[VB6] Rocketdock Settings Enhancement

[yereverluvinuncleber]

Excuse if this is in the wrong place, it has some graphics elements so it may fit here.



I use Rocketdock on all my Windows machines as I find the convenience of the MAC-style dock and the ability to customise is a real boon. Rocketdock was written by Punk Labs (skunkie et al) and was originally written for XP but was never overhauled for NT6 usage. It is no longer supported but it is still probably the best in its class. Rocketdock still functions as it should on Win7/10 but as time went on a few minor bugs crept in that decreased its usability. Nevertheless it is still an enhancement for Win 10 &c as that o/s has a fairly awful GUI and start menu IMHO.

One of the bugs is the time that RD takes to respond to an icon right click. It appears to have to trawl through each of the dock entries and parse the data before it can display the settings screen. I believe it is also reading the stored library of .ICO/PNG files so it can display a graphical selection of thumbnails for the user to choose. The bigger the icon folder the longer it takes.

As a result a right click can take 20-30 secs on a typical core2duo with an SSD and even on newer, faster systems there is a many-second delay. In addition, as each thumbnail is being read into memory (to speed up access?) there must be a significant memory overhead reading potentially hundreds of PNG images from the target folder.

So, I decided to write a VB6 replacement for this one bit of buggy functionality. Firstly, it is the only language where I stand a hope in hell's chance of doing it and secondly, because I am increasingly realising there is a mass of amazing code that can do anything using VB6.

This is the original settings screen:



This is my current replacement:


It has been enhanced so that it loads the portable settings.ini file quickly, it also reads the registry if that is where the user has chosen to store the dock data.

It improves upon the original in certain areas: It indicates by number which Rocketdock item is currently selected; the user can delete unwanted icons directly from the file display; the ICO file previewed can be resized; you can flip to the next Rocketdock item without having to leave the settings screen; the start path is now selectable using a common dialog box; there are tooltips for all controls (before there were none), there is a help facility; the "get more" button takes you to a useful location where there are a lot more icons for the user to download; the whole thing runs faster. One final improvement is that the dock is only disabled when the native settings screen is used, that does not happen when using mine, ie. Rocketdock is still usable when my utility is running.

The only difference so far is that the file viewer top right, only displays the icon names and is not yet capable of displaying as thumbnails. I don't know how to do that yet, I am thinking of creating an array of objects that will use LaVolpe's graphical code to simulate a fileviewer in thumbnail mode. If you have any suggestions on how to achieve this I'd willingly take any suggestion.

I used LaVolpe's code for the previews as it was the easiest to integrate into my design. It can display all the icon types that Rocketdock might possibly encounter.

So far the new settings screen is very quick to open and do its stuff, certainly much faster than Rocketdock's settings screen.

I didn't intend to replace Rocketdock altogether, it just bothered me that I'd have to wait 30 seconds to change a simple icon. When I have this covered I'll think about the next thing I can improve.

I realise it might make no sense to recreate the whole of Rocketdock using VB6. Comments please!