My wxWidgets learning project

I usually make a "not-so-minimal" project for every tool I evaluate. To keep focus it must have some realistic goal; right now I have one project with some key characteristics:

- read binary files, to evaluate the little-endian / big-endian solution and Linux utf-8 / Windows ucs-16 compatibility. With some platforms the bytes must be swapped after reading binary integers, with others there is no need (with Macs using Intel processors most desktop computers are now little-endian).

- use some "high-level control", like the tree or list controls, to evaluate the trust one may have to develop continually in one platform, minimizing the inevitable platform switch. Here I should use VMware Virtual Machines or run inside coLinux, but I doubt my hardware allows it. I will test one solution like that as a proof of concept, but a multi-platform development environment needs to run the platforms side by side; one easy solution is a computer for each platform.

- use sizers; well, any project would use it anyway.


Once I need a program to check fonts for unicode code points availability, like the infamous surrogated code points. Default font viewers are not very informative and the best program I found was Steve Hartwell's Font Inspector, a wxWidgets project by the way; the program had a date limit and Steve Hartwell's home page is no longer available, so my wxWidgets learning project is something around that - not the visual inspector that Steve's program was, maybe a little of that, but a tool that can filter fonts by unicode named range support and check for the existence of any code point.

Not very usefull, that's all right. Just a goal to keep me on the road.