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HoboBen
Created : 05 March 2008
Edited : 05 March 2008

The GUI coming to a desktop near you!
I've started work on a proper GUI for Cobra now. I did have a working thing that was one-window only, but the code was a mess! So I'm rewriting it to be a lot clearer, more manageable, themeable, and completely scriptable, using my recent Basilisk library.

Here's just an early demo, with window focusing and that sort of stuff:



It's a bit ugly ATM, but I want to do all the themeing later... Perhaps getting my artist friend to make a few skins.

I'm hoping to eventually write a visual form designer + IDE (using my own GUI! ) for the scriptable parts that I want to be a bit like VisualBasic. Course, my script interpreting will be a lot slower than even VisualBasic's interpreting, but all the important number-crunching could be done from the Cobra program that uses the GUI...

This GUI stuff in Cobra is a lot easier than doing it in Blitz. Cobra's sprites do all the optimisations automatically, so I don't need to do all that faffing around
optimisations with only-drawing-what-changes, etc, and I can just change SpriteIndex's to adjust the draw-order (focusing windows) instead of having to reorder a load of types (though Cobra has a nice SwapItems command)...

So, stay tuned...

I was going to write a GUI long ago, but then I saw that other people were writing some, so I left them to it. Nothing surfaced, so it's up to me!

 

Comments
Thursday, 06 March 2008, 09:26
HoboBen
 		Woo, progress!



Semi-automatically themeable, looks fairly pretty for gui elements that I nicked.

Added hotkeys to cascade, tile, and order the windows.

But it doesn't count until it can actually do something useful!
Thursday, 06 March 2008, 09:32
Jayenkai
 		Shocking difference between the two
Nice work, keep it up!
Thursday, 06 March 2008, 11:44
HoboBen
 		lol, I still haven't sorted the buttons - instead I've worked on the window tiling/cascade thingies, and made them all fancy and animated, and a neat alpha fade-out. OSX/Vista/Compiz eat your heart out. I'm debating whether to add particle effects - having windows-on-fire might be overkill?
Thursday, 06 March 2008, 13:32
HoboBen
 		Stress test!!!!



The window tiling functions look really great with that stuff

There's no slowdown at all, either!

I'm enjoying this
Thursday, 06 March 2008, 19:13
steve_ancell
 		Good to see you having fun Ben, keep it up .