AltME groups: search

I don't think it's noticable. Every time I've done optimizations 
on events, removing redraws are causing the biggest slow downs. Everything 
else is hardly noticable.

Hang on a minute.. The big revelation I had above about using REDRAW 
instead of DETECT was probably premature. Of course I must have experimented 
with both ways a long time ago and I would have settled on using 
DETECT for a reason. You have to be careful in REDRAW to avoid recursive 
SHOWs etc. It's worth more experimentation, anyway.

Maxim, Henrik: I agree current DRAW gradients aren't the best solution 
and I'm aware about this issue from the time Shadwolf's requests. 
But this improvement will happen probably once the new 2.7.x release 
merge get to more stable state. As you might know Carl don't want 
to add new features until 2.7.x is at the same level like 1.3.2.

I would like to know that too. A program I'm making has a timer mechanism 
where the program must be active all the time and I want to display 
an alert if the window gets out of focus.

excellent, time events are still running even when all rebol windows 
are inactive. This means it's possible.

active-windows: []
insert-event-func event-func: func [face event][
	;print event/type 

 if event/type = 'active [if not find active-windows event/face [append 
 active-windows event/face]] 

 if event/type = 'inactive [if find active-windows event/face [remove 
 find active-windows event/face]] 
	if event/type = 'time [
		if none-active? <> empty? active-windows [
			none-active?: empty? active-windows
			if none-active? [
				print "all windows inactive!!"
			]
		]
	]
	event
]
view/new win1: layout [size 400x250]
view/new win2: layout [size 500x200]
win1/rate: 0 show win1 ; start time events
none-active?: false
do-events

Can you see any holes in this method ? (Apart from the fact that 
it requires time events.)

I discovered a problem when closing the first window which has RATE 
set. Now time events no longer flow and so the state isn't detected. 
But it is solved by catching the close event and setting RATE in 
a second window.

hum. isn't it possible to have decimal rates?  I just tried using 
0.5 and am getting no 'time events. is this normal?

Gregg, I'm working on that way now. For minimal impact, I only start 
time events if they aren't running already, and then I restore the 
window/rate after I catch the first time event.

oh no it's buggy. it works sometimes and sometimes not. Damn, time 
events are tricky.

hahahahahah  the field's feel is a typical View obscurity built from 
hidden contexts which are only availble at boot time  :-(

we can loose 6 hours trying to map all that back up... maybe someone 
has already done it here?  I have the sdk, I could look into it... 
but its just a question of time... I've got more important code to 
write than searching for this right now.

Yes, I like to write things down that I think will save me time later. 
x N

I completely agree with Maxim, although I don't forget the things, 
but it still takes a long time to figure out how to do trivial stuff 
with a field.

ImageMagick works well. I've only needed and done simple stuff with 
it--it's so feature rich and complex, I don't have time to dig in 
and do fancy stuff.

I just discovered that a face with a rate, once shown, will trigger 
time events even if its not within any face, and even calling hide 
on it does not seem to stop its events!  you need to set its rate 
to none and call show on it (even though its not visible in anyway, 
since its not within any window !)

view l: layout [
	b: box red with [
		rate: 1
		feel: make feel [
			engage: func [f a e][
				if e/time [
					print ["tick" now/time]
				]
			]
		]
	]
	button "hide" [
		print "hide"
		hide b
	]
	button "show" [
		print "show"
		show b
	]
	button "remove" [
		print "remove"
		if face: find l/pane b [hide face/1 remove face show l]
	]
	button "add" [
		unless find l/pane b [
			print "add"
			append l/pane b
			b/show?: true
			show l
		]
	]
]

its just that I am working with a multi-pane application which have 
timers and (obviously) we only want to refresh what is actually withing 
windows... what happens is that eventually, all the panes start kicking 
out timers!  (and I need the time event to be local to the actual 
face to relate its animation ... otherwise, I'd cross the animation 
from one pane to another ! :-)

yes how to specify a time-out..i have that to here in another issue.. 
not so easy actualy when not having threads..

