AltME groups: search

thanks, that is helpful...it is simple and is similar enough.  One 
thing I was wondering was if I have to do a load or not from ram...or 
a copy.   still experimenting.  I was trying a make image! to clone 
each picture..

I found the silver bullet.  Thanks for all the ideas.  I ended up 
usng append.  Nothing fancy, just it takes me extra time to get the 
data structure so it works, and the code was pretty tense in many 
aspects.  I do remember some doc that had a note about making .gif 
anims from REBOL but still haven't found.

How do you set the toggle style back to it's initial state ?

How do you do it? I was checking anamonitor but these kinds of things 
are mysteries to me.

can't do anything like that. the drop down has to be independent 
on the restrictions of the layout it's sitting in.

Just curious but say you've created some apps in the past and you 
want to create a little launcher app that calls them. These apps 
can stand alone as well and aren't necessarily part of the launching 
app. Is it possible to "do" them and then have them return back to 
the launcher app without having to recode them (the launched apps)? 
 Or should I just place a view/new in the called app and an unview/only 
when I want to quit it?

James; Depending on the version you have (I can never remember what's 
what anymore in terms of SDK features amd if you need keys if running 
2.7.5 vs 1.3.2 etc) try looking into  launch  and  call.  do will 
work if there are no quits or halts; falling through the end of a 
script returns the value of the last expression, but halt will halt 
the caller, and quit just bails.  If you are willing to recode a 
little bit, change all the quits and halts to  throw  and wrap the 
do in  catch [do ...]  (along with the unviews)  Best is launch, 
it spawns off a brand new process.

At least that's one way to do it.

You know when you want to update an area object, if you replace the 
text how do you make the cursor go to the home position? Outside 
of setting the para/scroll, there's some other value hanging around 
(I'm tired of looking for it with anamonitor!)

Experts;  What are the implications of removing  on-unfocus  from 
a face's flags block?  It has to do with a login panel firing on 
Enter (only) for the password field with a login button and some 
other fields that can cause an unfocus of the password (which by 
default fires the action...which can be inappropriate).

good to know how this is done .. I have tried saving to binary! before 
without knowing how to do it!

Challenge;  A REBOL face face.  Ok all you graphically inclined; 
come up with a face that is a face.

Given this graphically PT version ... what can you do to make the 
face of REBOL.

face-block: [
    pen blue ellipse 150x150 100x120           ; head

    fill-pen green circle 110x110 10  circle 190x110 10             ; 
    eyes
    fill-pen black circle 110x110 3  circle 190x110 3
    fill-pen pink ellipse 150x150 10x20        ; nose
    fill-pen red ellipse 150x200 25x10         ; mouth
]


view layout compose/deep/only [box 300x300 sky effect [draw (face-block)]]


Extra points for blinking, winking and moving lips, but simple is 
better  - plans is to show students.  :)
(For those that need to know ... PT is short for part-tard).

I more and more often feel, we need at Style Guide for REBOL. Not 
for the source, Carl have already written about that in the Core 
guide, but a guide to user interfaces. What key combinations should 
mean what? Should labels for fields be left- or right-aligned? etc. 
I know, many of these things are different in different operating 
systems, but we build applications, that can run across many OS's. 
So I feel, we need at standard guidance to do these things.

Agree? Disagree? Comments?

Maybe we should put a group together to figure this out? Or is it 
best, if one person do it? We also need input, ideas and viewpoints.

Does routines to let you do that need to be in R3? Or can it be a 
software-builder-library, that you load, when you build applications?

I'm using a single "area" right now to display a list of notes but 
would I like to do something like what we see here in Altme; that 
is, a scrollable list of rows that have differing heights. Any thoughts 
about how I can accomplish this feat? I tried list with supply but 
all I get is a bunch of areas the same height. I think that you cannot 
have such a thing with list/supply so there must be another trick.

how do I convert an %image.jpg to to a height of 100 and a cropped 
width of 200 ?

If i1 is your original image, you can do:


i2: copy/part to-image layout [origin 0 image i1 as-pair i1/size/1 
100] 200x100

This will resize height to 100 and crop width to 200.

Can you tell me how to get to the R2 beta world as I am currently 
spending more time in 276 than I do in the alpha ?

