I also took this approach recently - using sprites & manager object(s) instead of IL for a ppt-sorter style thing so that I could enable the user to make a selection and also drag & drop to rearrange the order of objects. I was aware that IL would be quite easy for creating a full scrolling sheet of thumbnails (see the Director-Online article), but didn't even want to think about the logical gymnastics (imagemaps & hotspots I guess - lots of inside(point, rect) stuff) required to do a selection rect, dragging, drop targets etc all from one big dumb bitmap (not to mention the potential performance drag if it got big).
Basically each sprite (thumbnails, drag targets & numbering/labels) had a property defining its offset from the first thumbnail, which can be stored in a global (or passed as a parameter) when drawing the other thumbnails. The scroll up/down buttons then simply tells the manager object to adjust the number of the first thumbnail and then tells the sprites to redraw. It works fine but did use more channels than I would have liked (16 thumbs, 16 labels, 20 drag targets to start with) & at the moment I'm not allowing multiple selections, so suggestions in the area of doing this kind of thing easily and "tangibly" with IL are welcome. HTH johnAq > If you will be showing a fixed number of thumbnails on the screen at any > given time then this can be accomplished relatively simply using > allocated sprites for the grid, without worrying about running out of > channels. > > Basically you would do this through a sprite manager object where you > have each sprite which is a thumbnail holder register itself with the > manager when it is born. So if you had a 3X4 grid 12 sprites would > register themselves in the order they appear on the grid. The manager > then tracks what group of twelve thumnails to present at any given time > and swaps images accordingly. This can tie nicely into your search > system because it can dynamically feed a linear list of thumbnails to > the manager which is uses to know what and how much to display. > > I've found this approach to be very fast and quite flexible if I want > more squares in the grid I just allocate more sprites in the correct > order have them register themselves and the manager takes care of the rest. > > I'm sure the imaging approach would work too but I like the > "tangibleness" that sprites give me. > > hth, > > Rob > > Charlie Fiskeaux II wrote: > >> I'm working on an image browser, so that someone can browse through an >> archive of images and search them via keywords, and I'm trying to decide the >> best way to create the grid of thumbnails. So far it seems like the best >> solution would be using Imaging Lingo to combine all of the thumbnails and >> their names onto a single large image, but I wanted to see what y'all >> thought. The grid will have to be scrollable, since only four rows will be >> visible at once, and I want it to not have a physical limit on the number of >> thumbnails it can display (like running out of the 1000 sprite channels). >> Suggestions? Comments? >> >> > [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