I'm not sure. I have very little time to work on it right now, and 
R3 is coming up with VID+.

guess no one ever bothered

 <--- probably more like: no one has the time to add that feature. 
 The Viewtop source is open, but it has never been modified.

Denis, yes, I spent a lot of time trying to make viewtop replacements, 
with scripts for updating index.r files.

But I never really finished the work, so I haven't made any big announcement 
- it would probably just waste people's time.

Excitedly anxious for docs...   But, take your time.  "when do we 
get it, when do we..."  :)

If you are *really* constrained, create your UI with draw commands 
and manage events and everything yourself. Of course, you may end 
up with so much more code that it's a moot point, so it depends on 
what constraints you have. 


It reminds me of when VB1 came out, and people tried to use thousands 
of text boxes to create spreadsheets, which was slow, resource hungry, 
and limited in size, because you could only create so many windows. 
The common question was "How does Excel do it then?", and the answer 
was that Excel (v3 at the time I thnk) created only 3 (or so) actual 
GDI windows, everything else was rendered, and interaction handled, 
dynamically

depending on your display needs you could set a rate in a view face 
for interval polling and catch the 'time event under engage - the 
application could then check a data pool/dump area that is being 
generated in a forever loop or something similar by a tcp watcher

data-i-want-to-display: [..............] ;probably a block
window: layout/tight [
	data-box: box 400x200 rate 0:00:0.001 feel [
		engage: func [f a e][

   if a = 'time [do-something-nifty data-i-want-to-display show f]
		]
	]
]
view/new center-face window
setup-port-listener
forever [
	check-my-port-and-update data-i-want-to-display

 ;add some window shutdown code to close ports etc after window closes..
]

yes, because the block is never reduced, so 'y is used directly, 
instead of a reduced block where the value of y at the given time 
would be inserted into the block.

Aha! got that warm spot of the exact right words in REBOL to get 
the right things in the right place at the right time.  Whew!  Thanks 
for the ideas.

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.

Some time we gotta catch up.

I think I asked this a long time ago, but forgot the answer: Does 
anyone know how to detect when a window goes inactive?

I think there is to much emphasis on building super easy and fancy 
interface builders. Then when you need to code, you go "OK, now what?" 
and all the time advantages are out the window.

Thanks to all of you for your input. That definitely puts me in the 
right direction (and keeps me from wasting any more time with "list".) 
 This morning I took a look at Carl's #29 cookbook and at least there's 
a fast way to get closer to what I'd like. I really appreciate your 
support.

Yes Graham it works here too ;-) but must be explicit defined with 
make font:
rebol []

fnt1: make face/font [
        name: "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/VeraMono.ttf"
        size: 32
]
fnt2: make face/font [
        name: "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/Vera.ttf"
        size: 32]

view layout [
        origin 0
        box 400x100 effect [
                draw [
                        pen black
                        font fnt1
                        text anti-aliased 0x0 "Rebol Rulez!"
                        pen blue silver
                        fill-pen red
                        line-pattern 10 10
                        line-width 2
                        font fnt2
                        text vectorial 0x30 "Rebol Rulez!"
                ]
        ]
]



I took me some time to find this Issue again...

For reasons I don't understand .. it stopped working and I didn't 
have time to debug it.

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 ?

so, simply put - forget View - that is for us, long time rebollers, 
this is our toy. Now let's integrate core into browser and use such 
bindings, like others do ...

I guess time will tell, but my only point is that if the effort had 
gone into a web-interface-compatible view dialect instead of targeting 
native then REBOL might be quite popular today, it would also be 
easier to deal with things like UNICODE in the interface...

Too much to read, so the answer to my question might be up there 
somewhere. If it is, just point me to the time of the answer, and 
I'll look it up, but here goes:

Fork, what is in your opinion the benefit of having the application 
inside the browser?

