Re: Some somewhat cooler thoughts...

[BALATON Zoltan]

Hello,

On Fri, 24 Jan 2003, Nicola Pero wrote:
> > I was given the impression (by Nicola and Alex M.) that Renaissance uses
> > relative positioning by using GSHBox and GSVBox objects.
>
> It does by default, and it's sort of the philosophy of how we expect
> people to use it.
[...]
> But if Gorm is used with Renaissance, it should have very good support for
> boxes too.  The user would use boxes himself.  You drag a box into the
> window, the you drag a button into the box, then a textview into the box,
> etc.
>
> By clicking on a menu item, Renaissance would draw red lines (continuous
> and dotted) around boxes and box contents, so that they are aware of where
> they are and how they are placed.  You can turn this off from the same
> menu. (functionality already implemented in Renaissance).
>
> Boxes in a Renaissance-aware Gorm would be very similar to the existing IB
> guidelines.  But, contrary to the IB guidelines, they are essential parts
> of the interface, and a Renaissance-aware Gorm would save them to disk,
> and use them to create the window on another platform, following exactly
> the same guidelines you've used on your original one.
[...]
> With IB you just use autolayout tools from IB to get the layout right,
> then drop all autolayout tools/ideas you've used, and save to the file
> only the final position/size information.
>
> With Renaissance, you save to the file the autolayout logic instead, so
> that the system can use the autolayout information to produce the window
> according to your wishes even on another platform.
[...]
> > 4) The intelligent layout (GSVBox and GSHBox) features will be somewhat
> > restrictive.
>
> Whenever you feel they are restrictive, you can turn them off and fall
> back to do things manually.
>
> There are cases you might well want to do this - an Info Panel for
> example.

I don't know IB well enough but according to the documentation at
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/802-2110/6i63kq4sk?a=view#03.Working_with_Interface_Builder-98
it supports a different (but not necessairly insufficient) way of
specifying autoresize/autolayout constraints than GS[HV]boxes used in
Renaissance. Probably it is one of the main obstacles to using Gorm to
edit Renaissance files. I wonder what are the defficiencies of the
existing mechanism supported by IB/Gorm for autolayout (implemented by
aligning unarchived objects using the specified constraints after
unarchiving) and if there was any advantages adopting this mechanism in
Renaissance. Or the other way around: what about adopting boxes in Gorm.

Boxes are simpler for a programmer creating the UI programmatically, but
the spring/rope analogy of IB might be more intuitive for visual UI
designers and more easily/cleanly representable in a graphical editor.

I wonder what others think.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan