Subject: Dynamic toolbars.
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Oct 28 2001 - 20:19:51 CST
Hi Folks,
Having implemented dynamic menu's for Unix/Gnome I looked at the
code for toolbars and I think much the same tricks can be applied there to
gives totally dynamic toolbars.
This will of course allow plugins to add and subtract toolbar icons as
they're loaded. In addition will allow us to drag toolbar buttons around
the toolbars as we wish and to add and subtract toolbar icons from a
dialog too.
This is mostly backend work but it will require a little bit of platfrom
work.
In particular we will need to implement a gr_Graphics method to place a
pixmap on the cursor. Gtk+ has a method to this. I'm sure Win32 does too
but I don't know how hard it will be.
In addition, for a total user experience, the toolbar layout will need to
be written to a preference file so that a reconfigured layout can be
preserved between editting session.
Finally these dynamic toolbars and dynamic menus are very useful for
embedding work. We can embed a COM or bonobo object in abi and rebuild the
menus and toolbars to reflect the embedded app.
So for example if a GUPPI graph is embedded in abiword the menus and
toolbars can be rebuilt to reflect the GUPPI controls.
This also makes deploying abiword on PDA easier since the PDA software can
simply specify which toolbar and menu's it actually wants in a prefs file.
So all cool stuff, I'm tempted to put this in before 1.0. I think it will
be done by the end of next week at the latest.
Cheers
MArtin
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