Re: Three thoughts

[Eric McDonald <mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu>]

Lincoln Peters wrote:

>>Also, the "widget styles" of the two toolkits are a bit different 
>>and so the resulting UI would end up looking like Frankenstein, I 
>>think.
> 
> I'm not familiar with TclTk's (Tk's?) "widget style".  

You're reading too much into what I meant by "widget style" (which was 
in parentheses for a reason). Perhaps another way to put it is simply, 
look-n-feel.

> Over the long term, it might be worthwhile to try to develop a common UI
> based on SDL and GTK+/GNOME, since SDL could provide a more game-like
> (i.e. less Office-app-like) interface and GTK+ could provide a bunch of
> features where it doesn't particularly matter if they look like they
> belong in an Office app.  

Well, it was not too long ago that I revived this suggestion (having 
first made it during the Great Flame War of November 2003), and some of 
those who read it infused assumptions into its implications, such as 
that I would recommend using GTK components without "redecorating" them 
to fit their environment. It took a while to untangle that thread, and I 
would rather not go there again any time soon.

> There might be a few hardcore strategy gamers who would appreciate being
> able to use Mono to link Xconq to a spreadsheet application and do some
> intensive data analysis on games like advances.g (e.g. track production,
> technology, offensive/defensive power, over time). 

These are some of the benefits that crossed my mind as well when we last 
discussed this (last year).

> Perhaps it would be possible to avoid the "hackish" aspect of using
> TclTk and GTK+ simultaneously by completely switching from TclTk to GTK+
> in one fell swoop, but that idea is probably even more scary for most
> developers.  The closest I'd expect us to reasonably come to that
> scenario would be to implement GTK+ as a separate interface and then
> label the TclTk interface as a "legacy" interface.

I have thought about this on and off in the past few weeks. After 
reviewing the SDL API and GTK API, and looking at the existing SDL code, 
I think that I am going to give SDL a try first. (After reading portions 
of both API's yesterday, I actually did sit down and fix some bugs in 
the SDL app.)

>>The closup view window that you propose is an interesting idea, 
>>but I agree that we should try to avoid extra work to fish out an 
>>unit, if possible (as someone mentioned in a later message in 
>>this thread).  One idea that I thought of would be magnify the 
>>icon of an unit if the cursor passes over it in a manner similar 
>>to that little bar of icons at the bottom of the MacOS X 
>>interface (IIRC). Or maybe that magnification should only happen 
>>when a modifier key is being pressed when the mouse passes over 
>>the unit, so that the magnified view does not normally get in the 
>>way of other units in the same hex (and possibly surrounding 
>>hexes).
> 
> 
> Unless you have an intuitive way for the user to indicate
> when to zoom and when not to zoom, 

See my suggestion above about pressing a modifier key.

>the user might be rather surprised
> when the mouse hovers over a cell and one unit suddenly gets bigger
> while the others get smaller.  

Well, I never suggested that other get smaller....
Does the MacOS X icon bar have that property?

I was just thinking in terms of making one image larger than the others, 
and then partially or totally obscuring its neighbors for the duration 
of the magnification.

> In conclusion, this kind of zooming is probably more work than you had
> in mind.

I didn't have any amount of work in mind. It was just a suggestion. But, 
now that you mention it, I am not sure that it would be so much work.

> Another possibility might be to make the close-up dialog be a separate
> window that displays each unit in the same arrangement as on the main
> screen, but it draws every unit in the cell at the same size.  

I think that is what Elijah and Matthew were suggesting (or something 
similar), and it is certainly what I had in mind until the "icon 
magnification" idea occurred to me.

> http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/cell_closeup2.png

404.

Eric