I wish you all a Happy New Year! Today I want to give you a first look at the upcoming Diving Log 6.0, which will be available later this year. Major updates in Diving Log and usually changes of the development technology. Diving Log 4.0 was built with Visual Basic 6, Diving Log 5.0 was a major rewrite in VB.NET. As user interface (UI) technology I choose “Windows Forms”, which had at that time already a successor called WPF. But it was still the right decision to go first from VB6 to .NET Windows Forms, because WPF would have made the port from VB6 a lot more complicated and time consuming. But I knew I would have to redo the UI again when switching to WPF.
Diving Log 6.0 main window
And that’s what I’m doing in Diving Log 6.0. This time I can reuse all the code behind, but I have to recreate every single window again in WPF. But it is worth the effort, because Windows Forms didn’t get any major update since 2005 and it’s just a matter of time when the first problems/missing features surface. WPF is the current .NET UI technology for Windows, so this should be a lot more future proof.
WPF has also some other advantages: it scales a lot better for high resolution screens, which are more common today than a few years ago. It also allows me to do basically anything UI-wise without being dependent from 3rd party controls. I’ll demonstrate you some of the advantages in a separate blog post in the near future. Here are some more screenshots:
You can change the accent color in the settings
Icons in dropdowns were very difficult in Windows Forms, but not in WPF
The main window background was always an unused space. In Diving Log 6.0 you can add several widgets to create some kind of personal dashboard with local and online data. Right now there is only a weather widget, but this will be extended in the future. You can configure the weather either by country and city name or simply by selecting one of your favorite dive sites with GPS coordinates.
Add and remove widgets in the settings dialog. For configuration, just click the gear icon in every widget.
This is just a small overview what’s coming in Diving Log 6.0. There is still a lot to do until I can release the first beta version. But I’ll show you more completed features throughout January. Please keep in mind that this is work in progress, so some icons are not updated yet and other things may change, too.