Back to HoboBen's Blog ( Created 05 March 2008 | Last Edited 05 March 2008)The GUI coming to a desktop near you!
| I've started work on a proper GUI for Cobra now. I did have a working thing that was one-window only, but the code was a mess! So I'm rewriting it to be a lot clearer, more manageable, themeable, and completely scriptable, using my recent Basilisk library.
Here's just an early demo, with window focusing and that sort of stuff:
It's a bit ugly ATM, but I want to do all the themeing later... Perhaps getting my artist friend to make a few skins.
I'm hoping to eventually write a visual form designer + IDE (using my own GUI!  ) for the scriptable parts that I want to be a bit like VisualBasic. Course, my script interpreting will be a lot slower than even VisualBasic's interpreting, but all the important number-crunching could be done from the Cobra program that uses the GUI...
This GUI stuff in Cobra is a lot easier than doing it in Blitz. Cobra's sprites do all the optimisations automatically, so I don't need to do all that faffing around
optimisations with only-drawing-what-changes, etc, and I can just change SpriteIndex's to adjust the draw-order (focusing windows) instead of having to reorder a load of types (though Cobra has a nice SwapItems command)...
So, stay tuned...
I was going to write a GUI long ago, but then I saw that other people were writing some, so I left them to it. Nothing surfaced, so it's up to me! |
Latest Comments
| Posted : Thursday, 06 March 2008, 09:26 |
HoboBen
  
| Woo, progress!
Semi-automatically themeable, looks fairly pretty for gui elements that I nicked.
Added hotkeys to cascade, tile, and order the windows.
But it doesn't count until it can actually do something useful!
| | Posted : Thursday, 06 March 2008, 09:32 |
Jayenkai
| Shocking difference between the two
Nice work, keep it up!
| | Posted : Thursday, 06 March 2008, 11:44 |
HoboBen
| lol, I still haven't sorted the buttons - instead I've worked on the window tiling/cascade thingies, and made them all fancy and animated, and a neat alpha fade-out. OSX/Vista/Compiz eat your heart out. I'm debating whether to add particle effects - having windows-on-fire might be overkill? 
| | Posted : Thursday, 06 March 2008, 13:32 |
HoboBen
| Stress test!!!!
The window tiling functions look really great with that stuff 
There's no slowdown at all, either!
I'm enjoying this
| | Posted : Thursday, 06 March 2008, 19:13 |
steve_ancell
| Good to see you having fun Ben, keep it up .
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