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Very tangentially related: Back in the Windows Mobile / PocketPC days (2003), I'd just written my first mobile app, an HTML editor [0], using the .NET Compact

Very tangentially related: Back in the Windows Mobile / PocketPC days (2003), I'd just written my first mobile app, an HTML editor [0], using the .NET Compact Framework 1.0 and C#. Windows Mobile's API was a subset of the Win32 API, and the Compact Framework was a _very_ limited subset of the full .NET 1.0 Framework. .NET CF exposed a TextBox control, but no rich text edit control. There was a "Pocket Word" app that shipped with the OS, and it _did_ have rich editing capabilities (bold/italic/underline/highlight, bullets, fonts). Sadly, that wasn't exposed as a reusable control anywhere. This was annoying, because A) it would have been neat to use that in my own app, and B) lots of folks kept asking in the newsgroups if a rich edit control existed for the PocketPC. I ran across a mention somewhere of a couple Win32 messages that supposedly allowed interaction with the rich edit control that Pocket Word was built on, and spent a few weeks trying to reverse engineer the interactions. I finally was able to figure out what most of the bytes in the control structure were used for, and wrote a long newsgroup post documenting my findings [1]. I never did get around to making use of those capabilities in an actual app, but it was a fun exercise. Looking at the formatting capabilities in Word for Android, it's so much more powerful. Amazing to see how far mobile app capabilities have come since then. (I also experimented for a while with trying to port the Scintilla code editor widget to Windows Mobile. And then there was the time I tried to use a .NET 2D scenegraph lib in a PocketPC app, but the .NET CF didn't support enough System.Drawing APIs, so I wound up hacking together an almost-working solution using Mono's System.Drawing implementation backed by a fork of Cairo from Mozilla Firefox for Windows Mobile. Ah, fun times :) ) [0] http://www.isquaredsoftware.com/pockethtml.php?page=Description http://www.isquaredsoftware.com/pockethtml.php?page=Descript... [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework/MOk776gh5Fs/9VUDZhFJTokJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/microsoft.public.dotne...

lewisjoe 7y ago
> Looking at the formatting capabilities in Word for Android, it's so much more powerful. Amazing to see how far mobile app capabilities have come since then. I'm in the business of making a powerful Google Docs alternative, Zoho Writer (https://writer.zoho.com https://writer.zoho.com). Our mobile versions were (are still) using native TextBox APIs to build the mobile word processor. But interestingly, even with all the recent improvements, the native APIs to model complex formattings like background-color, tables and selections across multiple text-views are pretty tricky. On the plus side, mobile OS's these days allow us to draw directly over a canvas which means we can get to those complex features by rewriting the app to render directly over a canvas. So yeah, we have come a long way indeed. Also hey, you've helped me out with understanding some Redux stuff from time to time. Is there anything you haven't done? ;) Thank you for all the effort you put in for the open source community.
- acemarke 7y ago
  Hah, there's _so_ much I've never touched at all. And really, these last few years that I've been focusing on Redux, I haven't had time to go off and play around with other things. > Thank you for all the effort you put in for the open source community. You're welcome! Glad to know I've been able to help out.

lewisjoe 7y ago

> Looking at the formatting capabilities in Word for Android, it's so much more powerful. Amazing to see how far mobile app capabilities have come since then. I'm in the business of making a powerful Google Docs alternative, Zoho Writer (https://writer.zoho.com https://writer.zoho.com). Our mobile versions were (are still) using native TextBox APIs to build the mobile word processor. But interestingly, even with all the recent improvements, the native APIs to model complex formattings like background-color, tables and selections across multiple text-views are pretty tricky. On the plus side, mobile OS's these days allow us to draw directly over a canvas which means we can get to those complex features by rewriting the app to render directly over a canvas. So yeah, we have come a long way indeed. Also hey, you've helped me out with understanding some Redux stuff from time to time. Is there anything you haven't done? ;) Thank you for all the effort you put in for the open source community.

acemarke 7y ago
Hah, there's _so_ much I've never touched at all. And really, these last few years that I've been focusing on Redux, I haven't had time to go off and play around with other things. > Thank you for all the effort you put in for the open source community. You're welcome! Glad to know I've been able to help out.