The quest for a smooth-scrolling interface

PockeTwit's still crashing, and I blame it all on those clickable links.

Early on in developing PockeTwit, I decided I wanted to include "hyperlinks" in the status text, so the user only has to click on an @reply name and be able to see that user's timeline. This was an important usability feature for me.

I also wanted a smooth-scrolling modern interface. This meant I couldn't just rely on the PocketIE rendering engine for my UI. I had to do "owner-drawn" controls in GDI, where my code would specifically draw the seperating lines, the avatars, and even the lines of text.

So for each status on screen, PockeTwit would have to figure out how to word-wrap the text, find any clickable links, then draw it all. It would have to do this every time the screen was scrolled, even a single pixel. It worked, but all that computation slowed things down a good bit.

I tried a few things to speed it up. I "cached" the line breaks and clickable locations in memory. It helped a bit, but nothing was going to make it really smooth like I wanted.

With v.49, I tried something radical. Instead of looping through all the statuses every time and only rendering the ones on-screen, I created a giant bitmap and rendered ALL the statuses to it ONE time. Then as the user scrolled, I just copied the appropriate section of that bitmap to the screen.

This was WAY faster. I was amazed at how well it worked and how smoothly it scrolled. And I looked at the task manager and was suprised to see that PockeTwit.exe was still using almost the exact same amount of memory as before. Unfortunately, it really was too good to be true. . . (to be continued)