[Jsystem-general] Development round-up 6-May-04

[Chris P. <ch...@k2...>]

I thought I'd start getting some words on development out as it (i)
keeps everyone up to speed on what's going on (ii) helps me remember
what I've done and (iii) acts as a rolling history of development so
far.  Given that this is the first one there's quite a bit to get
through so first off, let's start with icefire...

There are two major improvements on icefire to mention.  Firstly, users
can now order plugins within individual docklets.  It's not as neat as
the drag'n'drop idea I've got planned but it's still pretty good.  Now
when the user right-clicks on a docklet header, instead of having 'Add
plugin' and 'Remove plugin' menus, there's a single 'Plugins' menu which
expands out as follows:

Add       >
-----------
[plugin]  >
[plugin]  >

[plugin] refers to a currently loaded plugin instance within the
docklet.  You'll notice that each plugin entry is actually a menu parent
and moving the mouse over it opens another sub menu as follows:

Move up
Move down
-----------
Remove

Obviously 'Move up' is ghosted if the plugin is already at the top of
the docklet, as is 'Move down' if it's at the bottom.  Like I say, it's
not as neat as dragging them but it's certainly a step in the right
direction!

The next icefire improvement is something that's been possible for ages,
it's just that I've not wanted to make it public.  Did you know that
plugins can also add items to the shelf?  :)  Yep, you just cast the
'Host' parameter to an MShelf interface and call AddToShelf() as you
would from an AddOn.  The only problem here is that doing it this way
you won't be able to receive notifications from the shelf when the user
clicks the icon.  You can get around this problem by having the plugin
implement the MShelfAddOn interface and then 'start' the plugin as if it
was being launched as an AddOn.  This, obviously, is a bit too
convoluted so I'm working on a neater way to do this.  The most obvious
use for this would be to allow plugins to 'minimize' themselves to the
shelf - imagine the Pulse plugin with a "show in shelf" option which
hides the plugin (sets its height to zero), then adds an icon to the
shelf.  The shelf icon has a 'restore' option which puts it all back.
Neat eh?

That's icefire done with, now on to more melon news...

Firstly, soap's come up with a couple of absolute gems.  Not only has he
wrapped the pdh api (performance monitoring to you and I) into a melon
library so you can enumerate all objects, then all counters and
instances for each object, but he's even put together a little dialog
that lets the user select the one he/she wants from a list!   If that
wasn't enough, you can also preview the counter to see what sort of
figures it pushes out.  :D

As if that wasn't enough he's taken the meter and graph objects from the
existing plugin and turned them into 'lightweight widgets' which,
instead of using a window to display in, they just create a bitmap which
can be drawn into an existing window.  Expect a new plugin that can
display any number of graphs showing any performance counters the user
wants very soon!

Not to be outdone, I'm busy revamping the controls that appear in the
new icefire settings dialog (tabs, sliders and buttons so far) - I've
created a new toolbar control and an extended version of the standard
ListBox Windows control (allows for variable height items, icons,
customisable fonts, etc.

There's a few other things going on but I'm gonna save them for another
round-up!