Bill van Melle wrote: > On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 12:31 AM, Noel Grandin <[email protected] > <mailto:[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. > No, that's fine, it's always nice to know what the competition is capable of. Like you say, WPF has baked this in at a more basic level, which is what I think that this feature would require.
Personally, I think you're just better off make your widgets scale nicely to the available space in the first place. I do that for all of mine. It's a little painful in the beginning, and I'm happy to share some of my tricks, but once you're done, it works very well. > > > 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. It's nice because it encodes the constraints at a more human level, and it has nice failure modes when the constraints are unsatisfiable. Our stuff is pretty good, but its always interesting to see what other approaches have to offer.
