World: r3wp

VID was a revolution at the time of its invention .. but we hope 
that it will be soon superceded by R3 GUI  and we won't have to worry 
anymore :)

yes, true

Few languages can lay claim to inventing new ways of doing things 
..  we just still need to prove it's viable :)

VID was never really finished. That's its only problem.

That could indicate a deficiency in the method of dialecting visual 
interfaces .. it's just not flexible enough

No, the dialect is simply a tool for building a face tree and it 
can be as complex as we want. Same in the R3 GUI.


How that face tree is otherwise managed during runtime (resizing, 
events, etc.) is up to other functions that exist elsewhere in VID, 
long after the role of the dialect is gone. What the VID Extension 
Kit does is add keywords for resizing and a few other elements, so 
the face tree holds a bit more information.


The resizing system is then used later to perform adjustments to 
the face tree, when you resize the window. That's just one example 
of doing only minor modifications to the dialect itself.

So, where is it failing?

Pareto failure?

It's all the "meat" that comes after using the dialect to generate 
the face tree. There just isn't enough functions to manipulate the 
face tree. VID is almost a misnomer in this sense, because the dialect 
only performs the very first part of controlling the UI. The rest 
is up to the meat.

I wonder why we can't build eg native windows guis the same way

It's been many years since I've used an IDE, but I recall selecting 
widgets and placing them on a screen, setting the Z order, and various 
properties for certain events.  Isn't VID just a RAD tool for doing 
this in a dialect ...

yes, and also for doing layouts programmatically, which you can't 
with a point'n'click IDE.

How often are you doing that though?

it's a very nice feature for doing certain lists and face-constructs 
(part of the VID Extension Kit)

Presumably in a completed GUI we wouldn't need to generate anything 
on the fly

Actually you would, and I'd hate to lose that ability.


http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/admin.png<- the view in the center 
is built like that as well as the dynamic lists in the right hand 
side with the popups in them.

You're saying that you couldn't prebuid that?

that would be a complete nightmare to do

This is not obvious with VID, because you might build such a layout 
in a special setup, but in the VID Extension Kit, you have face constructs. 
A face construct is simply a style that accepts a particular dialect 
as input. The dialect is parsed into VID which then in turn generates 
an internal face tree. This means you can build styles that do something 
like:

view layout [
	paper [
		size a4
		dpi 300
		at 20x20 image bay.jpg
	]
]


The point is that every time you feed the paper new data, using SET-FACE, 
it's re-rendered from scratch using VID.


You can also build very complicated list views that dramatically 
change appearance and number of faces, every time you feed it new 
data.

The issue is that VID makes many things simple and so is very enabling 
in that respect.  But difficult things are close to impossible for 
seasoned users ...

Even now I see that having a true rich text we can type with is not 
possible in R3 gui

That's incorrect. Who's spreading this information?

I think noone is. It is just a guess, based upon a fact, that none 
such usable rich-text editor appeared yet :-)

I'm getting tired of hearing that if something is currently not there 
in the R3 GUI, it's completely impossible to do. Sorry.

I don't want to give up dynamic GUIs, and I think we have a perception 
that everything should be as easy as VID, or at least not too much 
harder. We are missing some key ingredients, which makes things much 
harder, but if you ever tried to develop a custom Windows control 
in the early 90s, you might not say REBOL makes it too hard. Then 
again, you might. :-) Entire companies were built around, and devoted 
to, providing small sets of custom controls, sometimes just one. 
TrueGrid comes to mind.


Great things have been done, even without docs or all the right pieces 
to make it work well. If R3 can provide the necessary hooks, events, 
and docs, I think we can do the rest. Honestly, at this point, I 
would be happy to have RT *just* provide the core pieces. If Henrik, 
Gab, Ashley, Cyphre, and a few others can agree on what to tell Carl 
they need, all Carl has to do is be willing to give their work an 
official blessing.

I fully agree with Greg here. Especially on the first part - for 
the Visual Objects we bought expensive GridPro product :-) I think 
that it would not take Carl more than 1-2 hours to write down his 
ideas on guides, resizing, layers, etc., or to hold 1-2 hours discussion 
with the team ... why not to coordinate?