REBOL/View targets the native widget set of the host and tries to 
provide a platform-independent experience, based on a more abstract 
definition of interface.  This seems to be somewhat redundant with 
efforts like Firefox, Opera, etc.  I curious if REBOL/View would 
be better implemented by targeting an Ajax-like browser that already 
lives on the machine... or if there is a compelling reason not to 
do it that way.

It sounds like you are saying that REBOL, like the Qt library, abstracts 
the widgets and goes to more of a "give me a window and a graphics 
surface and I'll do all my own drawing and event management"

Yes, I have my own opinions of how to do this right and of course 
I don't think W3C is doing a terribly profound job of it.  :)

However, I'm the sort who kind of starts to accept certain inevitabilities. 
 It is inevitable that everyone will have a web browser on their 
desktop, that they are already running, that can do Ajax-like stuff... 
a la Gmail.

Pekr: well, y'know, it's not like x86 is anything beautiful to look 
at, but it just got defined and hammered on... eventually PowerPC 
got beat.  I do agree with aesthetic arguments, yet it depends on 
which area truly interests you... I know what goes on deep in the 
heart of my intel processor and I guess I sort of accept it because 
it's too far down for what I see... if it works, it works, and I'll 
replace it if someone has something faster.  But if a thousand monkeys 
wrote a better book than shakespeare, I'll read the book the monkeys 
wrote.  :)

My experience with the web is the more complex trhe page the longer 
the wait. There are sites I avoid because I hate the wait...and the 
browser seems to bog down the whole system. Rebol apps for me are 
instant. No waiting and they do  not bog down my system.

Amacleod - the biggest problem of View is the need to install. I 
say - as for R3, we definitely need plug-in - then you can do your 
app in rebol and ppl will stear how fast web app can be.

One aspect of the new "reality" is that your computer always has 
a web browser running, it has to.  So any comparison of REBOL and 
a web browser you have to do is to run REBOL * in addition to* the 
browser.  Not fair, just true.  Performance-wise, how quickly the 
app starts up or not doesn't matter anymore... you've paid the startup 
cost for Firefox (or whatever), you've got the code pages in, they're 
there you have to live with it.

In terms of view as part of the core: Some plans down the road (Wildman) 
may require cusrtom answers. Also when you want to be on cell ph0ones 
or pda's you might not want to attach large libraries to your app. 
I do not know the size of these gui libs but they can't be as small 
as vid.

If they wanted to, they could make that console take up the whole 
screen, and put a button there to let you do so.  The browser would 
allow it.

so what do you prefer? Getting rebol console not knowing what to 
do, or getting simple console with "Type desktop to start the Viewtop." 
and visiting visual world with plenty of examples and demos to run?

What I dislike on the web though, is the fact than once you try to 
do something more complicated, you involve some monstrose js libraries 
which are bigger than rebol itself. The whole concept does not sound 
well integrated to me. But never mind - web 2.0 will offer better 
support for offline apps - Google Gears, Mozilla's FF3 attempt, etc.

Well, don't shoot the messenger... as I say, I do believe in good 
native apps, just don't think it's where REBOL can "win".  Of course, 
success is up to each person to define.  For some it means making 
the thing the way they wanted it, and I understand that notion well.

That's Carl's call, and he has strong ideas about how to do things. 
:-)

I am not arguing that REBOL/View should not exist.  And in fact though 
I am talking about how I like Gmail I do currently use Apple Mail, 
a native program, to read and send messages via Gmail's IMAP (usually). 
 I'm just saying that the reason people are targeting the browser 
now instead of native code is because browsers have one of the most 
important features--efficient multilingual text layout in a 2D space, 
with inline images and such.  I can't embed a YouTube video here 
in the text box... if I type in a hyperlink it's not clickable... 
right click can't copy text, etc.

In general, I don't like AJAX, but with HTML 5 it looks like it might 
become almost acceptable. Still, I would find it easier to generate 
such code from REBOL dialects than to write it directly. That is 
not the reason I don't do browser apps as often though.


The real reason is that most of the applications people use don't 
use web browsers at all. Most of the applications I use work offline, 
and no web interface works offline (though Google, Adobe and the 
Mono project are working on it).

