World: r3wp

Hi, I have read the recomended http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-guide.html
 so I have an idea of some of the stuff to expect from VID, but as 
soon as I try to do anything not explicity shown in that document 
I find my understanding is really very thin & flimsy. This is an 
example of me failing to get the results I expected. Perhaps there 
is just one basic step I have omitted that is messing everything 
else up?  Any tips would be welcome & appreciated, but dont miss 
a Sunday snooze on my account please :-)
mmm: layout [

 space 0x0         ;; thought this would make items touch each other. 
 dosnt work?
	my-sldr1: slider 300x10 [print "1 clicked"]  ; ok
	my-sldr2: slider 300x10 [print "2 clicked"]  ; ok

 space 1x1         ;; thought this would make items 1 pixel further 
 apart. dosnt work
	my-sldr3: slider 300x10 [print "3 clicked"]  ; ok
	name1: text "Inital text" 100x30             ; ok

 button "Change text" [name1/text: "Text now changed"  show name1] 
  ; ok

 button "Cente" [my-sldr2/size: 100x40 show mmm]  ;; this breaks, 
 but does make a change

 my-sldr1/step: 25             ;; imagined this did soemthing, but 
 cant see or guess what, seems to break the lat button

    my-sldr3/edge/color: blue     ;; this works but also applies its 
    self to the last button
	my-sldr3/dragger/color: red   ;; doesnt seem to work 
]

view mmm   ;; ok

? mmm      ;; shows components of object, reference for what they 
all mean is not available
? my-sldr1 ;; again guessing what they do is frustrating 

probe my-sldr1 ;; I know what the parts are but cant guess which 
ones work or what they do.

With ?, you can only see one face at a time. The subfaces are stored 
in PANE. If you try:

probe mmm


watch the console scrolling a lot of code. That's the entire face 
tree.

The space 0x0 and 1x1 should work. Otherwise try space 0 and space 
1.

it seems that you just saying they work, causes them to work... well 
the space is applied to the following item with reference to the 
one after that, not the space between the items where the word "space" 
is put....  After moving the position of the space this also cause 
the dragger to turn red too.    The probe mmm, are the 14,000 lines 
all of VID?

space works on elements from when SPACE is stated and then the space 
will stay that way for the rest of the layout description or until 
it's changed. If you want specific spacing between elements, PAD 
is used.

probe mmm is the face tree, generated by VID, when using the LAYOUT 
function. It's not VID itself.

Any idea why my example does so many screwy things?

Sorry, I didn't notice, but you can't put paths in the layout block. 
Those last three lines of code should be outside the layout block.

I had assumed all the layout refinements would be in there.   would 
this not be appropiate either?
	button "Cente" [my-sldr2/size: 100x40 show mmm]

yes, that's fine, because that is an action of the button. The action 
is a function with 'face and 'value passed and is regular REBOL code.

But after that block, those paths break the layout, because you are 
back in the dialect domain.

ok, i moved the changes to outside the layout block, but this dosnt 
work
	my-sldr3/dragger/color: red 

and this button dosnt redisplay the layout, it just overwrites the 
existing stuff.

 button "Cente" [my-sldr2/size: 100x40 show mmm]  ;; this breaks, 
 but does make a change

I am guessing that the display is not dynamic in the way I am expecting?

When altering a facet of a face, it must be shown before the change 
can be seen.


This is a little complicated to explain: You have chosen to resize 
a slider, which is a face with subfaces. Thus if you resize a slider, 
you need to access its internal resize function, in order for it 
to properly resize the knob as well. if you alter the size of a face 
like above, you are literally only altering the size of the outer 
face of the slider. VID does not know what you are trying to do there.


BUT: Given it's incompleteness, SLIDER does not have an internal 
resize function. :-) This is not intentional, and you've stepped 
into the mud here. This is one of the most lacking parts of VID, 
in that when the layout is set up, it can be laborious to change. 
Fortunately there are unofficial solutions to that, so I suggest 
you don't bother with this and try something else.

Alternatively, try working a bit with RebGUI.

one thing about the space, is that it needs to be specified BEFORE 
the next face, cause the space is calculated when it encounters a 
face, so if you use space after a face, the space accorded to the 
previous face has already been allocated.

Resizing a slider is on reflection a fairly odd thing to want to 
do, and I was only doing it because "size" was the first thing I 
came across that sounded straight forward to do to test my understanding. 


