Philipp wrote on Jun 9^th, 2005, 9:46pm:

Hi Phillip, the GUI class I've been working on (called MyGUI) is still in its early stages. I've been trying to find out whats possible and what is the easiest/best way to implement such as a class.
The version I'm working on at the moment is a test to get something working and then I was going to open up discussion for improving it and figuring out what components should be included.

I'd like to see the progress you've made to see if there's any similar ground or good ideas/features tha can be shared.

The structure I'm working towards at the moment is as follows:
MyGUI - A collection of compatable user inteface objects designed to work with processing.
MyGUIObject - An interface for creating GUI objects for processing that are to be used with the MyGUI collection class.
MyGUIStyle - A simple collection of colours and a font(s) that is used to give a constant look and feel to all elements drawn through processing.

The intention is that you create a MyGUI object, set a MyGUIStyle and then add MyGUIObjects to the MyGUI object and it will handle all the mouse states and draw functions with no extra commands in the main code.

e.g.: Code:

MyGUI gui;
MyGUIButton button1;

void setup() {
  size(300, 200);
  background(153);
  gui = new MyGUI(this);
  button1 = new MyGUIButton(50, 50, "Hello");
  gui.add(button1);
}

void draw() {

}

void actionPerformed (MyGUIEvent e) {
   print ("Component: " + e.getSource().getLabel());
   print ("Message: " + e.getMessage());
} 

Its still in early stages of development like I said. I'm hoping once the basic collection class is ready and I have the a button object sorted I can release it before developing new components.

Hi Phillip,

I'm really impressed by the examples on your website. I think you've done an excellent job to include AWT components in Processing which is far more then I could have hoped for.

My suggestions are as follows:
1) I think you should improve the handleEvent(String[] param) method to be more user friendly. Looking at accessing the different paramaters doesn't make for easy reading and if preferable you would want to make it as easy as possible for people to use SpringGUI.

2) Why aren't you using JavaX / Swing components? Those are lightweight versions (and often more featureful) then the heavyweight AWT components? If you find time to revise what you've done then I think you should implement those instead of the older AWT ones.

As for my project, the MyGUI class and MyGUI objects that I've set up use Processing's own drawing methods. I need to add more documentation to it before I can release but I'll be happy to put out the source code at an early stage so that people can write their own MyGUI objects.

In the mean time, I'll make sure I trial your system out, I really like what I see.

Best regards,

Hi Phillip,

If you haven't seen my other post in the Community Discussions section yet then I've released an early test version of the MyGUI classes.
You can find a working example here:
http://mkv25.net/applets/MyGUI_a2/  

The object orientated approach works very well in my opinion. I've tried to take full advantage of the integration with processing's drawing functions using _scale and _rotate variables to quickly modify the positioning of components.

If you look at the code for receiving events, although I've used guiObj1.setActionCommand() and event.getActionCommand(), you can also use if(event.getSource() == guiObj1) which looks and works very friendly.

The other very useful method is guiObj1.isDragged(); which returns true for a mouse activated state, used in my example to keep methods and values constantly updated.

I need to add documentation to this project, I'm hoping to add Javadoc comments, and make a website like yours. I like the documentation you published for SpringGUI.

Best regards,
- Markavian

Quote:

I thought about this and agree that flat shading is more suitable because of the rotation. If I wasn't going to include rotation features then I'd keep the lighting because I think it looks so much better. I have already updated my current components - below is my crib sheet that I refer to / update before programming the components:



Quote:

If you look at the MyGUIObject class you get an idea of the features I think should be common in all objects.
To summarise, each MyGUIObject has all these variables available:
- public MyGUI _parent;
- public MyGUIStyle _style;
- public int _x, _y, _width, _height;
- public int _id;
- public float _rotation; // radians
- public float _scale = 1.0;
- public boolean _visible = true;
- public boolean _disabled = false;
- public String _actionCommand = "";
- protected int localMouseX, localMouseY;
- protected boolean dragged, hover, lastHover;

And all these methods:
- MyGUIObject()
- MyGUIObject(int x, int y)
- boolean hasFocus()
- boolean isDragged()
- void mousePressed()
- void mouseReleased()
- void mouseDragged()
- void draw()
- void drawStates()
- void setID(int newID)
- void setParent(MyGUI parent)
- void setActionCommand(String command)
- void setStyle(MyGUIStyle style)
- void enable()
- void disable()
- void rotateDegrees(float degs)
- void rotateRadians(float rads)
- boolean checkForHit()

And I'm still adding to them where I feel a common feature can be added. The MyGUI object automatically calls the mousePressed(), mouseReleased() etc. methods, and I've included basic logic for setting up and tracking the different states. checkForHit() is most important because it tracks the mouse position relative to the bounding box of the object (based on _x, _y, _width and _height).

Programmers wanting to extend MyGUI with their own objects will have to consider all the different draw states by using the methods and boolean values provided, and can write their own custom responses to mouse and key events by simply overriding methods in the parent class. A good example of this is the MyGUIDragButton which extends MyGUIButton, which in-turn extends MyGUIObject.

Quote:

This is something I will am considering, I just want to get some simpler objects done first. The default mouse methods of MyGUIObject already track things like when the object has focus, checkForHit is used to set the hover state directly, there is the isFocused() method to see if it has focus (as only one object can have focus at a time). a MyGUITextInput will be very similar to a MyGUIButton except it will have complex rendering logic for the positioning of the text as you type, positioning of the cursor and filtering of characters. Then I suppose I'd have to consider MyGUITextArea - a multiline version?

Quote:

I definitely will be writing lots of documentation for this project, I just need to improve/optimize the core so that its heading in the right direction.

Thanks for your input.
- Markavian

Latest update:

Quote:

I've been trying to create an array of 14 sliders using MyGUI with some problems.  For some reason the last 3 sliders don't show up.  It seems like 12 is the max number of sliders possible.  Is this the case? and if so, is there any way around it?

For further information, please see:
http://www.mkv25.net/MyGUI/doc/mkv/MyGUI/MyGUI.html

Examples of the four MyGUI other constructors are:

MyGUI gui = new MyGUI(this);
MyGUI gui = new MyGUI(this, customSize);
MyGUI gui = new MyGUI(this, customSize, customMyGUIStyle);
MyGUI gui = new MyGUI(this, customMyGUIStyle);

I've tried to make all the possible combinations available for constructors.

Note: MyGUI Version 0007 is incompatable with the latest versions of processing. It broke with 0093, and has a null pointer error with 0097.

I'm looking into this and hope to release a working version soon.