Paul, indeed read-io and write-io are no more necessary. however, 
if reusing the same memory buffer is the intent, then they're the 
only way to do that. it may be better to just copy a small part of 
the file at a time and let the GC do its job instead.

I was thinking about an automatic cropping tool, but I'm not sure 
how to do that.

You should be able to do this instead of use INCLUDE.


 auto-crop-bitmap-text: get in do %auto-crop-bitmap-text.r 'auto-crop-bitmap-text

All white does not do any cropping. It didn't find any "content" 
(non-white pixels) to crop to. What do you want it to do ?

Let me add that to the to-do list...
Is this a common case, by the way ?

That would help my algorithm. Text which is right up against the 
edge is likely to be classified as 'junk'. When there is text at 
the top edge and text at the bottom edge only, then we have two possibly 
'content' texts. But which one is the content and which is the junk 
? The algorithm is forced to either make a choice (which it could 
do by choosing the larger one), or not choose at all (which is what 
currently happens), so including both as the 'content'. If you put 
just one line of white outside the text you consider 'content' then 
it will be surrounded by white and the algorithm will select it as 
'content'.

Hmm.. I think the image padding might be outside the responsibility 
of an auto-crop function. Its job is to remove stuff, not add. It's 
probably better to write a small generalised function to do the padding 
(which could be useful elsewhere) and just feed the result of the 
auto-crop to it.

Seems to only do 0, 90, 180 and 270:
http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-system.html#section-9.5

Do you know, how to use DRAW to do image transformations?

I usually learn enough about view to do something I need and then 
promptly forget it :(

Where can I put the handler such that when the layout is clicked 
'my-face also receives a notification.  I was hoping I could put 
the feel in the face declaration, but that doesn't do anything.  
 Also, more than one layout is usually getting added to the pane. 
 I just want to the parent face to receive a message whenever one 
of them are clicked without having to add the handler in each of 
the layouts.

hmm.. can't you do something with setting the caret to a large position 
and read the position that way?

What I am trying to do as in the video i posted on the rebgui channel 
is to open the area just enough to show all the text .. no less, 
and no more.

I picked up an Asus Eee PC with XP on my latest vacation in Japan. 
Rebol runs quite nicely. The relatively small resolution has caused 
me to redo an app. Is there an "easy" way to do screen resizing? 
Is this something best left up to 3.0?

I could in a pinch enclose the screen I have in a scrollable pane 
set to limits of the Eee PC, I suppose.
Thanks as always in advance.

Hm... but is it possibe to do so that  interfaces is keeping to be 
responsive while another function/task is running?

Not easily. You have to launch another REBOL process, send it the 
request, let it do the blocking calls to ODBC then send back the 
results.

Do you know how to handle (and compute with) 64 bit unsigned ints?

Maarten, I can't think of a short-cut way to do, what you want. I 
guess, you have to do the bit-manipulation manually. struct! might 
help with something like:

unsigned: make struct! [hi [int] lo [int]] [0 0]


You can then get to high and low 4 bytes with unsigned/hi and unsigned/lo, 
and you can see all 8 bytes with: third unsigned

I made some bit operations, that might help you further: http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/libs/bit.r

hmm.. I'm still not sure where it fits or how it's used. But if we 
stick with the chart drawing aspect: It would be possible to do as 
a dialect, and I think it should be inspired by graphviz.

Has anyone ever seen a view app with several fields and and an area 
 that always minimizes when you hit the return key? In this case, 
I don't want it to do that. I  don't think I' ve ever seen that except 
in this app. What would make it do that?

I think so .... I suspect Cark added all the features he needed to 
do the presentation he was writing that day :-)

I'm trying to use Antons' Scroll-panel style but I'm having some 
trouble. 
Do you "do" the script or it it more involved? 

I tried to follow his style-gallery.r script but there is a lot going 
on in there and got lost. 
I see some kind of "include.r" script. perhaps that is needed?

I have a similar problem re: scrolling, and I've tried the suggstions 
by amacleod without success, here I've copied a modified version 
of cookbook-scroller in the hope someone can suggest a solution.Hi, 
I'm trying to write a data entry form with many fields, this form 
is longer than a typical
monitor viewing area.

