Reusability of more complex UI components

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hi,

GWorkspace has few nice NSViews that can display collections of objects in 
different ways:
- directory content view with flavours of Icon View, Browser View and Small 
Icon View
- shelf view

I think, if refined, those components can be reused by many other applications:
- Gorm for object view or class browser
- Project Center
- GNUmail for mailbox/email management (sometimes larger icons are better for 
quickier spotting of what you are looking for)
- various ftp/samba clients
- Pasteboard book (ClipBook.app)
- ...

To name just a few, well known applications.

The view has basically following functionalities:
- change view type
- selection management (select objects, get selection)
- drag and drop of selected objects

Some generic implementation should work like NSTableView with a data 
source/objects source or delegate that will provide objects and all information 
about objects being used in the view.

I can see many other applications that can use 'object container' views with 
drag and drop capabilities and various 'view flavours/types'.

Would it be possible to extract those views to separate reusable framework 
(backbone/environment framework?)?

What do you think?

Stefan Urbanek
--
http://stefan.agentfarms.net

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you 
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- Mahatma Gandhi