About 7 weeks ago, I posted that I had been "wxPromoted" and had the capability to track and close wxWidgets bugs and patches. It wasn't too much longer before that led to additional rights, and for the past month or so I've been a "wxWidgets developer" with the ability to commit changes that I make to wxWidgets back to the library itself. This certainly is not only a great honor but a great responsibility. I thought I would share how I spent some time last week to improve not only BitWise but also wxWidgets. In case you're confused about the significance of wxWidgets: it's the cross-platform GUI library used by BitWise. Check it out.
There were two Mac bugs that I had found recently: 1) the password box that pops up when you log in detached was not centered on the screen and 2) the font dialog wasn't respecting the flag not to show the color options (i.e. show just the font options). These were both problems inherited from wxWidgets, so I rolled up my sleeves and improved wxWidgets to fix these bugs in BitWise.
In the case of the color option, there was a bit of work involved to properly handle the case of the color options being missing and getting the preview to work correctly. The cool thing is that I can show you the changes right from the web: click here to see the log of changes to the generic font dialog code (note my initials KH under author). To see the actual code changes, click "Diff to previous 1.47." Now anyone using wxWidgets has this improvement, even if it only affected OS X.
In the case of the password dialog not centering, the capability had to be added altogether. Curiously, the text entry dialog not only could be centered by did so by default! This required changing three files: utility functions, generic dialogs header and the documentation. Now, the password entry dialog centers by default but can also be flagged not to center, just like the text entry dialog.
I wanted it fixed, I fixed it myself, and now everyone else that uses wxWidgets benefits from it. Too cool. :)