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With the exception of Erco's work and one other (who no longer works
with fltk, apparently), most of the s/ware I've seen linked at the fltk
forum has been, how shall I say? It's like... Like mine. Half baked, incomplete, or just screwy. Should I make bug reports about other people's work? It's linked here at the fltk page. I think not. But this, I think is your problem. What I want to report is that it took me about two hours (so far) to find stuff to play with, ideas to explore, and again, it's Erco's work that has been the most inspirational. Beautiful stuff. (But the tree widgets are too complicated... I'd remove the preferences or put them in one of the main files, for starters -- and I'd fix foo.cxx so that it gets two parameters for it's printf("%s,%d") requirement... instead of just one. No biggie.). But wait! It has been suggested to me that I check my email settings. I don't WANT email. I don't WANT to be a developer (been there and done that and it's usually a bad fit between my crazy exploratory "computer research v. computer science" approach. So all I want to do is challenge the developers here... to raise questions, suggest new approaches, and DEMONSTRATE the functionality, if not the implementation of some of my "mad science".  Try this! This time for sure... 1. We need a better way to get control of subwidgets in new classes. Just combining them into a group is not adequate. This may be possible without breaking into the main fl_event handler, but I haven't seen how to do it yet, somy approach is to really take over the fl_event handler. (Fl::handle(int).) 2. We need an easier and BETTER way to draw boxes; one that can be used to copy/clone themes from other applications easily. The most straight forward way to do this would be to take a screen shot of the other application(s) and use those graphics (encoded with alpha) to print box characters (yes, it's very retro-- character graphics) which can be accomplished with a simple graphic editor and an alpha converter. 3. We need a way to easily pass messages to widgets through the timeout loop. Some functions won't work until the event loop (Fl::run()) is running. (This is not hard, but it should be a documented, standard feature.) 4. We need an icon view. 5. We need something like Erco's treeview widgets, but with a simpler interface. Perhaps the ugly part can be hidden somehow -- it's really a very very nice implementation with the exception of how keys are (or aren't) handled and some limitation on where one can click, which I think also traces back to the problem of breaking into the main loop to grab events meant for other widgets. 6. We need a way to control widgets (and again the main loop is the suspect) so that they can be animated in the fluid designer -- if not connected!! (I think it was a terrible mistake for Qt4 to quit animating buttons.) I hope this message is on topic. :-) My bug report is this, however. 7. Your email list is too hard to get at. It should be publicly viewable by those of us who prefer to remain anonymous, but who want to play with an excellently designed toolkit with incredibly simple and easy to understand examples, and that shows real-life X windows sample code that you can't find anywhere else on the net. (But you need to include debugging info to see it work.) 8. So I have one more suggestion. And this may be way off target since I don't even use the stock installer or makefiles. There should be an option to compile with debug info in one's own home folder. And if you don't want your test apps to be a meg each, compile fltk as dso's. That too is what I do, but it's up to you guys. :-) I've got my own plans. I'd like to think I can offer some ideas to you guys, but it seems like development is pretty much dead on the 1.xx versions. I diffed 1.6x and 1.7x or something and there were almost no changes. So this raises some questions as well. Where can I get 2.x? Do I even want it? (I'm curious about the gtk+ theme but I'll bet it's one of those hand drawn things also.) Go to the fltk page and see if you can find version 2.x. You've got only 2 hours... better get started. :-) And again, I do NOT want to be a developer. You guys have to have pretty thick skin to take all this criticism, and I just can't handle the negativity... ;-) In conclusion. BREAK INTO THE MAIN EVENT LOOP. You'll be glad you did. At least I think so... ;-) I'm going to try to get the combo box clone (Input_Choice) to work (and to position and resize correctly) by way of reading events (either in the group widget or if necessary, in the main fl_event loop). And concluding my conclusion: I truly do thank you for this software. It's the most fun I've had in years. |
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