How do I control polymorph sizes using UITheme builder - smalltalk

I am trying to create a Dominion game in Smalltalk, and I can't get the layout of the GUI the way I want.
Currently, I have this as code to build the GUI:
open: game
| builder content |
builder := UITheme builder.
content := builder
newColumn:
{(builder
newListFor: game
list: #supplyStrings
selected: nil
changeSelected: nil
getEnabled: nil
help: 'Supply') .
(builder newRow: (game players collect: [ :p | self morphForPlayer: p usingBuilder: builder ]))}.
gui := (content openInWindowLabeled: 'DominionGame') extent: 1024 # 768
(forgive the poor Smalltalk style, I've been using Smalltalk for a week).
I am getting the basic idea of what I want: a window with the top portion common to all players, and a bottom portion divided into sections for each player.
The trouble I have is that the top portion is too big, taking up about half the window, and I don't know how to fix that.
I've tried adding "vsizing: #shrinkWrap" to the builder for the #supplyStrings list, but that made it too small, forcing the contents to use a scrollbar; I've tried adding "extent: 1024#200" to that morph, and saw no effect.
So I have two questions:
1) How do I get finer layout control over the objects built with UITheme builder?
2) Where can I find documentation on how to do UI design using Pharo? I'd love to RTFM, if I know where TFM was to R!

You can build an UI at different abstraction levels in Pharo. There is Glamour, where you describe the UI in terms of presentations, panes & ports. It is most useful for building specialized model browsers. For building a game it doesn't seem the most suitable. Then there is Spec, aiming at reuse of composable widgets. That could be a good fit. This summer there has been a GSoC project to build an Spec UIPainter, so you can get a good feel for how to layout the UI. PolyMorph is basically an abstraction layer over Morphic providing different skins (UIThemes). Below that is Morphic. An advantage of building directly in Morphic is that there is an excellent game building example: Laser Game (needing slight changes for use in Pharo).

Related

Sticky Scroll with custom language

In vscode, the new Sticky scroll doesn't seem to work out of the box with my custom language extension. Is there some interface my language needs to implement in order to support it?
The new Sticky Scroll feature seems to be based on the language elements (class/interface/namespace/function/method/constructor) being recognized, and available in the Outline view. This means your custom language must have a Language Server or any other tooling that provides such elements to the editor.
If your language does provide that, but is not being properly supported in the new Sticky Scroll feature, I suggest you to open an issue in VS Code repo. As you can see (https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/labels/editor-sticky-scroll), there are a few issues reported.
Hope this helps
That could change with VSCode 1.72 and issue 157165 "Add option to base Sticky Scroll on indent, not Document Symbols"
Basing Sticky Scroll on class/function/namespace etc. makes a lot of sense, but only as long as there is an active language server or language extension that provides good Document Symbols (Outline).
For all languages that either have no LSP (so, so many), whose LSP provides no Outline, whose LSP provide invalid Outline or which simply have no concept of functions/classes etc., Sticky Scroll can not be leveraged :-(
I'd argue that in many cases the respective context could be inferred from the indentation instead.
I realize this may not be desirable by default, so perhaps it should be either hidden behind a flag or configurable per language. For example, in a large JSON file, you might then get this context:
1 {
51 "a": {
52 "b": [
-----------------------------------------------
74 "current_line",
75 "..."
Personally, I'd like to have SS in CoffeeScript, Crystal, AutoHotkey, Markdown, JSON, and pretty much everywhere else except maybe plain text files.
This implemented with PR 159198;
When no document symbol provider use the folding model for the sticky scroll:
This is available in VSCode insiders today.

