xPL Frontend concept?

["Adrian" <yahoo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi

was just thinking about all this talk re xPL front ends (or a nice looking
graphical GUI the respresents the states of certain variables). I can see
that a few people having developed there own but of course these would be
highly customised to that users environment and not so easy to be used
elsewhere. (i know code i've written works for me but trying to make it
really usable anyway takes time)

I have a concept for a dumb GUI and thought i'd sound people out (maybe
inspire someone to write it too as my skills are a little slow (and finding
some decent time))

What i was thinging of was (for me in VB6) an application that is made up
of
a number of screens (for whatever)

each of these has defined
background image (or more so portions of it can be changed)
eg if the image represents a room and the light is turned on, the
background
lightens

clickable areas or icons
each of these had multiple images (say an on/off button - 2 images one for
on, one for off)
this could have moreof course (like a pressed down image before it shows
the
on image)

general no clickable bitmaps
like a scale for dimming - say we have a button (as above) on top of and
below this image.
each press of the up of down buttons changes the general bitmat to another
(in this case we might
have 10 bitmats each representing the 10 different scales
general text field
any text can be displaed here

basically, we have a config app which allows you to setup the screens,
defind the backgrounds, define the buttons and the icons (and there
location)

hows does this fit into xpl?  When this app come up (excuse me if this
doesnt guite gell, i'm still learning about xpl) I'm not quite sure how it
registers itself with xplHAL but could give it a list of icons it has and
the number of variations of this (so for one of the clickables it would
just
say i have a clickable called "but2", it has 2 settings (but2.1,
but2.2), i
have slider bitmap (10 settings, slider.1   -> slider10)...

>From here we could configure xPLHAL to interact with it say user
presses
button 1,a xpl-trig is sent saying but2 is pressed, HAL does whatever this
button does (turn on light?) and tells the GUI (xpl-CMD?)to change to the
second icon. If there was also a screen on the GUI which represented the
room with this light, it could also tell it to change the background image
on that screen as well so if we went to this different screen, the
background has aready been changed.

So for anything that changes in HAL, it can tell the GUI which icon this
now
represents. The GUI has no intelligence, it just shows the icons and
remembers there state.

I did think that the GUI could just listen the xpl messages and adjust
itself as needed but this would require more complex setup on the GUI side
(having to tell an ICON what to listen for to change).

any comments/other concepts/is this the right track?


Adrian

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