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Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

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Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#91

Post by andyhmltn »

hnriot wrote: post #47
latitude wrote: post #2

Author's here. A bit of a background on the project if I may. I wrote the original version several years ago. It was purely for myself, to automate the way I was doing the backups at the time. I also threw together a website and put it online, just because and with no hope that something this simple would be in demand. Then went on doing other things like having kids and what not. Fast forward to 2012 and there's a c…

not sure why you claim it has an excellent UI, it's a very simple UI with the usual toolbar (who has those anymore? I guess that's a Windows thing.) To me, it looks like one of the basic autogenerated MFC apps with a toolbar and list view that I made dozens of in the 90s. I guess I'm spoiled on a Mac and don't need additional tools (or UIs) on Linux.

UI isn't just what's on the page. It's also what isn't. If you look at the authors WIP you'll actually see how much it's been refined over time :) Very simple but powerful is the intention

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#92

Post by latitude »

bithush wrote: post #90

Lovely looking application. The animations are super smooth. Would you mind sharing what technologies and tools you use? Also, and this is a strange request but this is HN! but what editor theme and font are you using in this screenshot? http://bvckup2.com/wip/tree-db.png

It's C++ on top of raw Win32 API with very light use of actual ++ features and no external dependencies except for Windows SDK. About 75KLoC in libraries (UI, RPC, event loop, tasklets, etc) and 90KLoC in the app itself. The IDE font is one and only Dina - https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/.

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#93

Post by bithush »

latitude wrote: post #92
bithush wrote: post #90

Lovely looking application. The animations are super smooth. Would you mind sharing what technologies and tools you use? Also, and this is a strange request but this is HN! but what editor theme and font are you using in this screenshot? http://bvckup2.com/wip/tree-db.png

It's C++ on top of raw Win32 API with very light use of actual ++ features and no external dependencies except for Windows SDK. About 75KLoC in libraries (UI, RPC, event loop, tasklets, etc) and 90KLoC in the app itself. The IDE font is one and only Dina - https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/ .

Ahh yes Dina! I tried it out long ago but have been using Consolas since its release. Just installed Dina and I have to say it looks rather lovely at 8pt on a dark theme! Is that a custom theme you have in VS or something from vsstyles?

The animations in Bvackup are very OS X like. They are beautiful. It has been a very long time since I clicked a button in a Windows app and went "ohh that is sexy!" haha. Also your /wip is very interesting. The level of detail is impressive. I ended up spending about half an hour reading every entry.

Are all the animations completely home baked then?

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#94

Post by Flenser »

latitude wrote: post #87
marcoms wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know what the "v" means? Svbtle, Bvckup, Backvp... Is it supposed to be pronnounced like a "u", and just why use it in the first place? No disrespect.

It was an exercise in quirky branding on my part - http://bvckup.tumblr.com/post/3283335299/how-bvckup-got-its-... . To my excuse it was almost 5 years ago, long before using "V" in place of a vowel became mainstream. And, in retrospect, I should've picked something a bit more pronounceable. In Svpply and Svbtle it simply stands for "u", which is a deferral to how Romans would've written it.

It's a happy accident, but I'd assumed it was because b,v, and c are right next to each other on the keyboard, making the first 3 characters before it autocompletes easy to type.

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#95

Post by latitude »

bithush wrote: post #93
latitude wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's C++ on top of raw Win32 API with very light use of actual ++ features and no external dependencies except for Windows SDK. About 75KLoC in libraries (UI, RPC, event loop, tasklets, etc) and 90KLoC in the app itself. The IDE font is one and only Dina - https://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/ .

Ahh yes Dina! I tried it out long ago but have been using Consolas since its release. Just installed Dina and I have to say it looks rather lovely at 8pt on a dark theme! Is that a custom theme you have in VS or something from vsstyles? The animations in Bvackup are very OS X like. They are beautiful. It has been a very long time since I clicked a button in a Windows app and went "ohh that is sexy!" haha. Also your /…

It's not a theme, just some basic color palette with green for preprocessor, yellow for keywords, cyan for string and numbers and white for the rest. Dark gray for the comments.