On reflection, I think that it is unlikely for me to grasp much of 
what can be done with VID until it gets a makeover with the documentation. 
Perhaps I could contribute to the documentation on the Wiki by listing 
all the items that can be changed for slider & then discovering what 
each one does by trial & error.  would this be helpfull, or just 
cause another job for someone to delete it in favor of a master plan?

At this point, I'm not sure it's worth documenting more. Perhaps 
2-3 years ago. 90% of work is currently directed toward VID for REBOL 
3 which is an entirely and far superior GUI system.

entirely = entirely different

could I use R3 for playing with graphics yet? Is the documentation 
public?

it has a few bugs, but you can play with it. docs are public.

I looked at RebGUI and had a play with the demos. Afraid RebGUI looks 
as if it would be even more complicated. I may as well start learning 
about R3 graphics as by the time I have learnt R3 I expect  R4 wll 
be in development.  :-)

R3 is still alpha software and the layout engine is going to be changed, 
since it's not laying out faces correctly many times, but the dialect 
is not likely to change. There are also only Carl's styles available 
in strong colors, and they are not so good looking.

but the underpinnings with GOBs, text and DRAW is fairly stable. 
it's fun to play with.

there is also glayout, which works very out of the box and is built 
over VID.  the api isn't document though.


you can look at the glayout-demo app on rebol.org so have an idea 
of all it can do.  it layout engine is very complete, and seems like 
the basis for how R3 was implemented... they use the same philosophy.


glayout handles ALL resizing automatically, and it even includes 
real scrollpanes, which react to content, as it changes (scrollbars 
resize automatically, for example)

there are just a few pointers to know if you want to create completely 
new styles, its not very complicated.

I am using it for my ssh-tool, which will be online within a few 
days (once I get my web server fully operational).

how do I get to the r3 console please?  I just get a dos type box 
with a >> prompt.

r3 lives within the OS console

so no interactive console any more?

or at least not for any code that splits across 2 lines

what do you mean by interactive?  its the same but instead of being 
a separate windows app, the console is directly within the dos prompt.

but it works complety differently?

no its pretty much the same.

Sadly: <The R3 alpha uses the default Windows console. This is a 
temporary situation until the new console has been created. >
http://www.rebol.net/wiki/Notes_about_Windows_Console

>> print [
** Syntax error: missing "]" at "end-of-script"
** Near: (line 1) print [

I hadn't noticed the multi-line difficency !

So I just have to paste unformatted code only?

sunanda... for my part, I'd rather it stay there.  at least we have 
real stdio.

working in a telnet/ssh session for example, I can (in theory at 
least) use rebol remotely.

for my part, I'd rather use a rebol session as a remote shell, than 
bash.

I have to format the code in indented blocks to not lose track of 
what I am trying to do. Sorry to be so lame.

I do clipboard://

Ah that sounds like a plan

You don't even need a REBOL header anymore (I changed that).

The R3 documentation shows this example for view
view layout [
    h2 "The time is currently:"
    h3 form now
    button "Close" [unview]
]

But it does not work. Am I expecting too much from the documentation 
(sorry)    Could someone give me a graphics example that works please 
to start me off.

Sorry, I see the R3 docs are a work in progress.  I better back out 
of R3 graphics for now I think or I will get classed as a troll. 
sorry.

there are actually two sets of GUI documentation. The right one is 
located here: http://rebol.net/wiki/R3_GUI

Thanks Henrik, now I have some things that work to play with.. I 
also want to study Glayout...  AND Maxim's SSH-tool project sounds 
very interesting... Off to bed now, back to parsing tommrow I think.

I have found an example for R3 here  (about the only one I could 
spot so far)

http://rebol.net/wiki/Script_Writing_With_The_Visual_Interface_Dialect

It looks quite nice with rounded corners to the buttons too.

The example crashes when you try to exit so I suppose there is lots 
to do before this is ready for general use. I know how long developmnet 
cycles can take so I won't be holding my breath :-)    


I suspect the R2 functions built in will do more than enough for 
what I want & that I just need stick with one thing till I can understand 
it enough to know what it will do & what its limitations are. 


I showed my parsing project ot a work coleague & he suggested some 
additional data that it should colect, he was very impressed when 
I implimented his suggestion & tested it all in under 3 minutes.

I am reading about these mezzaines 3 times per day here and I still 
don't have any clue what they are... I googled but found nothing 
either.. .so what are mezzaines?

mezzanines are functions written in Rebol as opposed to C