Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Galleries

[Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Charles Moir wrote:
> I was going to say great go ahead, because no one here is doing it I know.
>
> But then I remembered that we're desperately trying to get to a stable 0.4

Oh don't worry, I won't check anything in for 0.4 that could possibly
destabilize stuff.

> and then a 0.5 (with the single goal of being useful and actually 
usable for real).
> And there are some pretty basic things that do not work that,
> personally, I'd have put above Galleries.
> e.g. colour picker.

I thought someone else was on this one?

> E.g. the freehand tool still doesn't work (not sure if
> this has been bug reported,
> but the freehand smoothness slider is almost useless. You can't make 
smooth lines with few points.
> It seems to insert 100x more control points than the Windows version
> ever did).

I don't really know how the windows one used to work, but the slider
seems to resmooth stuff for me. Perhaps wx drops in more mouse
events (or similar), or we are not dropping duplicate mouse events,
or we are responding to multiple different mouse events for the
same move. But see below.

> e.g. the Shape editor
> smoothness control which could be used to work around the fact,
> except that doesn't work either.

This one is really weird. I noticed this and thought my info
bar or slider stuff was broken. It's not, in that the smoothing
code is actually called, with a sensible sounding value which
changes as you change the slider. I've traced it right through
to the path smoothing code, which is being properly called.
The path smoothing code is not immediately comprehensible,
but I suspect there might be something compiler dependent in
there, because it appears to be being called right. This might
explain the freehand stuff to.

> e.g. bitmap export (we're going to use 'old' TIFF-style export dialog
> which is (should be) pretty simple to port compared to the monster
>'new' bitmap export dialog. And we're working on native save (no idea
> why it's talking this long). And we hope to get Eric's SVG export
> integrated as well.

I think Gerry and/or Luke are working on them. There's only so
much work that can be done simultaneously on export and/or save.
I had a crack at reenabling DO_EXPORT before Luke did and retreated
in the face of superior enemy action.

> So yes if course I'd love to see Galleries, but it's outside our 0.5
> goal, and doesn't actually help real users wanting to use the product.
> And to be honest it's just a few key features to get to this 0.5 goal,
> so we're pretty close already.

My motivation was simply that if I got one of them working (and the
base gallery system working), it would make it very easy for others
to work on enabling the rest - i.e. it would parallelize
development. The one I was going to pick was the
layer gallery, because it's currently impossible to use layers
at all (because you can't create new ones etc) though all the
layer infrastructure is there. Clearly things like the clipart
gallery can wait, but equally having the bitmap gallery working
would be very useful (I thought).

There's a sort of moral here in that all my bugs are P3 and
below, and are to do with wxAUI and docking (which is sort
of linked to the gallery stuff too). Of the unassigned bugs,
most of them are Mac bugs, and none obviously fall into
areas I've been looking at. If there are 0.4 (or even
0.5) bugfixes required, it would be useful to have them
in bugzilla.

Equally it would be useful to have whatever the 0.5 milestone
is documented somewhere.

Alex