Creating the form is easy, but I cannot work out how to scroll the 
whole form 'up/down'

when the user TAB's out of the last showing field bottom and display 
the 'hidden' fields.

Rebol actually does TAB to the next field and accepts data entry 
but you cannot see it
without manually moving the scroll slider.


How do I programmatically make the form 'move' up/down ? and sync 
the slider ?

 I've tried "all" the example code I can find and none seem to do 
 the trick :-)


In the attached (modified cookbook-scroller.r) program I've added 
a few fields to illustrate the

problem. My need is for rapid data entry and using the mouse is really 
not a option, The program accepts user data, user TABS to navigate 
to next field, form slides as necessary, upon last field, data is 
saved, form cleared, cursor placed at first field, data entry continues.

Thanks for any ideas.

;; ===============================
  rebol ["cookbook-scroller2.r"]
  sub-panel: layout [
        across origin 5
        style label text bold right 60
        backcolor tan
        h2 leaf "Scrolling Sub Panel" return
        label "Name:" f1: field return
        label "Email:" f2: field return
        label "Info:" f3: area wrap return
        label "Month:"
        l1: text-list data system/locale/months return
        label "Day:" s1: slider 200x20 return
        label
        button "Submit"
        button "Cancel" [quit]
    ]

    out: layout [
        across
        h3 "Panel Scrolling Example" return
        space 0
        p1: box 300x300 coal frame black
        s1: scroller 16x300 [scroll-panel-vert p1 s1]
        return
        s2: scroller 300x16 [scroll-panel-horz p1 s2]
        return
    ]

    p1/pane: sub-panel

    scroll-panel-vert: func [pnl bar][
        pnl/pane/offset/y: negate bar/data *
            (max 0 pnl/pane/size/y - pnl/size/y)
        show pnl
    ]

    scroll-panel-horz: func [pnl bar][
        pnl/pane/offset/x: negate bar/data *
            (max 0 pnl/pane/size/x - pnl/size/x)
        show pnl
    ]

    update-panel: func [pnl vbar hbar] [
        pnl/pane/offset: 0x0
        s1/data: s2/data: 0
        vbar/redrag pnl/size/y / pnl/pane/size/y
        hbar/redrag pnl/size/x / pnl/pane/size/x
        show [pnl vbar hbar]
    ]

    update-panel p1 s1 s2
    view out
;; ============

You will need to know the offset value of each face you tab into. 
You will also need to detect which ace is currently focused. (Do 
not know how is is done).

If you know these two things you can set the offset and "show" the 
face to junp to that location.


Also, I do not know if all faces can be tabbed into such as your 
month list face..

amacleod, the "selected text prevents scrolling in scroll-panel" 
problem is not the fault of scroll-panel.

demo-scroll-panel.r shows this problem because I didn't want to make 
it too complex, by including the necessary global event handler to 
handle scroll events on non-focused scrolling faces (such as scroll-panels). 
I do have a demo somewhere which has the necessary global event handler 
somewhere... at least style-gallery.r uses it.

I haven't programmed scrollers to be easily optional (though it's 
on to-do list).

Do you need it to work with the sdk ?

if you want to do commercial soft it can help :-)

amacleod, do you mean adding a TEXT like this:
	scroll-panel [
		text "hello"
	]
and clicking on the text?

The TEXT gains the focus (and can be selected and copied etc.), but 
since the scroll-panel no longer has the focus it doesn't get arrow 
keys etc.
You could make the TEXT inactive by setting its FEEL to none:
	scroll-panel [
		text "hello" feel none
	]

or you could modify its feel to route particular keys such as page-up/page-down 
and arrow keys to the scroll-panel it's in.
	text "hello" feel [
		append last last second :engage bind [
			if find [up down page-up page-down] event/key [

    face/parent-face/parent-face/parent-face/feel/engage face/parent-face/parent-face/parent-face 
    act event
			]
		] first find second :engage 'act
	]
Not particularly easy, but there you go.

I have thought about this issue before, but didn't come up with a 
clear vision of how to handle it properly yet, I think.

Note that the feel I've provided above is hardly a general solution. 
It's likely to work only with my scroll-panel as it depends on knowledge 
of scroll-panel internals to do its work. It's a quick hack.

I'm looking to hide the title bar. But I do not see how.

inform and show-popup do not seem to have an options refinement.

