I agree, but I wonder if the map mightn't look better with lines only every 5 cells.

The oval effect you so dislike was only on the "teaser" version I sent to you. The color code was lifted from the November issue of MacTech Magazine which provided a "Basics of Color Quickdraw" article with code which draws random color ovals. Changing colors is easy: just pick a triplet of unsigned ints (0-65535), representing Red, Green, and Blue intensities. My land color is Green=50767, and sea is Blue=55000. Patterns are definitely on the wishlist, but I don't know how to do them yet.

Curious about the effort involved here, I just fired up Think C and looked into the matter. Switching to Geneva, white on black, took about a minute, including research time and compilation. It also further emphasized the existing coordinate-drawing bugs. These appear to be much worse since the conversion to C++, and are annoying enough that they're at or near the top of my priority list.

How big a problem is this for you? Do you need to resize regularly, or are you doing this mostly in your role as a tester? I'll get to these problems sooner if they are impacting your regular use of the program. And about the dialog boxes: you're talking about the "Settings" box, right? For me, this only causes a problem if either thumb is away from its "home" position, and then the only problem is that the area obscured by the box is not redrawn until it's scrolled off the screen - a serious bug, but not a "total screwup". Are you seeing additional, worse behavior?

This last problem - as I describe it - will be "easy" to fix. The resizing bugs will probably take days - at least - to find and eliminate. So my lazy-man's plan is to delay that effort for some time, and instead do more fun stuff - like adding gridlines. If you delay getting a smoothing algorithm to me for another month, I'll probably get bored enough to work on scrolling again.

I actually spent some time thinking about this today; it may get tackled before all the above cleanup is accomplished. My plan is that the worldview window will not be scrollable or resizable. Is this OK with you?