Re: Three thoughts

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

On Sun, 22 Aug 2004, Lincoln Peters wrote:

> Here's a rather crazy possible solution: Would it be possible to use
> TclTk *and* another toolkit, such as GTK+, simultaneously?  That might
> allow us to not only use GTK+ to implement new features, but also to
> "phase out" the TclTk code (since nobody seems to like TclTk anymore)
> and replace it with GTK+ code.

I think it would be possible, but probably would be rather 
hackish. Both Tk and GTK+ have their own window hierarchies, and 
that would require a fair amount of bookkeeping on Xconq's part, 
to make sure that focus gets restored after a window closes, 
etc....

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.

Your idea does have the merits you suggest, though. 
Interesting....

> The situation illustrated here is the city Sausalito and a fighter
> flying overhead.  Within the city are infantry, armor, a bomber, a
> battleship, and a carrier.  

If the ship types corresponded to U.S. Navy naming conventions, I 
think you would have two carriers and zero battleships. Not that 
it really matters....

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).

Eric