Iris UI's: Forms, tk, etc.

[TP Monks]

In <1991Jun20.225914.26517 at nas.nasa.gov> dwallach at nas.nasa.gov (Dan Wallach) writes:


>Now, Overmars has told me "Almost certainly Silicon Graphics is going to
>supply the Forms Library as part of their developers package. This means
>some sort of support for the future."

I heard the same tale.  If this is the case, presumably SG will put
some effort into doing the thing properly.  Perhaps it would be
helpful to have some kind of discussion about the kind of things that
people would like to see changed/improved in the forms library before
it gets handed over.  Presumably, as Mark Overmars pointed out,
changes will be more difficult to instate once its an sg supported
product.

For example, why not allow users to 'tap into' a callback to an object
so that their routine is called before the objects callback.  This
would allow extra functions to be added to an object by a program.
For instance, I've written a class that allows you to display
scrollable sgi imagelib files (works a bit like the positioner, but
with an image moving across the background); it would be handy to be
able to tap into the callback to such an object to read the colour of
the pixel under the mouse, without having to add a free object.
This function is implemented in Windows, and presumably other guis.

Perhaps other people have other suggestions or comments?

I'm not trying to create extra work for Mark, just to tell SG what
users want from such a package! - not that it isn't already an
excellent piece of work!

Tim Monks
Southampton university.