RE: xPL Frontend concept?

["Ian Lowe" <ian.lowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sounds rather cool Adrian - I was mulling over a similar concept,
essentially looking at an app which has a "toolbox" of various
graphical
controls (dimmers, knobs, buttons etc) that could be picked up in this
way - basically a kind of intelligent paint app for creating screens
that could then be loaded up as an entity.

In theory you could have templates for each of the common screen sizes -
ipaq/laptop/touchscreen etc. you could also have transparent or clear
buttons (so you could have a really classy background image nicely
drawn, and simply mark out "hotspots" for where controls go.

How this fits with xPL - very nicely actually :)

The same xml plugins that allow xplhal manager to use determinators
could easily be used to attach xPL "commands" on to the buttons -
If the
frontend app talked XHCP to an xplhal server, then you could populate
the screen labels etc with the value of global variables, or for that
matter run either scripts or determinators on the xplhal server.

This is worth taking forward I think - I'm also a VB6 (trying to move to
.NET) programmer, so we could probably work something out.

-----Original Message-----
From: ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Adrian
Sent: 04 September 2005 10:09
To: ukha_xpl@xxxxxxx
Subject: [ukha_xpl] xPL Frontend concept?

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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