[APBeta] The Dark Side

[Jared]

I agree with Paul.  I don't bother using the night vision in Windows with
any application.  It just doesn't work well.  Rubylith is a much better
alternative.  It provides better contrast as well.  Even some of the Mac
guys I know use it rather than turning the screen red.

Might be a new thread but I've been running windows 7 for a while now as
part of the public beta.  AstroPlanner has been working pretty well for me.
 I have noticed a couple of things though.

1- The application seems to hang for about 20 seconds while the "Telescope",
"Sun", "Moon", "Date/Time", and "Site" group boxes appear.  I think I had
this issue with XP as well though.  So probably not a Windows 7 thing.  They
also tend to flicker quite a bit.  I believe this has already been bugged.
2 - connecting to the telescope seems spotty.  Although when it connects I
generally don't have a problem.  I think this is probably part of the ASCOM
issue though.  I'm connecting through a bluestar device but other
applications don't seem to have issues with it.

Jared



On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 11:00 AM, Paul Rodman <paul at ilanga.com> wrote:

>
> On Oct 31, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Dan Kuchta wrote:
>
>  OK, I've gone to the dark side - Windows!  I just purchased a netbook on
>> woot since they were selling one with a 1366 by 768 resolution so it should
>> run AstroPlanner with enough space to work well.
>>
>> In anticipation of its arrival, I downloaded the latest AP beta for
>> Windows and am playing around with it in VMWare Fusion on the Mac.  One
>> thing I noticed right away is that the night vision mode doesn't work very
>> well.  Much of the background color for the windows stays gray instead of
>> turning red.  Is this a known problem with the Windows version?  If not,
>> then it's probably just some strange behavior of VMWare Fusion.  I'm running
>> XP Professional with SP3.
>>
>> Here's a screen capture of what I see in Night Mode:
>>
>
> No, that looks like Win XP in "standard" theme mode. You can go into the
> Display control panel and set the theme to "Windows Classic". That will work
> better.
>
> The problem is that, unlike the Mac, there's no easy way to make the entire
> screen red*. What you have to do is colour individual elements of the UI.
> Windows has an API to do this, but since XP it doesn't work on all UI
> elements. I think it has been deprecated in favour of themes. I have
> struggled mightily to work around this, to no avail. In theory, you should
> be able to create a "red theme" and change themes when you're in the dark.
> Unfortunately I can't figure out how to do this programmatically.
>
> For Windows, I strongly recommend a physical red screen (plexiglass, etc.)
> in front of the monitor.
>
> Paul R.
>
> * this is not strictly true. You can twiddle the display's gamma to a
> certain extent in Windows, but (a) it only works for about 20% of video
> cards/drivers/settings, and (b) the range of "redness" is very limited and
> nowhere near enough for astronomy.
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