Re: animations - yeah, they are all custom, but there's not really much to them. The hardest part was to do flickerless fade-ins and -outs, the code for that just ain't pretty. Window transformations are just DeferWindowPos with the right combination of flags and a bit of painting cooperation from custom controls. Still though... the amount of work required to get these animations working was ungodly compared to $('div').animate({ ... }); :)

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#96

Post by zedpm »

latitude wrote: post #11
czam wrote: post #9

How does it compare to http://freefilesync.sourceforge.net/ ? Apart from the delta copying the feature list sounds similar. I find the FreeFileSync UI quite usable.

Faster bulk copying, lighter build, lighter on resource usage, removable device tracking, much better UI (it's subjective, of course, but just try it out and see for yourself). Formal backup planner, dry runs, native support for running as a service with separate engine and UI processes. -- edit -- Let me give an example of what I mean by "much better UI". Bvckup 2 has a hierarchical log viewer [1] and this thing doe…

I'd love to hear more, if you're comfortable sharing, about the data structure you use for the log viewer. Either way, this looks like an excellent product; thanks for sharing.

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#97

Post by bithush »

latitude wrote: post #95
bithush wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh yes Dina! I tried it out long ago but have been using Consolas since its release. Just installed Dina and I have to say it looks rather lovely at 8pt on a dark theme! Is that a custom theme you have in VS or something from vsstyles? The animations in Bvackup are very OS X like. They are beautiful. It has been a very long time since I clicked a button in a Windows app and went "ohh that is sexy!" haha. Also your /…

It's not a theme, just some basic color palette with green for preprocessor, yellow for keywords, cyan for string and numbers and white for the rest. Dark gray for the comments. Re: animations - yeah, they are all custom, but there's not really much to them. The hardest part was to do flickerless fade-ins and -outs, the code for that just ain't pretty. Window transformations are just DeferWindowPos with the right com…

Yeah I can imagine. Win32 was never designed for animations like that :) You appear to have done a pretty remarkable job though as they are some of the best I have seen in Windows outside of things such as WPF. Well done!

Do you blog at all? I imagine you have some very interesting things you could talk about in regards to Win32 programming. Understandably there are fewer and fewer pure Win32 developers these days and even fewer who take the time to really make a Win32 application look good.

Purely for personal curiosity I have decided to learn C (and most likely C++ as well) as I have no real experience with native development and it is something that has always bugged me. Would it be incredibly rude of me to maybe shoot you an email for a little chat one to one? I totally understand if you are unable too. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#98

Post by norswap »

latitude wrote: post #2

Author's here. A bit of a background on the project if I may. I wrote the original version several years ago. It was purely for myself, to automate the way I was doing the backups at the time. I also threw together a website and put it online, just because and with no hope that something this simple would be in demand. Then went on doing other things like having kids and what not. Fast forward to 2012 and there's a c…

What would the advantages over a tool like FreeFileSync be if I don't care about real-time backups?

(Note that I understand that it's designed to be very simple and usable, and there's real value in that, but I'm specifically asking about the features.)

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#99

Post by [deleted] »

bithush wrote: post #97
latitude wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a theme, just some basic color palette with green for preprocessor, yellow for keywords, cyan for string and numbers and white for the rest. Dark gray for the comments. Re: animations - yeah, they are all custom, but there's not really much to them. The hardest part was to do flickerless fade-ins and -outs, the code for that just ain't pretty. Window transformations are just DeferWindowPos with the right com…

Yeah I can imagine. Win32 was never designed for animations like that :) You appear to have done a pretty remarkable job though as they are some of the best I have seen in Windows outside of things such as WPF. Well done! Do you blog at all? I imagine you have some very interesting things you could talk about in regards to Win32 programming. Understandably there are fewer and fewer pure Win32 developers these days an…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Bvckup 2 – Simple Fast Backup for Windows

#100

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #99
bithush wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can imagine. Win32 was never designed for animations like that :) You appear to have done a pretty remarkable job though as they are some of the best I have seen in Windows outside of things such as WPF. Well done! Do you blog at all? I imagine you have some very interesting things you could talk about in regards to Win32 programming. Understandably there are fewer and fewer pure Win32 developers these days an…

[deleted]

[deleted]
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