As I've mentioned a few times recently, the file transfer manager in the next version has a slider that allows you to control the bandwidth used by file transfers. It's a vertical slider that sits on the right side of the manager, with "fast" at the top and "slow" at the bottom, which is fairly intuitive.
Imagine my surprise when I realized that vertical sliders on OS X orient themselves with the low value at the opposite end of the slider than Linux and Windows. Now my "fast" and "slow" labels are backwards. The obvious solution is to just swap the fast and slow labels, but then fast is at the bottom. Not to mention that this really is a bug/paradox in wxWidgets.
The paradox is that wxWidgets is supposed to use native widgets and behavior, but provide consistent cross-platform behavior. In this case, the native orientation of a slider is trumped by the need for consistency (for obvious reasons). As luck would have it, someone had recently submitted a patch to the patch manager on SorceForge to add this capability to wxWidgets. Being the big bad wx-developer that I am, I checked it out. Take a look, if you wish.
The patch was disappointing; it was imcomplete and not very well thought-out (read the patch conversation if you're interested and/or what to see what a hard-nose I can be). Since the patch was inadequate and things should always be done right, and since I wanted an "inverse" slider on OS X for the file transfer manager in BitWise, I re-implemented the inversion on both GTK and OS X. Perhaps this provides a bit of a glimpse into how things in the open source world work sometimes. Developer X has product Y which needs feature Z, but feature Z is not available, so developer X creates feature Z. Now everyone has access to feature Z.
A bit "a day in the life," but I guess that's part of the point of having a blog. :)