Some Ideas for features to WidgetFX framework.

[JOKe ( Naiden Gochev )]

Hello I was watching the WidgetFX project from the first Joshua
Marinacci post about it and i Think it is AWESOME.

I love it I have some widgets created which will be explained in some
blog maybe this week. But I have a note about one feature request :
- More transitions on Widgets ! What I mean ? Check out KDE 4.2 and
KDE's Plasmas the Rotating is COOL.
it will be nice to have Rotating for WidgetFX Widgets not only
Opacity.
Another cool feature will be the way to PerspectiveTransform a Widget.
Yes maybe will not be so user friendly to perspective transform
something but check out the perspective transform in this applet :
http://ericonjavafx.com/?p=1 I think it is enougth user friendly.


And some note that I dont like :
when I create a widget it looks OK.
The fonts are ok and everything is ok - BUT when i drag it in the
slide bar the widget is scaled and the fonts sometimes are unreadable.
And something more the fonts are not Antialiased anymore I think but
THEY WAS :(


Anyway congratulations for this great widget platform

[Keith]

Rotating widget sounds like a decent idea for some widgets. We want
to be able to change the aspect ration of the slideshow,
and rotating it would be a much nicer way to do that than a regular
old radio button on the config dialog.
I'm not sure how generally useful it would be though.

JavaFX in general needs some built in transitions like Flex has. I'm
know Sun has that on their list, but perhaps the JFXtras project
could fill in the Gaps in the meantime.

On your scaling issue, if you make your widget resizable you can take
care of the scaling yourself and control font size,
etc as the window size changes (probably using bind in lots of
places). The WebFeed and Slideshow widgets
manage their own resizing as an example you can look at. Otherwise
we just have to use a scale transform
to get the widget to fit on the dock, which generally does a pretty
decent job, but as you noted text can get pretty small. Often times
you'd
probably prefer to show less content rather than continuing to shrink
the font. There's no way we can do that automatically.

On the other hand, Scaling has the advantage of being very fast and
much simpler to code as opposed to heavy use of bind. Steve and I
found that out the hard way when
preparing the simple Calendar widget he's featuring on his blog
tutorial (and once again he didn't even mention my name, thanks
steve).

http://steveonjava.com/2009/01/27/widgetfx-calendar-tutorial/

Initially, despite someones suggestion to use scale right at the
start, we used bind to resize the page, fonts, etc, and it was
horribly slow.
After a lot of optimization, it was adequate at best. We finally
switched to scale and it was suddenly really snappy.

Bottom line, Scale just works.

thanks,

Keith

On Feb 9, 7:32 am, "JOKe ( Naiden Gochev )" <Goc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello I was watching the WidgetFX project from the first Joshua
> Marinacci post about it and i Think it is AWESOME.
>
> I love it I have some widgets created which will be explained in some
> blog maybe this week. But I have a note about one feature request :
> -  More transitions on Widgets !  What I mean ? Check out KDE 4.2 and
> KDE's Plasmas the Rotating is COOL.
> it will be nice to have Rotating for WidgetFX Widgets not only
> Opacity.
> Another cool feature will be the way to PerspectiveTransform a Widget.
> Yes maybe will not be so user friendly to perspective transform

> something but check out the perspective transform in this applet :http://ericonjavafx.com/?p=1I think it is enougth user friendly.