Any idea how the /parent refinement works for layout. I can't seem 
to find the right syntax.. 
if its even relevent to what i'm trying to do...

On choose functio...never mind I got it to do what I needed...

back to choose function...
can't get the styl attribute to work. 

If I want my choose menu to be a certain width what syntax do I use?

choose/offset/styl ["One" "Two" "Three"] func [face] [print sec] 
'offset' size = 200] ????

Thanks, Brock. I agree ! :-) It's very useful right now, though to 
make it perfect I need to do the vector calculations using decimal! 
instead of pair! to avoid visible loss of precision (when using not-too-extreme 
parameters).

if possible, you should append faces in a pane that belongs to the 
text face. you can do that as you want. it's only a matter of regular 
block manipulation and then SHOWing the text face again.

Hmm.. interesting. Do you have a base object (eg. similar to svv/vid-face 
?)

I suppose you don't know how to do the equivalent of SIZE-TEXT in 
postscript yet.

and the test file to do is test-caret-to-offset-patch.r

the "console" on Mac and Linux is just a terminal (OS provided), 
and they are usually UTF-8. That has nothing to do with View.

Henrik - the only thing I do remember from View 1.3 dev times is 
addition of rgb-to-hsv and hasv-to-rgb functions.....

I'm trying to create a function that builds radio buttons and checkboxes 
on the fly. Sunanda gave me some ideas about how to do that. This 
morning it dawned on me that I was going about it the wrong way. 
I was trying to build an entire string that represented the rebol 
code for the gadget instead of building a block of code.. What was 
happening was my contexts were all in error. 

I'm wondering now how to append my code into an existing layout block. 
The only working method I have found so far is to append into a non-layout 
block then "view layout blk." I'm still curious if there is a way 
to append/insert into a layout block though. E.g., 
a: layout [ btn "Quit" [unview halt] ]
b: [t1: check [ ] ]   <- this is my generated block
append a b

I get a "Script Error: append expected series argument of type: series 
port"

James, I did one side of bitmap support for clipboard://, and there 
are other ways around it, depending on what you need to do. E.g., 
imagemagick.

Gregg, what I wanted to do was simply take what was in the clipboard:// 
(via a printscreen) and save it as a png or bmp, thereby skipping 
the monotonous paste into Paint and save.

In a fresh console, does


>> do http://www.rebol.org/download-a-script.r?script-name=clipboard.r
write clipboard:// "Test" read-clip
connecting to: www.rebol.org
Script: "Clipboard" (10-Dec-2008)
== "Test"

work? Which Rebol version do you use?

Just to be sure I'm using it right...
 do %clipboard.r
>> clip: read-clip
** Script Error: h.desktop-window has no value
** Where: read-clip
** Near: require h.desktop-dc: get-dc h.desktop-window
require

Write-clip works

rebol does not use the vista default browser... can anyone tell me 
what I must do for it to work?


even altme is using explorer, although every thing is set to firefox... 
even mime types.

it works everywhere except in rebol-related apps  :-(

A View problem:

rebol []
  unview/all
  view layout [button "butt" [request-list "req" [1 2 3]]]
  
Sequence:
1. run the above code

2. click "butt" to get the pop-up request list. Do not interact with 
it! instead:
3. return to the console window and hit esc
4. run the coee again

Result:
 a stuck window
 

Any ideas what I need to do in addition to the unview/all to disable 
whatever the request-list is waiting for?

WAKE-EVENT DO EVENT is normally expected (via some GUI action) to 
do HIDE-POPUP, and WAKE-EVENT usually

straight afterwards fixes up SYSTEM/VIEW/POP-FACE (ie. setting it 
to NONE when all requestors are closed).

However, when this process is interrupted in DO EVENT (by pressing 
Escape in the console),
then this fix-up is skipped, and POP-FACE remains set.

So HIDE-POPUP, issued at the console, will not fix POP-FACE (eg. 
set it to NONE).

This means the next VIEW -> WAKE-EVENT will act as if there is a 
requestor open, and return the wrong

result (FALSE, because the incorrect POP-FACE is not found in the 
correctly empty POP-LIST),
and therefore WAIT will return immediately.