I guess we could talk to Reichart and see how much time went into 
developming AltMe. Then we could find out how much time has gone 
into gMail, along with how many technologies are used in each, for 
both the front and back ends. Obviously the scale of things skews 
direct comparison.

As a developer, I prefer REBOL, but I readily admit that REBOL hasn't 
advanced as I hoped in some areas. e.g. the plugin has enough issues 
that a client of mine is having a new UI built in Flash to replace 
the REBOL version we did initially. Of course, the REBOL version 
took very little time, and the Flash version is costing about seven 
times as much.

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.

A possible algorithm for the new junk cropper could be:

1) advance inwards from each edge until there is a full white line 
parallel to the edge.

2) if a white line was found for each edge, then advance inwards 
again, this time searching for a non-full white line, (eg. with a 
few pixels from the desired text in it). Step back a line and you 
have your crop region.

screen-size: system/view/screen-face/size
news-bottom-offset: 0x100
news-height: 0x100

message: "This is short news scroller. Who makes me smooth? ..."

;--- style for draw dialect
bold64: make face/font [style: 'bold size: 64 color: white]


;--- But how to calculate text size for draw? Here's a workaround 
...
txt: make face compose [size: 2000X200 text: (message)]
txt/font: make face/font [style: 'bold size: 64 color: white]
text-size: size-text txt


view/offset/options layout/size [
  backcolor green

  ;--- we start behind the screen ....
  at (to-pair reduce [screen-size/x 10])

  t: box (to-pair reduce [2000 news-height/y]) ;--- box size ...
       effect compose/deep [
         draw [
           font bold64
           text (message)
         ]
        ] 
       rate 50
       feel [
         engage: func [f a e][
           if a = 'time [
             ;--- zde nastavujeme rychlost posuvu
             f/offset: f/offset - 3x0

             if (f/offset/x + (first text-size)) < 0 [f/offset/x: screen-size/x]
             show f  
         ]
        ]
      ]

] (to-pair reduce [screen-size/x news-height/y])(to-pair reduce [0 
(screen-size/y - news-bottom-offset/y - news-height/y)])[no-border 
no-title]

view/new window: make face [
	size: 800x150
	font: make face/font [size: 40]

 effect: compose/deep [draw [font (font) text 100x50 "Hello there"]]
	rate: 50
]
window/feel: make window/feel [
	engage: func [face action event][
		if action = 'time [
			window/effect/draw/text/x: window/effect/draw/text/x - 1
			show window
		]
	]
]
do-events
i

Some time ago Carl told us, that View uses double buffering, but 
apparently it is not enough ....

randomize: func [
    "Reseed the random number generator."

    /with seed "date, time, and integer values are used directly; others 
    are converted."
][

    random/seed either find [date! time! integer!] type?/word seed [seed] 
    [
        to-integer checksum/secure form any [seed now/precise]
    ]
]

img: make image! 512x512 
repeat i 512 [
	randomize
	wait .001
	repeat j 512 [
		either i < 256 [
			if 2 = random 2 [
				img/(as-pair i - 1 j - 1): 255.255.255
			]			
		][
			if 2 = random/secure 2 [
				img/(as-pair i - 1 j - 1): 255.255.255
			]
		]
	]
]


view layout [image img across text "RANDOM" tab tab tab text "RANDOM/SECURE"]

I fetch the text asynchronously ie. I don't have the text at the 
time I construct the layout .. oh well...

; You could make the text face dynamically each time:


make-textbox: func [width [integer!] text [string!] /local textbox][
	textbox: make-face/size 'text (width * 1x0)
	textbox/text: :text
	textbox/size/y: second size-text textbox
	textbox
]

hi.  I run View in Win XP.  My script is very simple... 

blk: load %/c/input.txt foreach url blk [if not find attempt [read 
append url "cvap"] "Nothing found"  [browse url]]
and a line in the input file is something like this:
http://website1.com/search?query=
http://website2.com/search?query=


So, I want to search for "cvap", and it appends that to the URL and 
I search the result string and if it DOES NOT say "Nothing Found", 
then I open that URL so I can visually examine it.