cytoscape show traffic between nodes along an animated path

I need to show things moving between nodes along their connection paths similar to this project. I haven't been able to find any examples of it in cytoscape, but I have used cytoscape in the past and prefer to keep using it for this as well. I would appreciate recommendations on how to approach this problem.
You've got a few options...
The easiest is the Marquee visual style. It produces a "marching ants" illusion in the direction of directed edges. Simply to the Styles tab in the Control Panel and select the "Marquee" style. In the EDGE tab, you can choose from 3 different Marquee Line Types. You could imagine mapping these 3 line types to 3 categories (or bins) of traffic density, for example. Or you could use color, thickness and/or transparency in combination with a marquee style to represent traffic density. You can see an example here:
https://youtu.be/MF0zsxEPoPc?t=44
There's also an app for animation! This takes the approach of interpolating any visual style (including position and existence) between any set of key frames you provide. So, for example, you would have a start and finish frame and then CyAnimator would make a movie file for you:
http://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/cyanimator
And yet another completely different approach: with the scripting capabilities of Cytoscape, you can pretty much do whatever you want. The Unit tests for the RCy3 package, for example, ends up being an almost psychedelic display of data vis potential (and the unit tests aren't even at full coverage, shame). So you could direct your own animations in real time with a bit of scripting in R or Python. Here's the RCy3 unit test demo and links to the scripting libs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXqbdlUnzUE&t=1s (caution: flashing graphics)
https://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/html/RCy3.html
https://py2cytoscape.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
I'm using cytoscape.js with meteor.js. My elements, stylesheet and vehicles (shown as red dots) are stored in mongo, and can be updated via an external process or edited on-screen. The graph can be restructured or reshaped on the fly, and the vehicles will discover the new least-cost route to reach their target. Moves are queued with eles.animate() Routing is handled by eles.floydWarshall().path(). This might be similar to what you had in mind.

titanium how do i add a view to the single context

So i have a titanium app, and i just read about single contexts. (Incidentally, somebody here should write a book about programming in titanium... the only one out there doesn't really mention single contexts or any of that new-fangled stuff. Heck, make it an eBook. I'd buy it)
The titanium documentation stresses their use (http://docs.appcelerator.com/titanium/latest/#!/guide/Coding_Strategies-section-29004891_CodingStrategies-Executioncontexts) and then politely forgets how to implement a single context!!
So, question:
Let's say i have the awesomeWidget page - this just shows a button, and when you click on a button a new screen appears.
The aswesomeWidget page is accessed through another page - it is not from the root of the titanium app.
Keeping to single contexts, how do i add the view that the button creates to the current window?
Do I:
keep a global pointer to the current (and only) window?
pass the variable holding the current window down to all the following pages that use it
something else?
First off, Titanium keeps a reference to your current window anyway for you, so this use case is easy. For example:
awesomeWidgetButton.addEventListener('click' function(e) {
var yourView = Ti.UI.createView({...});
Titanium.UI.currentWindow.add(yourView);
});
If you want to dig further, the concept of a single context is closely tied to the use of CommonJS modules and the require keyword. It is very simple to keep a single context, just never open a window with the url component filled out, and liberally use the require() keyword. Other than that, its up to your imagination to keep track of who points to what and vice versa, there are standard patterns and best practices that apply here (MVC, Singletons, just keep it simple) just as in coding in any other language.

