Ribbons :: Summary

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debackerl

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Aug 25, 2007, 2:35:31 PM8/25/07
to mono-soc-2007
Hi,

My previous post covered my last week of development and my feeling of
the SoC program. Now, I think it would be a good idea to write a
summary. The objective of my project was to implement the ribbon
paradigm for Gtk# using managed code only. Since this is a GU library,
a tiny sample application had to be created to show the implemented
features.

During the SoC program, I have implemented the following classes:

* Ribbon: This is the main ribbon, which displays tabs and pages.
This is similar to a notebook, but more using the Ribbon way of doing
(drawing) things. Each page has a label widget placed in the
corresponding tab, and a widget displayed as the page.
* RibbonGroup: This is more like a decoration. It draws a frame
around its child, and a label. It may also display a special button,
next to the label, to 'expand' the group. Expanding a group means
displaying a window with more options.
* Gallery: This is used to display a table of tiles. The user has
the ability to select a tile. The developer may draw whatever he want
in the tile.
* GalleryPopupWindow: This is a popup window which is really
convenient to display more tiles than it would be possible using the
Gallery. This popup is opened by clicking on a particular button of
the Gallery. The developer does not need to care about this popup.
* Button: I required a button that could work in three mode: click
only, drop down menu only, or click and separate drop down menu. In
addition I had to be able to easily change its design (ask it not to
draw its background when the mouse is not over).
* ToggleButton: Its visual appearance is similar to the button
described above, except that it is a toggle button.
* BaseButton: Since Button and ToggleButton share a lot of common
behavior, a class had to be created to contain that behavior.
* ToolPack: This is used to pack several Button's or
ToggleButton's together in a single (visual) block. It is only used to
visual purposes.
* FlowLayoutContainer: This container layouts its children using a
flow layout. It has not be throughly tested, and the code should be
optimized to handle cases where the heigh is fixed better.
* ToolBox: This is similar to FlowLayoutContainer, except that all
rows have the same height, and children are scaled to fit the height
of the row.
* Theme: It is used to draw the appearance of all widgets above.
The objective is to be able to change the theme used by a widget to
customize the appearance of the application.
* ColorScheme: It is supposed to represents some variants (dark,
bright, etc) of a color (bluish, gray, black theme).

The documentation of the classes is included in the classes themselves
using the XML syntax because

1. It is more convenient for me since I can update the
documentation whenever I change the API.
2. There is less files, and consequently, the structures of folders
is simpler.
3. Many developers are used to it since it is the standard way of
documenting code.
4. Newcomer can read the code, and the corresponding documentation
in a single window, instead of switching between multiple windows.

In addition, I had to imagine a special mechanism to work with
windowless widgets easily. Indeed, next-gen widgets needs to be
transparent because they have all kind of shapes, shadows, etc. Gtk
windowed widgets can only enable this if the desktop supports
compositing. Some may suggests using compositing where available, and
using opaque widgets else. However, this is not an option because I
would have to design two themes. Consequently, the resulting
applications would not have the same style depending on the computer
it runs on. It would look rather awkward to the end-user I think.
Therefore, I have used windowless widgets. The disadvantages of such
widgets is that the only event that is propagated is expose. That
event is used to tell the widget to render its content. Thus, I have
built a special window which propagates other events to windowless
widgets. This mechanism is implemented in the SyntheticWindow class.

In addition to the transparency problem with Gtk, I have also
experienced troubles because Gtk does not seem to support size
negotiations between a container in its children.

I think that I have implemented most features required to use a
ribbon, and using the Gtk phylosophy. On the other side, I would have
liked to provide a more complete sample. Nevertheless, it presents
almost all features of my library. It is now up to you to build a
usefull application using it.

Remember that the code can be obtained at
http://mono-soc-2007.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/laurent/src/.

Laurent.

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