Its my new Plus! nick formatter, I am not just copying the other ones, it is genuinely better than them
And I had some work done on it ages ago, ever since Chrono changed his screen name to have formatting codes in it. Let me know what you think.

http://www.hotmailstuff.com/bettername.htm

Wow now that IS a nice program ! Always giving U great ideas ( Without my knowledge, but what the hell )

I would like to give U a great idea I have got, Ill talk to U on MSN

xDDDDD

I dont know why people want that XP gay style on their nicknames.

Good looking program, and a nice intuitive interface. I like it, but I'm not jumping to get a nick that blinds people if they look at it from 2 feet close range .

Greetz

ginge, great program! However your program does lack a feature from Gradient. The ability to set a gradient to the background text. At the moment, you can only select a solid colour for the background text. Look forward to the implementation of the new feature.

I realise it needs this, and the only problem is the user interface, getting it to do a real time preview with a background gradient is a lot harder, although I think I can with quite a bit of effort.

For the moment, you have a choice, either no real time preview of backgrounds but the ability to do gradients (not individual colours though), or wait a bit longer and have proper realtime preview, as you do with the foreground text.

btw. if anyone knows how to set the background colour of an individual character in a rich text control let me know

Looks like a great program ginge although I was wonding is the program fully integrated with Messenger or is it a stand alone app?

Currently it is a standalone app, you get the dialog I have a screenshot of and that's it.

In the future it will move into BetterMSN, hopefully for the next release or the one after than, anyway within a month at the very most. I may continue to maintain it as a separate program as well, depending on what people want (people - tell me what you want)

If Patchou wants it, or the source code, or any pieces from it, he is welcome to them. It is actually released under the GPL (if you want to steal the code you really should read what this does) and the source code is freely available to anyone, even competing projects - either email me, or get it off CVS at http://sourceforge.net/projects/better-msn

I think since you've already written it that if Patchou could add it to Messenger Plus! that would be too sweet.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Captain Canada
I think since you've already written it that if Patchou could add it to Messenger Plus! that would be too sweet.

---

But what the use if the colour shows up at your side only

Ginge, I did try it

Ginge, are u still using the original CHARFORMAT structure? Try using the extended CHARFORMAT2 structure. U are probably using 2.0 anyway .

CHARFORMAT2 (MSDN)

The CHARFORMAT2 structure contains information about character formatting in a rich edit control. CHARFORMAT2 is a Rich Edit 2.0 extension of the CHARFORMAT structure. Rich Edit 2.0 allows you to use either structure with the EM_GETCHARFORMAT and EM_SETCHARFORMAT messages.

typedef struct _charformat2 {
  UINT        cbSize;
  DWORD       dwMask;
  DWORD       dwEffects;
  LONG        yHeight;
  LONG        yOffset;
  COLORREF    crTextColor;
  BYTE        bCharSet;
  BYTE        bPitchAndFamily;
  WCHAR       szFaceName(LF_FACESIZE);
  WORD        wWeight;
  SHORT       sSpacing;
  COLORREF    crBackColor;    // Background color : -)
  LCID        lcid;
  DWORD       dwReserved;
  SHORT       sStyle;
  WORD        wKerning;
  BYTE        bUnderlineType;
  BYTE        bAnimation;
  BYTE        bRevAuthor;
  BYTE        bReserved1;
} CHARFORMAT2;

Hope this helps!

Greetz

Thanks [white] shark, I'll look into that. Sadly its not quite as easy because I'm doing it through VB, which doesn't let me access it directly, but that may still get it.

I use it 24/7

quote:

---

I mean the prog

---

quote:

---

Sadly its not quite as easy because I'm doing it through VB

---

That actually looks very good, but until I get the proper installer technology into BetterMSN I can't distribute additional DLL's without breaking it. Anyway, it seems to be open source, so I should be able to steal what I need from it

I will add all those tools to my web site (links of software itself, you decide). Of course, this is when the web site will be back

I prefer if people link to the download page rather than host it themselves, so I can release new versions without having to tell loads of people. Of course when I finish my autoupdating its not such a big deal, but that is taking quite a while...