Thread: [ocemp-devel] Final changes and 0.2.0 plannings for OcempGUI
Status: Beta
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marcusva
From: Marcus v. A. <ma...@sy...> - 2005-11-17 14:17:40
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Hi, I am currently making some final changes to the code before it can be released. I just want to have the most common keyboard accessibility within the ScrolledList code, so that navigating within it will not become a constant switching between the mouse and keyboard. I had the possibility to test whole code on some slower machines yesterday and - as I already knew - the container widgets can become horribly slow the more children they contain. That's a pity, since those do not slow down using a constant factor, but seem to use a slow down with a factor smaller than x^2. Sounds really bad, but it is not at all, since some optimizations still can be made without breaking the current layouting engines. It's however inacceptable over time, so that I thought about a layouting engine, which fully supports containers and boxed sprites/surfaces. This will make the need of blitting child surfaces on the parents superfluous and should also allow to update containers partly instead of redrawing them fully as its currently done. This also means breaking, dropping and rewriting a lot of drawing and widget code, which will definetely break the 0.1.0 API in the one or other way. As I wrote in a previous mail, I will _not_ break API compatibility between 0.1.0 and 0.2.0, so that after the 0.1.0 release a development branch will be introduced into which all new code will go. The new releases will be made using this branch then. This allows constant development without worrying about stable APIs and also allows to make up development releases. After the 0.1.0 release only minor optimizations, minor enhancements and bug fixes will go into the 0.1.x branch. Its active development and support will be stopped as soon as 0.2.0 is released (only in some rare cirucmstances there will be fixes in 0.1.0 afterward) and the same process starts with 0.2.0 and so forth. =20 This will give users and developers of OcempGUI the benefit to use a stable API all the time while they will not be in the need to adjust their code for the latest release but can safely rely on the stable one. Coming back to the upcoming release, the API seems to be - as already said - mostly stable, only some changes to the ScrolledList and some code cleanup are on schedule. The manual is half finished and there are about 9 widgets left to explain as well as the Renderer class and the style engine and theme part. I ask for your ideas and possible wishes for the 0.2.0 release. On my current wish list are: * Full Z-Axis support for Windows, Renderer and layout engine. * Full accessibility support through the ocempgui.access module * Implementation of an AT-SPI wrapper to allow using accessibility features of GNOME and KDE (AT-SPI is a proposed a11y standard by the FSG) * ComboBox widget * Improved mouse navigation and text selections in the Editable widget class. At last I bet you to test and look over the current CVS versions and - if you find any bugs or annoying behaviour - tell me about them, so they can be fixed. Regards Marcus |