EventToCommand binding with parameters in portable view models

I am implementing a view model that is shared by applications on multiple platforms. I am using MvvmCross v3 that has its own MvxEventToCommand class, but I believe the challenge is the same for other frameworks like MVVM Light. As long as the event is used without parameters, the implementation is straightworward, and this is the case for simple interactions like tapping the control.
But when the command needs to handle event arguments things become more complicated. For example, the view model needs to act on certain scroll bar changes (and load more items in the associated list view). Here is the example of XAML:
<cmd:EventToCommand
Command="{Binding ScrollChanged}"
CommandParameter="{Binding EventArgs}" />
(MvvmCross uses MvxEventToCommand, but the principle is the same).
Then in my model I can have the following command handler:
public ICommand ScrollChanged
{
get
{
return new RelayCommand<ScrollChangedEventArgs>(e =>
{
MessageBox.Show("Change!");
});
}
}
(MvxCommand in MvvmCross).
The problem is that ScrollChangedEventArgs is platform specific and this code simply will not compile in a portable class library. This is a general problem with any command that needs not only a push when an event was fired but requires more specific event details. Moving this code in platform-specific part is silly because it more or less kills the concept of portable view models and code-behind-free views. I tried to search for projects that share view models between different platforms, but they all use simple events like "Tap" with no attached event details.
UPDATE 1 I agree with Stuart's remark that view models should only deal with higher level abstractions, so I will rephrase the original concern: how to map results of low-level interactions to a platform-neutral event that triggers a business logic command? Consider the example above: the business logic command is "load more items in a list", i.e. we deal with a list virtualization where a limited number of items from a large collection are loaded initially, and scrolling down to a bottom of a list should cause additional items to be loaded.
WinRT can take care of list virtualization by using observable collections that support ISupportIncrementalLoading interface. The runtime detects this capability and automatically requests extra items from a respective service when the user scrolls down the list. On other platforms this feature should be implemented manually and I can't find any other way than reacting on ScrollViewer ScrollChanged event. I can see then two further options:
Place OnScrollChanged handler in a code-behind file and call the portable view model higher level event (such as "OnItemsRequested");
Avoid code-behind stuff and struggle to wire the ScrollChanged event directly to a view model, then we will need to remap the platform-specific event first.
As long as there is no support for second option, putting event handler in code-behind file is OK as long as it is done for the sole purpose of event mapping. But I would like to investigate what can be done using the second option. MvvmCross has MapCommandParameter class which seems to be able to help, so I wonder if I should exploit that one.
UPDATE 2 I tried MapCommandParameter approach, and it worked allowing me to insert a platform-specific adapter that would map low-level events to view model-specific commands. So the second option worked without any struggle. Stuart also suggested listview-subclassing so there is no need to care about scrolling events. I plan to play with it later.
I agree that viewmodel commands should normally be expressed in terms of viewmodel concepts - so it would be 'strange' to send the viewmodel a command about the scrollbar value changing, but it might be ok to send the viewmodel a command about the user selecting certain list elements to be visible (which she does via scrolling)
One example where I've done this type of thing previously is in list selection.
I originally did this across multiple platforms using a cross-platform eventargs object -
https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross/blob/vnext/Cirrious/Cirrious.MvvmCross/Commands/MvxSimpleSelectionChangedEventArgs.cs
this was then used on WindowsPhone (for example) via an EventToCommand class like https://github.com/slodge/MvvmCross/blob/vnext/Cirrious/Cirrious.MvvmCross.WindowsPhone/Commands/MvxSelectionChangedEventToCommand.cs
However... I have to admit that this code hasn't been used much... For list selection we have instead mainly used selecteditem binding, and there simply haven't been any apps that have needed more complex parameterized commands (so far) - you might even need to go back to very old v1 mvvmcross code to find any samples that use it.

