And 1.2 begins !

Phergus · Post by **Phergus** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 9:45 pm

aku wrote:follow the path of photoshop, and group all like icons into one...

Uhm. Why?

It's not like they occupy a huge chunk of space.

Emryys · Post by **Emryys** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 9:49 pm

Nice flexibility!

Post by **dorpond** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 10:01 pm

I like the idea of having a higher root level for the root function and then having a sub area where that root item breaks down.

For example, have a drawing icon -when we click on it, a bunch of icons appear in a secondary window(or area) that are all drawing related. When we click on a different root icon like FOW, all FOW releated options appear in that secondary window.

The key to succees is not to overwhelm new users with a ton of buttons to search through. While the Photoshop idea would work, I don't care for it and I use Photoshop all the time.

Post by **trevor** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 10:52 pm

heruca wrote: One question: If you split off a pane into it's own window by dragging it out of the main window, is it possible to then put it back where it came from? Or close it?

Yup, you can try it out in the demo.

aku · Post by **aku** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 10:54 pm

dorpond wrote:I like the idea of having a higher root level for the root function and then having a sub area where that root item breaks down.

For example, have a drawing icon -when we click on it, a bunch of icons appear in a secondary window(or area) that are all drawing related. When we click on a different root icon like FOW, all FOW releated options appear in that secondary window.

The key to succees is not to overwhelm new users with a ton of buttons to search through. While the Photoshop idea would work, I don't care for it and I use Photoshop all the time.

i think that would work better with something like photoshop, where you will often have 6ish tools all linked to one icon, but with this, where right now atleast, theres going to be 3 seperate icons, i think having a seperate area for them might be over kill...

although, maybe not if it was a seperate area on the same pane

Post by **trevor** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:19 pm

Fortunately, being so early in the 1.2 development, we can play around with it until we find a good solution. It'll take a couple iterations, but I'm ok with that

Post by **trevor** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:20 pm

My primary interest is in consolidation to reduce UI clutter. If we can't find a better solution then we'll keep it the same, but it's worth a try, to see if we can improve it.

heruca · Post by **heruca** » Mon Dec 18, 2006 11:53 pm

In the demo, has anyone been able to get windows to redock under OS X? I tried everything and it wouldn't work for me. Was thinking maybe it's a Windows-only thing.

Post by **trevor** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 12:08 am

Not working for me on my mac mini. Guess they've got a bug

heruca · Post by **heruca** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 12:28 am

Thanks for confirming that, Trevor. It's nice to know I wasn't just missing something obvious.

Azhrei · Post by **Azhrei** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 12:59 am

The demos all look really good.

A few notes:

The SplitPaneDemo allows the East to be dragged on top of the West, but won't remove the tabs (I assume this is a hard-coded constraint in the demo, but could be removed for other applications). It allows the bottom pane to be resized so that it completely covers the top pane. I consider this a bad design (hides it from the user without any obvious action on the user's part). I would like to see either (a) a minimum size constraint applied, or (b) an explicit user action before a pane can be completely hidden.

The ElegantDemo has the fancy per-pane title bar, which I like, but it also demonstrates that moving panes must be done one-by-one. I couldn't find anyway (within the UI; I haven't read the docs) to grab an entire stack of panes and move them elsewhere.

Overall, it looks excellent and I applaud the developers who put this library together. On the downside, loading the demo was 2MB+, which seems a bit on the large side. And I would want some way to erase any user-defined sizes/locations and reset the layout to its default. I think something like the Eclipse "perspective" idea would work well here. Hopefully, the library would support it easily.

I'm definitely going to look into the docs for this library as I may want to use it myself.

And to think that I was going to suggest something based on the Spring objects in the Swing package!

Post by **trevor** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 1:49 am

The library looks very configurable, it even supports views. I downloaded the source today and was playing with the demos and reviewing the code. There hasn't been an official release since last year October, but there has been code checkins as recent as 4 weeks ago, so it's still being worked on, which is good.

Also, since it's open source, if we find something broken, we can fix it and submit a patch.

Kuprin · Post by **Kuprin** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 12:29 pm

Yes, I'm back, hehe.

This looks good...we've come a ways since I was last around. How does the network code feel now? I remember we were having truckloads of compatability issues in testing when I was screwing with it, because of one guy on a 98 machine, a couple on XP, and the rest in Linux...

Post by **trevor** » Tue Dec 19, 2006 1:20 pm

Kuprin wrote: This looks good...we've come a ways since I was last around. How does the network code feel now? I remember we were having truckloads of compatability issues in testing when I was screwing with it, because of one guy on a 98 machine, a couple on XP, and the rest in Linux...

Welcome back ! Stay a spell

We've learned a lot, that's for sure. We even found that sometimes it's your networking card (crazy). The underlying network code hasn't changed much but the way images are handled has been improved somewhat.

Give it a go and let us know if you have any problems.

The 1.2 development cycle will spend quite a bit of time working on the network underpinings.

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And 1.2 begins !

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