mind; Jamie likes to keep all the legacy crap in the source code for operating systems and X extensions long gone, including rants about how they're broken under certain conditions, even if the bug is long fixed, just in case someone wants to compile the current version on their 1996 HPUX workstation.

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#79

Post by jailbird_bd »

dijit wrote: post #21
alphakappa wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither does YouTube, likely the most popular video playing entity today, respect the spacebar on iOS.

I think you’re mistaken, YouTube (in all the forms I use it with a keyboard at least) supports spacebar as a pause key. Your browser might try to pop you down half a page if the thing that is selected or highlighted on the page is not the video player itself though. But it works 100% of the time in fullscreen.

Run into a strange behavior though. When I pause the video with the mouse (and consequently, leave the pointer above the play button), and later try to continue the play with space, it will double-press the play button and pause the video again.

Re: Comments by a developer inside the Windows Media Player source code

#80

Post by ackbar03 »

What is the best library to use these days for developing in Visual C++? I had to write some VCpp code a few days ago using the Winhttp api and it was a nightmare. I'm not sure if its because I've been spoiled rotten by python where you can do a get/post request with a few lines of code, and that this is just how CPP is, but most of the complications are to do with calling and using the (not very well) documented API itself. Is there usually a easier way to do this? I'm just doing simple post and get requests, and I couldn't even do a file upload post properly by passing the binary data in, had to convert to base64 text in the end for it to work.
Post reply on HN