It works 95% of the time, but sometimes I get the following error:

** Script Error: find expected series argument of type: series port 
bitset
** Near: if not find attempt [read append url "cvap"]

Any ideas how I can fix this?
thx

xml_charts looks interesting but doesn't seem capable of doing what 
I want.  But it might be useful for a website.  Does it do time series?

James - those aren't time series from what I could see.  Time series 
are fed date values, and are not just equidistant points on an x 
axis labelled with dates.

There are some bugs in View that causes leaks when using networking 
and GUI events at the same time. That's only a very rough description 
of the problem. There are more accurate descriptions of this problem 
in RAMBO.

Are there workaround the problem with view memory leaks (when using 
networking and GUI events at the same time) ?

About word browser....

I use it all the time. Its great but I wish they would have finished 
the few things they seemd to have planned...like the "Add comment" 
function. It would be great if poeple could add other examples and 
other interesting points.

I can change it with system/view/vid/vid-colors/field-select. But 
I can't change the font color at the same time.

Question, I've been writing an app that shuffles through a lot of 
images but one at a time (same single image in layout) . I notice 
that what appears to be happening is that each time an image is loaded, 
more memory is consumed. I am not using load-image but maybe I should 
with the /clear refinement. Any thoughts?

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.

And while we're talking about querying and result displays, I often 
am confused as to whether a query I submitted actually returned, 
when it returned empty data. This causes me to query several times 
just to see if the server actually got my query and returned. The 
answer to this (in my opinion) is to return the query and time of 
query in the results as well, in the table title. So you can see 
*something* change on every query result.

hi, getting this error.

** Script Error: Face object reused (in more than one pane): none


is there any solution to 'copy or clone' a layout or reuse a layout

for multiple usage ? putting the layout into a object doesn't help 
either. 

same error message. I need a layout-template containing buttons, 
label etc.

and want use this template for to 'pane' it into 20 different independent 

boxes. these boxes will shown 20 different numeric datas, progress 
bars etc. 

have had a look also into stylize/master but can't mix vid with facets 
or 

am I to tired to see a simple solution. builing a very complex facet 
from 

scratch is very time consuming, what is the best design for this? 

tom

contruct a context with variables each time you clone the layout

If someone has some spare time to spend, I would like to have some 
tests being done for following case - In our PC shop, we mounted 
big LCD TV for some message/advertising purposes. The problem is, 
that the screen is placed vertically. I wrote small news scroller 
script, which eats some CPU cycles, but is still OK and very simple. 
But - when I tried it on that vertically placed TV, it is practically 
unusable :-(  - too jerky. I would like to know, if it is a driver 
issue, or just another View kernel defficiency? Should there be a 
reason why it should be a difference in performance? Video works 
OK for example.


Here's the script to test - http://www.xidys.com/rebol/news-scroller-r2.r
, so if you are willing to mess with your PC settings, go ahead :-) 
(not sure your icon placement will persist ...)

An integer! or time! that specifies periodic timer events for a face. 
This is used for animation or repetitive events (such as holding 
the mouse down on certain types of user interface styles). An integer! 
value indicates the number of events per second. A time! provides 
the period between events. The timer event is sent to the face feel 
Engage function with an event type of time.

from http://www.rebol.com/docs/view-system.html

anyone had issues with view popups when inserting a custom event-handler?


I'm doing something in view, nothing patched, wake event left as-is... 
I have an inserted an event-handler, and the moment I click on a 
choice, all the events stop... even time events.


I don't even receive events at my handler, so its not a "returning 
none from event-handler" type bug... any ideas, fixes, similar unsolvable 
observations?

hmm... it's actually only the sequence of events that needs altering. 
as far as I can tell that function only fires one event at a time 
from the event queue.

you could instead trigger a function here, (if proper conditions 
are met) and return event all the time.

