Re: [bme-develop] icon loading

[Simon T. <sim...@ga...>]

> Hello guys, sorry I have not reply till now, it's been a busy week.

No problem

> > > maybe also write a BHandler to handle the 
> > > icons...IconManager or something...My idea is this: the handler 
> > > will 
> > > be 
> > > owned by the main application object and the windows will send 
> > > messages to 
> > > that app to request for:
> > > -the entire list of emoticon objects
> > > -a message item representing an entire text with emoticons in it
> > > -a bitmap for one part of text(can be used when typing text in a 
> > > textbox and 
> > > instantly changing that to emoticons)
> > > 
> > > what do you guys think?
> > 
> > I agree with a BHandler owned by the be_app, that sounds fine. I 
> > think 
> > we need a class to parse text that is passed a simple char * or 
> > BString
> > of a bit of text, and returns some kind of custom structure 
> > containing
> > processed text - ie the raw characters along with emoticons and 
> > thier
> > offsets, plus maybe url detection and things like that.
> >
> It sounds ok, but does it really need to be a BHandler, why not just 
> a 
> Class with some methods to do the parsing, load the images, convert 
> strings to icon enabled messages, etc. What are the benefits of using 
> a 
> BHandler instead of just regular class?
> Don't get me wrong, I am not saying it's a bad idea, just want to 
> know 
> the reasons why either approach would be better.

The BHandler should help with multithreading issues - the protocol 
handlers or the conversation windows can simply target a BHandler with 
a message, the BHandler can pick up the messages in order and parse 
them in it's own thread (which owns all the icon data), then send a 
parsed-text message back to the window. The other approach would be to 
have a shared pointer passed around all the time, and I'm not too keen 
on that approach - also I'm not sure how thread-safe it would be.
  
> > > >
> > > >Where the number after each frame represents the number of 
> > > > hundreths 
> > > > of
> > > >seconds to display the frame for, and the final 0 means to loop
> > > >forever.
> > > >
> > > We can do it like this....but why? If we do it like this we 
> > > better 
> > > use the 
> > > gifs(get some gif animation code from the web)...I think 
> > > converting
> > > gifs to
> > > a file like this is a lot of work, and we're just working around 
> > > the 
> > > problem, introducing another file format in stead of the 
> > > gifs....anyway it 
> > > can be done, but it's a lot of work...
> > 
> > How else are we going to load the animated images? The translation 
> > kit 
> > doesn't support animated images, and I couldn't find a free library 
> > on 
> > the web to handle reading GIFs (probably due to patent restrictions 
> > of 
> > the GIF format). If you have easier ideas that will work, by all 
> > means 
> > implement them!
> > 
> I thought there was a translator for GIFs, isn't there? But I don't 
> know how we are going to paint animated gifs into the views, there 
> should be some code out there we could use as examples, I never dealt 
> with animated gifs before. All the animations I have worked on have 
> always involved threads looping through a bunch of images.

The GIF translator only decodes the first frame of any animated images. 
Actually drawing them shouldn't be a problem (I have a few ideas on 
that), once we have a list of BBitmaps for each of the frames in the 
animation.
 
> > > >Other news:
> > > >
> > > >I've finally got a BListItem class that does proper automatic 
> > > > text
> > > >wrapping, performance seems similar to a BTextView on resizing a 
> > > > lot 
> > > > of
> > > >items.
> > > >
> > > Nice work! have a screenshot?
> > 
> > http://si-msn.port5.com/bme2.png
> >  
> Great work! It looks good. 

I've also just made it much more lightweight, so resize performance far 
exceeds BTextView (I've tested a BListView with 15000 NetListItems like 
in the screenshot - still resizes in real time). Memory usuage is high 
though (the width of every character is cached), so I might try a 
compromise.
 
> > > P.s. Daniel did you upload your latest code into cvs?
> > 
> Not yet... mmm... I have made some changes in the Network handlers 
> code, change some things to get p2p messages again (somehow it got 
> broken when I changed to BLoopers), and a few other changes. So far.. 
> looks good! There might be an improvement on stability ... maybe.. 
> je, 
> I need you guys to test it because you do a better work on testing 
> than 
> I :D . 

lol no problem.

I had a problem with the CVS version before, where whenever I built the 
code, the deskbar replicant didn't work. I think I may have been using 
an old beta of the OBOS translation kit; moved to beta 3 now, and it 
works well. That means I can be a bit more active in development.
 
> I promise I will get it up there on friday evening (my time).
> 
> Good work team!!

Yay!

> Regards,
> Daniel
> 

Simon