If I want to keep a View window in front of all other windows, what 
is the best way to do this?

search this thread for when I asked the same question?

I did, so no answer, eh?

well, I found this post from Dec  from Luis http://pastebin.ca/1718241

but I guess it should have been posted to stackoverflow instread

activate-on-show is mentioned in http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-face-funcs.html#section-1
 now I am remembering some old hack I did where I had two windows 
that played hide-and-seek...but right now the app is hiding...

user32: context [
    dll: load/library %user32.dll

    HWND_BOTTOM:    1
    HWND_TOPMOST:   -1
    HWND_NOTOPMOST: -2
    HWND_TOP:        0
   
    SWP_SHOWWINDOW: to integer! #{0040} ;&H40
    SWP_NOSIZE:     to integer! #{0001} ;&H1
    SWP_NOMOVE:     to integer! #{0002} ;&H2
   

    GetActiveWindow: make routine! [return: [integer!]] dll "GetActiveWindow"
    SetWindowPos:    make routine! [
        hWnd [integer!]
        hWndInsertAfter [integer!]
        X [integer!]
        Y [integer!]
        cx [integer!]
        cy [integer!]
        uFlags [integer!]
        return: [integer!]
    ] dll "SetWindowPos"
   
    set 'arrange-window func [
        "Arrange window z-order."
        window [object!]
        mode [word!] "One of BOTTOM, NORMAL, TOP or TOP-MOST"
    /local
        hWnd
    ][
        window/changes: 'activate
        show window
        hWnd: GetActiveWindow

        SetWindowPos hWnd do select [bottom HWND_BOTTOM top HWND_TOP top-most 
        HWND_TOPMOST normal HWND_NOTOPMOST] mode

            0 0 0 0 to integer! to-hex SWP_SHOWWINDOW or SWP_NOSIZE or SWP_NOMOVE
       
    ]
    	SetWindowText: make routine! [
		handle			[integer!]
		Title			[string!]
		return:			[integer!]
	] dll "SetWindowTextA"
	
	set 'WindowTitle func [
		Title [string!] 
	] [
		SetWindowText get-modes system/ports/system 'window Title
	]	
]

I hope you meant on windows ....

...yeah...thanks!

WIP on a tiff viewer for r2 http://www.digicamsoft.com/cgi-bin/rebelBB.cgi?thread=%3C19Feb2010232555055824100%3E

use Show popup.

show-popup.... sorry.

if you don't do a call to do-events, it won't be modal (blocking 
events to the main window)

if you feel like it, you can just look at the show-popup and hide-popup 
 mezz source code and improve it to let it do what you need.

the only issue here is that if you try to do use a title'less window, 
it won't obay the "stay in front" property... strange.

the only thing to know is that the default wake-event is pretty dumb 
in how it manages the exit application condition when a windows is 
closed.

so if you do play around or make your own show-popup style commands, 
you will probably have to insert a line or two into the main wake-event 
so it knows not to close the whole event port when you close your 
custom stay-in-front windows.


note that these windows CAN resize... VID 2 just never allowed us 
to control it in the popup code.

that creates a modal window

no.

I have to fix view everytime I use my own requestors... its pretty 
quickly designed code which was patched by Gabriele in later VID, 
but even those changes, break up pretty quickly.

for a window to be modal, a new call to wait must be done at some 
point.

part of the modality is managed in wake-event IIRC.

but for a fact, just looking at the wake-event function for view, 
show-popup and hide-popup  you have ALL of what you need to make 
View manage windows the way you want it.


(I've had to play in there countless number of times... GLayout completely 
removes show-popup, for example.  and adds a /modal refinement to 
its 'view command instead)

When a mouse button is held down and the mouse is moved it triggers 
"over" events, during which a right mouse button event is ignored. 
In windows, either mouse button being pressed will cause the system 
to stop triggering "over" events. Does anyone know how I could get 
this kind of behaviour?

Sorry, that should be "when the left mouse button is held down"