GUI Roadmap/TODO list

[Timmy Douglas]

"Brian T. Rice" <water at tunes.org> writes:

> Yeah, that's how you should take it. I played a few visionary cards
> in writing that, ported some basic CLIM stuff, and haven't been able
> to flesh it out enough beyond that.

Yeah I have noticed some of this clim visionary code and I'd have no
idea where to start if I had to add code like that. I don't have much
experience using clim and it's not like I've ever designed the
internals or lower levels of a ui system before. but it seems that
most of that has been taken care of.

> At some point there's going to have to be some rationalization of
> the efforts of the multiple, non-interacting contributors... what we
> have now is just too chaotic (even if it is loads simpler than
> Squeak's setup).


So lets say the goal (for now, for me or anyone interested) is to make
a browser like squeak's system browser or omnibrowser or whatever. I
guess this would include (questions are in parenthesis):

- Draggable morphs (looks like code is there for this?)

- Morph manipulation (using halos? it'd be nice if there were like
  keyboard shortcuts also... like dragging morphs by holding alt and
  dragging.. etc), deleting, resizing, duplication

- Balloons

- A bordered display element
  - Containing a title bar
  - Resizable
  - stretch-to-fit area

- Scrollable elements (not sure how this would be done clim-style or
  anything) I haven't had time to understand the spaceRequirement
  stuff yet.

- Listboxes (should this be like the pluggable type in squeak where
  you set it up to work with another class that is like a model?)

- Buttons (since there isn't exactly a 'target' in MD languages, how
  would this be set up? and which morphs receive what mouse actions?)

- Text (same questions as above and I'm not really sure on how to hold
  the buffer data or the best way for displaying it..if it should
  follow a MVC paradigm approach, etc.) my ownly experience in this
  field is when i wrote the junk at:
  http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~timmy/te.html . The only decently
  interesting part of that was that the buffer held objects instead of
  just plain text so it was more interesting to draw I guess. On the
  other hand, I feel like some of the buffer operations took more code
  than I think they should have, and there wasn't a good way to only
  redraw the changed regions. I don't really know how squeak works
  except that the undo isn't very good and it's not powerful enough.
 

- etc.