[pedevel] Re: BEOS:FILE_TYPES
- From: Oliver Tappe <pedevel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: pedevel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 15 May 2005 20:09:38 +0200
On 2005-05-15 at 18:45:25 [+0200], Ingo Weinhold wrote:
> On Sun, 15 May 2005, Rainer Riedl wrote:
>
> >> What was the reason that speaks against using the rdef format for the
> >> application resources?
> >
> > I wanted to avoid having two different resource formats. As we already
> > use rez and I think rc isn't capable of doing things rez does.
>
> Don't know if that is true, but I thought the rez stuff is actually a
> relict of Pe's Mac heritage, and it would make sense to migrate to Be
> resources earlier or later anyway. Admittedly the rez language looks more
> flexible though.
I suppose my view on this very much depends on how deep we are going to
dive into this subject.
The way I see it, the resources are linked deeply with the general problem
of not having a proper GUI subsystem in Pe (no layout engine, no locales,
etc.). Resources (no matter if .rez or .rdef) lead to rigid layouting with
fixed positions, which in turn leads to non-fontsensitive GUIs. I would
really like to get rid of that limitation, so in the long term, I would
like to move some (most?) of the resource stuff back into the source-files:
- the dialogs in order to make use of a layouting library and
facilitate localization.
- the menus in order to facilitate localization
Icons as resources are fine with me >;o)
I could even live with one binary resource file, although it would be nice
to replace that with a .rdef or .rez, but I personally wouldn't want to
invest too much time into that (as that doesn't really earn us anything).
As we now have a clearer view about what resources there are (well, at
least I hope that's the case >:o), I suppose the natural next step would be
to make a decision about if (and when) we should integrate some kind of
smarter layouting into Pe.
Rainer, I remember that you sent me a patch with a font-sensitive
FTP-Dialog, quite some time ago. I can't seem to remember the details, do
you?
As a prime example of where proper layouting support is needed, I'd like to
point you to the find dialog, which esp. in combination with multi-line
find could do with a resize knob...
To conclude:
- should we use liblayout?
- should we handcode font-sensitive GUIs in Pe?
- should we go with the resources?
If you care, please shout!
cheers,
Oliver
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