These sounds great, especially for those of us building large nets that try
to manually lay out the graphs neatly to avoid what Greg calls write-once,
read-never programs...
"Martin S. Tignor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>@opendx.watson.ibm.com on 11/04/2002
09:48:01 PM
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Subject: [opendx-dev] some changes almost ready for checkin
Hi,
I have a few things that are going to be ready to checkin
in a little while. I hope there's no objection. Here's some
description. I am interested in comments good/bad/otherwise
as long as it's not personal.
Martin
1) Cursor keys are hooked up in the VPE's canvas.
Purpose:
...helps people who lay out nets really carefully (I hope).
The problem has always been that if you try to achieve straight lines
in your net you have to drag the node's outline. That means you have
to make 1 or 2 pixel movements without being able to see the lines. Now
it's easy to make small movements and you get to see the lines
redrawn as the node moves.
How's it work:
Select a node(s) or annotation. Then use up,down,left,right arrows
to move the selected objects 1 pixel at a time. You'll be able to
see the new lines right away.
What's it look like:
No visible impact.
2) Undo in the editor window
Purpose:
Duh.
How's it work:
Every node or annotation move in the canvas is recorded and
can be undone via Ctrl+Z. (Ctrl+U is what we use in the image
window and therefore it's what I would prefer to use but I try and
try and I can't get it to work. Ctrl+Z is windows-like.)
Bumper cars can be undone as well.
What's it look like:
It's just one button in the edit menu of the vpe.
Pros n Cons:
- Potential crash bugs if the contents of the undo stack aren't
discarded as aggressively as necessary.
- Nothing else can be undone. You only get to undo movements on
the canvas. (Who really wants to undo a Ctrl+O, anyway?)
3) Automatic graph layout
Purpose:
Rearranges the nodes in the graph of the current vpe page.
I hope the lines will be straighter and everything will just
generally look better. When the input is a really tough graph,
the output isn't always better. *BUT*, you can hit Ctrl+Z and
go back to what you had before.
What's it look like:
One button in the vpe's edit menu. A keyboard accelerator for
it is Ctrl+K.
Pros n Cons:
- It ignores the current layout. That can be pretty disorienting.
- If the graph has connections going all over the place and doesn't
use transmitters,receivers then the output might not be any better
than the input.
- It works stupendously on many graphs especially those that don't really
need to be rearranged.
- What looks good and what looks bad is pretty subjective.
4) Few performance improvements
Purpose:
There is some stuff in the code for reading in Selector interactors
out of .net files that doesn't work so well. However, prior to
my changes it worked really badly. I'm guessing this is D.Thompson's
bug #19. I haven't seen his .net, though.