I create dynamic faces all the time, which are basically neutralized 
by face/feel none.

I'm am sensing a few minutes of lost time ahead  ;-)

Yes, what I tried was a definitive solution. But after working on 
it for a very long time, I found it can't be done completely. (At 
least, I am 99% certain.)

basically at each operation, like clicking on a folder to view its 
content, I use call with an ssh related command.

I retrieve the output, report any errors or parse the return data 
and refresh the ui.


currently, it starts with root dir list, and you click on folders 
to go into them, or click on a checkbox to select it for other file 
manipulations.


each time I use call, the command-line must do a log-ing, since a 
system call is an atomic operation.

I did a full analysis of the problem (again, since I had done so 
with glayout a looooonng time ago) and there is no simple ways to 
handle the issue with the current view setup.

Max, how much time ago did you do your "analysis"? The modal system 
was rewritten almost from scratch in view 1.3. Did you post the bugs 
you had found?

a long time ago. the problems where that it was missing some things 
like opt support in show-popup and some other thing.  and the show-popup 
selection of feels didn't make it very predictable.


with my custom wake-event/window-feel pair, it just went haywire. 
 so I rewrote both so that they would work better within glayout's 
revised management of view layer.


for example in glayout... the view function has a /modal   and a 
 /center  refinements... these make many things much simpler to use... 
I rarely use show-popup within the app, cause the glayout's view 
command supports it directly.

the rate you enter on a face is not taken in account. 
Time events are always throwed at the same rate.

Then there is some internal counter for each face which have a rate 
value, to know when the time events must be dispatched to them.
I don't know if i'm clear...

So even if you fix a low rate 1 ev/minutes on a face, The time events 
continue to be send at a rate of 15 ev/sec in the inner event handler.
It can be the reason why it consumes so much time

and there is another one problem, It consumes time and memory, you 
have to to do frequent recycles.

no, but i saw that when the time rate is activated it consumes memory, 
some mega, i don't like that

My paint program let you draw a start point, and drag a line in some 
direction, then show an ellipse on that "angle".

Then, you could size the width and length, in real time, then when 
you released the mouse it snapped perfect....it was VERY fast, and 
very cool.

some graphic app I'm writting ;-) does the ellipse dragging in real 
time, but uses x-radius and y-radius which is snapped to the edge 
of the ellipse... 


I just prefer single point editing... but for that to be intuitive, 
the point really has to be exactly on the ellipse... and since ellipse 
have 2 center points... ellipse seem to be very complex challenge, 
by what I've read, there isn't even today an exact method to calculate 
the arclen of an ellipse... only very close approximations!

its not really obvious... I'm not a math expert, even if I've done 
some pretty cool 3D engines (crowd simulation, for example) it takes 
me a lot of time to get the math part of things done when its question 
of doing math mix and match.

My first retort is "of course there is!" (enough information for 
layout to set parent-face). Layout first makes the panel face it 
will return, referred to by 'new-face, near the beginning of its 
code body. It subsequently populates the pane of new-face with new 
subfaces built from the spec block. At this time, layout has the 
great opportunity to set parent-face for each one, but it doesn't. 
So, there exists the possibility for us to patch layout to do so.

you can include it within the with block facet if you know it at 
that time.  init is called after the layout is done (all calls to 
facet words and multi are done).

I normally have a different solution for setting parent-face on any 
layout before SHOW, but it still happens some time after LAYOUT. 
I wanted it to be set earlier here, as an inspiration from VID3.4, 
where you can find a previous face during initialization, such as 
to attach a scroller to a panel without having the user needing to 
specify it directly in the layout.


I made some changes to LAYOUT, added a refinement to specify which 
parent-face exists for the pane. This is possible, because LAYOUT 
is not recursive and is called whenever one pane needs to be laid 
out. The idea was then to set parent-face before INIT.


