Open Graphics Toolkit / News: Recent posts

Major improvements were made to OTK's Gui-Builder. It now allows moving objects between panels. Prevents objects from moving off the canvas. Avoids false double-clicking. Extraneous warning messages were removed. The overall appearance was improved, along with better mouse/object grabbing. Tool-tips were added to explain the main panel items. Right-clicking on canvas objects was activated to edit the object's properties. An accidental-quit protection dialog was added. An option was added to the View menu for changing visible grid spacing.
Paste operations now offset successive each paste for better visibility. Pre-compiled executables were provided for Linux and MS-Windows in the tar-gzip'd and zip'd packages, respectively.

Completed activating mouse scroll-wheel operation for all platforms. Added link to new Stopwatch-Timer project, which is based on OTK, under the Examples and Projects web-page.

Otk version 0.86 fixes the 'missing text-cursor' problem that was injected by a change in the previous version. Also in this new version, tool-tip hover-boxes now will disappear after a few seconds, even if your mouse continues to hover.

Command-line options, and functions were added to capture reqular snap-shot frames that can be made into movies. Such movies can be used to create multi-media instructions about using OpenToolkit applications, or for other purposes.

Highlighting of text selected by mouse was enabled for single-line form-boxes. Selected text is automatically copied into user's paste-buffer, to support copy+pasting. Text can be pasted by pressing the middle mouse button.

Added Otk_Get_Screen_Size function. Useful for optimally setting application's window size.
Enabled registering window-kill call-back on OtkOuterWindow when forced closed by window-manager.
Added protection against resizing window too small.
Added otk_set_not_native_window function, to enable including Otk widgets within OpenGL applications that already create window.

Otk (Open Tool Kit) - portable library for graphical user interfaces (GUI's) based on C and OpenGL. Emphasizes simplicity without eliminating capability. Supports panel's, text label's, buttons, form boxes, pull-down menu's, slider control's, etc..

Pressing the tab-key, when the cursor is in a single-row text form-box, now causes the cursor to jump into the next form-box of the current panel.

The test-capture capability was improved by adding time-tags to the XML file, which permits regulating the play-back speed.

There have been several improvements in recent versions.
Pull-down menus were made to fit within the screen, even when opened too close to the edge.
An ability was added to suggest alternate (or recent) directories in the file-browser.
(See file-browser.) Otk now attempts to adaptively improve the rendering
quality for the best display with good speed on given hardware. An ability was added
to request better quality or better speed, via Otk_Set_Render_Quality_Hint function.
A function was added to right-justify formbox text (Otk_Right_Justify_Formbox).
A makefile was added, for compiling to an object file for linking into applications.

Added new function to temporarily change the mouse-curser icon. Improved menu highlighting and performance. Fixed max-image size issue on some platforms.

Functions for creating icon-buttons were added to Otk. Mouse feedback was improved on pull-down menu lists. The appearance of tabbed-panels was improved.

Added three new functions. Otk_Snapshot saves the current window screen to an image file. Otk_Disable_Hoverboxes and Otk_Enable_Hoverboxes do as their names imply. The graphics quality was improved for capable machines.

Hover-box functions, sometimes called tool-tips, were added to OTK. These functions associate buttons or other widgets, with messages that pop-up when the mouse hovers over them for a period of time. A new function was also added to resolve which mouse button is pressed.

Version 0.70 improves the separation between sub-windows that might otherwise collide. It also contains an important fix for binding arrow-keys on Microsoft platforms, which had been broken in an earlier version. Starting in this version, separate macros are defined for the major and minor release numbers. This should be helpful for conditional compiles that depend on the OTK version.

OTK now supports automatic GUI-testing with a built-in ability to capture keyboard and mouse input into test-stimulus files. The stimulus files can then be applied in future regression tests, as if the application's GUI were be manually operated. See web-page for more details.

A file-browser bug, that was introduced in a recent version, has been fixed in the 0.67 release of Otk. The file-browser now appears to operate correctly on all platforms, once again.

A selection-list coordination function, Otk_Coordinate_Selection_Lists, was added. It enables selection-lists to be linked together by a common scroll-bar. Several other improvements were made to the selection-list scroll-bars.

OTK version 0.65 improves the safety of the image display routines, especially for very large images.
This version also includes a new ability to make efficient user-defined objects, with the Otk_MakeUserDefinedObject call. A new example OTK application, a simple image viewer, was added to the examples web page.

Version 0.64 features faster and more memory-efficient image loading. Safer file-browser operation on Mac OSx. And two new functions were added:
Otk_Set_Window_Name( char *name ), and
Otk_Dispose_Image( char *image_file_name ).
The first sets the window name in the window-bar. The second function provides a method to remove all image resources from the graphics-card, when an image is no longer needed.

The file-browser gadget is significantly improved. It should now supports all platforms more efficiently.

An optional external-font reader has been added as a branch. It enables adding new fonts to otk applications by reading SVG font files. See web-page for more information on usage and downloading.

An ability to read SCZ compressed images into Otk applications has been added. This enables using high-resolution, yet compact image files, without external dependencies which could otherwise break on some platforms. Several improvements have been in overall safety and robustness. The Otk_MakeCircle function has been added. It complements the Otk_MakeDisk function, which made solid disks.

A GUI-Builder has been added to the Otk project. GBuilder enables creating new GUI's by simply drawing them. An initial version of GBuilder has been released. See the Otk project web-page for downloads and instructions.

The OtkMakeImagePanel complements the previous OtkMakePanel functions by adding image-panels. It reads image files, and creates rectangular panels containing the images. It is useful for icons, logos, or for adding arbitrary background textures.
Version 0.47 also includes some minor code cleanups.

A package of example Otk programs has been released, with scripts to automatically compile and invoke them sequentially. The scripts enable quickly testing OTK_LIB functionality. The Otk testing-package will be handy for continued regression testing whenever otk_lib is changed or updated. It checks that OTK and applications compile on various platforms, and excercises most features to test for proper operation.

Otk release 0.46 fixes MinGW compile bugs on microsoft PCs from the previous version. Compiler directives in the code detect the MinGW compiler and run Otk within native MFC window without needing Glut. Tested to compile and work still properly on Linux with gcc in native X-windows, and now also on MS-Windows with MinGW.