The one-line solution seems to be to patch WAKE-EVENT to fix POP-FACE 
when it's not found in POP-LIST,
just before POP-FACE is checked.


 if all [pop-face not find pop-list pop-face][pop-face: none] ; <--- 
 Added by Anton. Fix POP-FACE when it's not found in POP-LIST (eg. 
 HIDE-POPUP was done at the escaped console, not by WAKE-EVENT DO 
 EVENT, as usual, here).
	either pop-face [ ...

I spent nearly as long reducing the problem to my 3-line bug report 
:-) It could have been any one of several other issues in the actual 
application.

Anton, it could and should also live on in RAMBO and the code base 
for REBOL3.
Do you want to RAMBO it, or will I?

the pop-face: none was what I meant for "resetting the internal state", 
but I would have needed to look at the code to find out what was 
necessary to do.

Don't know.  
We plan to do a version of it for our Gantt.

is there a way to do mouse chording?

BT, the codes you see at the console are ANSI escape codes, and that 
has nothing to do with what you get from view, eg. the "home" key 
sends the 'home word in View but an escape sequence on the terminal.

Base 64 in REBOL is, basically, a type of ASCII represention. It 
can stand a certain amount of damage (like whitespace being inserted 
-- imagine it is sent as an email) and can still be reconstructed:
    str: "abcdefabcdef"      ;; a string
    s64: enbase str    ;; enbased to base-64 by default

    replace/case/all s64 "W" "  W  "   ;; whitespace polluted in transit
    str = to-string debase s64    ;; do we get it back intact?

Makes sense...
when I upload an image to the db how do I go about it?
Do I load it into a variable first?

I don't know how it is stored in the DB, but it is bound to the DB 
as hex (base16) and stored as a 'Blob'.  As far as I'm aware, Ashley's 
driver will do this for you:

	sql ["INSERT INTO mytable VALUES (?)" #{ABCD}]

I want to be able to catch alt-key down and caps lock down and caps 
lock up and things like that. Can I use external libraries to do 
these things?

I'm working on taking the output of a console program to a view. 
 Its formatted nice for the console but I can't seem to get the text 
spaced correctly for the text-list box such as teletype or monotype.... 
any suggestions?  

myData: read %./
lo: [text-list 640x480 data to-block myData]

view/options/title layout lo [resize] "Files"          ;; characters 
do not line up vertically but look fine in console

thanks in advance.

I've done an appbar that sits on the desktop. It doesn't use the 
officel APPBAR APIs, just emulates the slide on/off bit. It's not 
perfect, but not horrific either. Basically, I have a timer and target 
locations, FSM driven. When in a given state, and an event occurs, 
it sets the target position and then moves towards it on each timer 
tick. When the window deactivates (using insert-event-func to catch 
that), slide off. When it activates, slide on.


It's not perfect, because you can't do it on a mouse hover, and I 
haven't tried to make it work on multiple montors. With my new setup, 
it slides off the center monitor and onto the left edge of the right 
monitor. :-\

I'm working with resizing fields.  Setting the size of the field 
would be a good start. Figuring how to size the text-list on a window 
resize event would be a bonus.
I took a sample from the docs and modifed slightly.

REBOL []


displayData: ["A very long entry that will exceed the default width 
of the field that is displaying it."]
view/options/title layout [

 lines: text-list 640x480 bold font-size 14 font-name font-fixed data 
 to-block displayData [  		;; not sure how to auto-size the text-list 
 either 

 see-it/text: first lines/picked										;; how do I size this field
	show see-it												;; maybe its done here  
	]													;;
	see-it: info												;; or here?								
] [resize] "Test"

Thanks again in advance.

How do I get the window to resize withthe image face?

pic1: load %pic.jpg
pic_size: 200x200
view/new lay: layout [pic: image pic1 pic_size]
wait 2
unview lay 
pic/size: 50x50
view/new lay

lay/size needs to be set as well. Do that near pic/size.

You don't need wrapper, but you cannot do: save-image %test.jpg to-image 
layout [button "hello world"]

Also IM can be used as a command line tool, which I was doing quite 
a long time. But finally I'm working on wrapper as it's faster than 
doing many calls to external app. Of course.. if you want to resize 
100 photos per year, you don't care if it's call or by using wrapper.