This worked well for faces that are not at the base level for the 
window, but how do you specify the parent-face for base level faces, 
as the window face does not yet exist? I have dropped the idea again, 
because the solution is too convoluted. Besides it wouldn't be possible 
to attach to faces that come after the scroller, so you have exceptions, 
which is not good.


Scroller attachment now happens on first use of the scroller instead.

your advanced styles work in glayout... I've converted the toolbar 
in 15 minutes last time I tried...

good idea. I have a hard time finding it via google.

Anton, I've not had the energy to take a look at what can be changed 
with LAYOUT, so what I do is try to stay within reasonable limits 
of what it can do and stay away from radical changes.


One thing to change, if it were, would be that INIT would be less 
limited, if it was run as a separate pass after initial layout instead 
of right when the face is created, but this may cause problems for 
styles that use INIT to alter the size and offset for the face, as 
well as produce subfaces that need to be initialized first. Also 
LAYOUT is not recursive and INIT may be run at very different times. 
At this time, INIT is limited, but you have a pretty good idea of 
when it's run.


In VID3.4 this is not a problem, since there is both an init and 
post-init action possible, so if I were to get rid of this problem 
in the right way, I might end up rewriting over 100 kb of well-functioning 
code.

amacleod: unfortunately life has been throwing fast balls at me for 
the last several weeks ... things like recurring water problems on 
my home, making all of my life really complicated and time consuming. 
 

I also tried something with remark which hasn't lead to useable code 
yet... so I am about backtrack to earlier versions and use that while 
I work on the next generation stuff.  


the next gen stuff is closer to Research than Development than I 
had predicted.  I thought it was much easier to leverage the technology 
within the web site/page cycle... but efficiency and elegence principles 
(in form and function) are hard to get right when merging persistent 
and volatile systems.

Graham, I worked on one a long time ago, with Ammon Johnson. We did 
it like Smalltalk, or the OS X Finder, rather than a tree.

So... the pane function may be interesting to investigate, but you 
may also just waste a lot of your time.

there is always an up event corresponding to the down event for a 
face you clicked on, even if the face is removed from you or you 
aren't releasing the mouse over it.

  there is also a move event triggered each time for some obscure reason.

yes and it continues to send it away events every time you cross 
the boundry of a face !

That is an excellent example.  Answered many questions I had (and 
raised a few more).  Thank you for taking the time to show me this 
Dockimbel.

Are you kidding? It took me a long time before I stopped turning 
everything into a string with my own functions! :-)

Having trouble changing the data in a drop-down list...

mylist/list-data: new_stuff 
show mylist

works the first time but not there after

From my last talk with the author of AGG we can use even version 
2.5 without any problems. So far R3 AGG implementation is somehow 
blended between 2.3-2.4

Otherwise it is true the author(Maxim aka McSeem) is not active developing(at 
least publicly) AGG. But There is still small hard-core team  which 
keeps improving the code with little steps.

For example I'd personally would like to try implement completely 
new AA rasterizer which could make the rendering theoretically faster 
by 80-100% but this is long time run given my limited time.

Next step could be make HW accelerated frontend for AGG. But this 
is 'pandora box'  or 'can of worms' for me as I don't have energy 
to take care of all possible bugs in all possible GFX cards and setups 
at the moment :)

normal printing, uses vectorial information, so the convertion from 
shapes to points (rasterization) is done directly at print time.

I played around with it...
AGG looks great on screen but prints fuzzy like you said...
Increasing resolution looks sharp on printout...

I do not know if I should spend time playing with scaling or just 
biting the bullet and converting output to HTML or pdf ...I had planned 
on it anyway but as usual what I thought would be a quick one or 
two day project turns into a week to make it "right"...

But always an opportunity to learn new stuff!

yes, you can ... well, but I am not much experienced in that. You 
need to test event/type for 'time value. But how to get time events 
there? Maybe setting face/rate: desired-value-per-second could help?