How to Write OS X Finder plugin

I'm looking for a guide or sample code for writing Mac OS X Finder plugins? It would like to know how to do some simple actions:
adding image overlayers to icons
adding context menu items
listen to file changes
I found the following two resources:
Writing Contextual Menu Plugins for OS X: An outdated document from 2002 that uses the COM API targeting Mac OS X 8/9.
SCPlugin: Open-source SVN Mac application that includes a Finder plug-in.
I am tempted to review the SCPlugin code, but was hoping to find an easier sample to digest.
The Finder Icon Overlay example project represents a small and very basic but actually working example of the answer below.
https://github.com/lesnie/Finder-Icon-Overlay
I know this is so old, but some may be still interested in topic (?)
Here is what I have it done under Leopard (10.6). At first proper Finder's headers are needed. Use class-dump tool to get it. Then write your code as a SIMBL plugin (refer to documentation how to do it), swizzling some methods. For instance to draw something over icon in ListView, drawIconWithFrame: method of TIconAndTextCell method must be overriden.
Here's the code for method swizzling:
+ (void) Plugin_load
{
Method old, new;
Class self_class = [self class];
Class finder_class = [objc_getClass("TIconAndTextCell") class];
class_addMethod(finder_class, #selector(FT_drawIconWithFrame:),
class_getMethodImplementation(self_class, #selector(FT_drawIconWithFrame:)),"v#:{CGRect={CGPoint=dd}{CGSize=dd}}");
old = class_getInstanceMethod(finder_class, #selector(drawIconWithFrame:));
new = class_getInstanceMethod(finder_class, #selector(FT_drawIconWithFrame:));
method_exchangeImplementations(old, new);
}
I am overriding "drawIconWithFrame:" method with my method "FT_drawIconWithFrame:". Below is sample implementation for this method.
- (void) FT_drawIconWithFrame:(struct CGRect)arg1
{
[self FT_drawIconWithFrame:arg1];
if ([self respondsToSelector:#selector(node)]) {
if ([[[[NSClassFromString(#"FINode") nodeWithFENode:[(TNodeIconAndNameCell *)self node]] fullPath] lastPathComponent] hasPrefix:#"A"])
[myPrettyIconOverlayImage drawInRect:NSMakeRect(arg1.origin.x, arg1.origin.y, arg1.size.height, arg1.size.height) fromRect:NSZeroRect operation:NSCompositeSourceOver fraction:1.0];
}
}
Essentially it draws "myPrettyIconOverlayImage" over every icon for file with filename starts with letter "A". This logic is up to you.
Pay attention to this line: [self FT_drawIconWithFrame:arg1]; this is how to call 'super' in order to get normal icon and name etc. I know, looks weird, like loop, but actually it isn't. Then wrap in into SIMBL plugin, install SIMBL and ...run.
Due to changes in Lion some work have to be done from scratch (make new "Finder.h" file with all declarations needed in it, find proper classess and methods to override), but this technique still works.
Happy hacking!
For Yosemite (MacOS 10.10 & newer), you can use Apple's FinderSync framework, which allows Finder extensions to:
Express interest in specific folder hierarchies
Provide "badges" to
indicate the status of items inside those hierarchies
Provide dynamic
menu items in Finder contextual menus, when the selected items (or
the window target) are in those hierarchies
Provide a Toolbar Item
that displays a menu with dynamic items (even if the selection is
unrelated)
Sadly, programming a Finder plugin actually does still require getting your hands dirty with COM. If you look at the SCFinderPlugin subproject of the SCPlugin project, you will find that it follows exactly the same techniques outlined in your first link, including setting up a vtable for COM, writing AddRef/ReleaseRef functions, and so on. Writing a plugin, where you're simultaneously managing old-school Carbon memory management, COM-style memory management, and Cocoa/new-style Carbon memory management, can be an incredible pain—and that totally ignores the fact that you'll be interacting in three or more radically different APIs, with different naming conventions and calling semantics. Calling the situation hysterically poor would be a vast understatement.
On the bright side, the Finder in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has been fully rewritten in Cocoa--and with that come vastly superior plugin interfaces. If you are lucky enough to be in a situation where you can actually only target Snow Leopard, you probably should grab an ADC Premier or higher membership, download the prerelease builds, and code against that. Besides, your plugin may not work on 10.6 anyway without a Cocoa rewrite, so it might make good sense to take a look at Snow Leopard before it gets released, regardless.
There is no official or supported plugin system for the Finder. Starting with OS X 10.6, you will need to inject code into the Finder process and override objective C methods in the Finder process.
I've done this for a proprietary project. I can tell you that the reason that there are no examples or tutorials for this is because it is a significantly difficult and time consuming development task. For this reason, there's plenty of incentive for individuals or organizations who have accomplished this to guard the specifics of their process closely.
If there's any way at all that you can accomplish your goal using the Services API, do it. Writing a Finder plugin will take you 1-2 solid months of painstaking development and reasonably deep knowledge of C and Objective-C internals.
If you're still convinced that you want do to this, grab mach_star. Good luck.
As far as I know, there's no official plugin architecture for the Finder. You may be able to add image overlays to icons through an external application without having to hook into the Finder, although it wouldn't be on the fly. I don't think there is a way to add contextual menu items aside from Folder Actions and Automator. You can also look into writing an external application to monitor File System changes using the FSEvents API.
Here's a completed solution for Finder icon badges and contextual menus in Lion and Mountain Lion using the techniques described by Les Nie.
Liferay Nativity provides a scripting bundle that will swizzle the relevant Finder methods and a Java client for setting the icons and context menus. It also includes equivalent projects for Windows and Linux.
The project is open source under LGPL, so feel free to contribute any bug fixes or improvements!
The pickings are slim; it's never been really clear to me whether Finder Plugins are actually supported. A few more leads, though:
SampleCMPlugIn - Carbon-based of course, since so is Finder. Note that almost any Finder plugin is probably going to stop working with 10.6.
Automator can save things as a "Finder plugin." It's a more supported version of what you're discussing, but of course less flexible.
To add Finder/File browser icon overlays and context menus, in a cross-platform manner, from Java, take a look at the Liferay Nativity library.
I also make mention of this in another SO post, which also contains links to Apple's 'Finder Sync' docs and API.