On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 12:31 AM, Noel Grandin <[email protected]>wrote:
> I'm not sure I really see the need for this feature, outside of gee-whiz > demo videos. > I don't need it in its full generality, and I have no intention of putting something with scrollbars into a ScalePane. But an autoscaling component is useful in an app where if the user reshapes the window to be bigger, you can seamlessly make your components bigger to take advantage of the space. E.g., imagine a photo browser, where you put thumbnails in a GridPane, and they get bigger when the user makes the window bigger. Well, we can do that already in Pivot, because ImageView scales automatically if you want it to. But suppose instead of just image thumbnails, you've got a more complicated widget in there, and you would like its pieces to stay in the same relationship to each other, because you designed an appealing layout for them. So I'm trying to see if I can do something nontrivial with this, but I really don't need it to work in its full generality. I'd like tooltips to pop up in the right location. I'd like it to be that if a component (say a button or a hyperlink) responds to mouseover by changing color, that it still works that way when scaled. For my immediate application, I don't need Expanders or Sliders to work, but I brought them up in my message to give a sense of the wide range of things that you'd need to have work in a "real" implementation of ScalePane. For what it's worth, WPF has transforms built in at the component level, so this kind of thing is much more doable, but I'm sure people here are sick of my bringing up WPF. > If you want a challenge, and you want to improve the Pivot state of the art > in layout, Apple's new AutoLayout feature > has some nice ideas: > > http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#releasenotes/UserExperience/RNAutomaticLayout/_index.html At first blush, it seems like much of what people would use their complicated constraint language to do is already pretty easy (and more understandable) in WPF and Pivot. Maybe I'm missing something.
