Well, I’ve gotten a lot of the “cosmetic” stuff fixed. Here are updated screenshots, that you can compare to the ones my last update about this project:
First, here’s the options screen.
You’ll notice it looks pretty much about right. I had to use a third-party time control (ZVDateTimeControls) to get the time picker working. Lazarus doesn’t have an equivalent of TDateTimePicker. They have a TDateEdit, but that only does calendar and not time only. But the third party one seems to work fine, though I’m not in love with the arrows on it, I’d rather see it using the native windows picker control under the hood, since cross-platform compatibility is not a primary concern of mine at the moment. But at least it’s functional for now.
Here’s the main window at the moment:
You’ll notice the main screen now looks “almost” like the real thing now. The toolbar is there, but the labels are in the wrong spot. I stumbled almost on accident onto the solution for how you do the labels on the right. Apparently you have to use TSpeedButton(s) on a TBevel instead of using a TToolbar to get labels on the right. Sounds pretty doable, but is lower priority than some of the other issues I’m dealing with.
Those tabs also don’t appear totally “right”. You’ll notice there’s some weirdness about the borders for them. The tabs are a TTabControl because they don’t have individual content, it’s really just an array of accounts it’s representing. But there’s a key difference in Lazarus from Delphi that the TTabControl is not designed to have child components, so it’s resizing it wrong to make room for the components that should be nested on the tab. This might actually be kind of involved to fix. One guy supposedly submitted a patch at one time that made it work more like Delphi, but it got rejected because it didn’t work “right” for all the different platforms Lazarus supports. So looks like I could try to track down that patch and make it into a third party control, or I could change the TTabControl to a TTabSheet, and replicate the buttons onto every tab, but that would lead to a lot more UI overhead. But either way, it’s not worth fixing unless I find a way to fix the blocking issue that could be a showstopper.
Right now the blocker issue is Indy 9. In 2005, Marco van de Voort ported Indy9 to Free Pascal, at least for 32 bit architecture, not 64 bit. But then he decided to upgrade to Indy10 so it wasn’t maintained. So, showstopper issue, Indy9 isn’t working right. I’m focusing on the “test account” button right now since that’s about the simplest network-operation the app does. Connect to the Pop3 server, login, and disconnect. Login is actually working. The problem is disconnecting. It’s reading garbage instead of “+OK” for the disconnect message, so it fails to disconnect and throws an exception that causes other problems, like skipping actually closing the connection. The problem is, using Wireshark to sniff what’s actually going on in the network, the server is actually sending the correct response back. But what PopTrayU is seeing when I step through the debugger is half of the account’s domain name, “bear.net” Stepping through the routines where it moves pointers around to find the response, it looks like it’s reading the wrong place in memory, it’s skipping right over where it should be reading, and reading from some random spot a little bit farther out that presumably contains memory that was previously used for something else. Tricky right? The code doing this is totally obscure, and has very few comments, so it might take a while to understand it well enough to figure out *why* it’s reading the wrong address when it goes to disconnect. The warnings in Lazarus that it’s doing Pointer to Integer conversions could be a hint though. Theoretically that shouldn’t mess it up on 32 bit, but you never know, seems to be doing some bad pointer math somewhere.
Interestingly, poking through the Indy10 codebase, they appear to have reworked the whole “managed buffer” that’s giving me issues and eliminated this weird pointer math. And Indy10 is officially supported in Free Pascal, so I may have to bite the bullet and upgrade. Apparently there were some non-trivial issues when Renier tried to port to Indy10 once long ago, but perhaps they would be less nasty to resolve than buffer overrun issues.
Oh, and unrelated to all of that, I also have the tray icon partly working now. The right click menu is working, but changing the icon images is not. The rules and about screens are also on the todo list if I can resolve blocker issues. The about screen lost all the strings in the tables, because they’re encoded in binary in Delphi, so I have to retype them. And the rules stuff was using some components that have to be manually ported/fixed.