I think this should be a Library. I agree it would be a very important addition to the software.

Bredan Berg wrote such a library for version 68,69. Maybe a discussion of the merits of this project could help us know how to move forward.
http://www.thbbpt.net/interfascia/

I very much like what I see with the Interfascia project. I don't have an old version of processing to test it with (it was looking to take BApplet). I'll try and get an old version and test it soon.

I can't say much about your project redfrik, I'm not a fan of the colours =) and I don't know how you've put it together. If you're willing to share then I'd like to take a look.

A few things that caught my eye about Interfacia:
Firstly the use of the GUIController, from what I gather its a collection class used to store references to all the GUI elements and also allows a single target/object to pass mouse events to.

The second and mildly suprising part was in the mousePressed() and mouseReleased() sections of his demo. (http://www.thbbpt.net/interfascia/examples/)

Code:

void loop() {
  ...
  
  // tell the GUI controller to update all components
  [b]controller.update (mouseX, mouseY);[/b]
  
  ...
}

void mousePressed () {
  [b]controller.mousePressed (mouseX, mouseY);[/b]
}

void mouseReleased () {
  [b]controller.mouseReleased (mouseX, mouseY);[/b]
} 

For all these actions he passed the mouse position to them. You could argue that you don't need to, however when workin on my sliders (http://mkv25.net/?item_id=101) I released that if you adjust the transform coordinate this does not affect the mouseX and mouseY values, so you have to adjust these before checking the bounding box for a hit - this is a good feature I think.

The last idea I want to mention at this stage is styles. I think a separate object/class should be created that holds the default style, colours, widths and fonts, that can be applied across a range of elements. E.g. A default GUIStyle class would be attached to GUIController with basic grey/blue components - but could be overriden/replaced by the user to give custom set of colours across all GUI elements inside the GUIController object.

I am just about to send an email off to Brendan Berg asking if the source to Iterfascia is available and pointing him to this post to see if we can learn any more.

ok, i clean up the demo interface code a little and put it online.  hope this will explain how it works - comments very welcome.  i rather hold on to the classes a little longer as drastic changes might happen.  also i'd like to put them into a library but time is limited atm.
www.fredrikolofsson.com/temp/testgui/

it's all already there ...

from <processing-folder>/libraries/howto.txt :

Quote:


so:

Code:

foo ff;

void setup()
{
    size( 200, 200 );
    ff = new foo();
}

void draw()
{

}

public class foo
{
    foo()
    {
	  registerKeyEvent( this );
	  registerMouseEvent( this );
    }
    
    public void keyEvent(KeyEvent e)
    {
	  println( "KE: " + e.toString() );
    }
    
    public void mouseEvent(MouseEvent e)
    {
	  println( "ME: " + e.toString() );
    }
} 

should get you started ..

F

a couple things, the thing i found out (about the p5 classes being able to register methods) allows updating of the event without any code in the draw loop.

ie: instead of the code you provided you could do this:
Code:

PGui gui;
color c_red = color(255, 0, 0);
...
 
void setup() {
  gui = new PGui(c_text, c_button, c_highlight, c_dark, ...);
  // Method 1
  gui.addButton(x, y, "text");
  gui.addScrollBar(x, y, width, height, minVal, maxVal);
  // Method 2
  PGuiButton textButton = PGuiButton(x, y, "text");
  gui.add(textButton);
 
}
 
void draw() {  
  ...
  // notice the lack of any gui.* functions here
  // the functions you would normally call for the
  // update() function can be assigned to pre() (which
  // is called before the main draw() loop) in the
  // class and the functions for the draw() function
  // could be assigned to a draw that gets registered
  // in the class (which )is called after the
  // main draw loop 
} 
 

also, fry, the mouseEvent and keyEvent things i had already found, only i am unable to extract any meaningful data from that, except for the use of toString() (and i dont think it would be very good to parse that during runtime )

if you know how to get the information out of the events passed to those functions, i would be grateful if you would help us with that.

ah, thank you, i think that was what i was looking for.
i didn't know that there was a reference for java online...

any ways, thanks, this will help in aproject im working on.

Whoa...

Nice to hear that there's an interest in such a library. I haven't been able to do much work on Interfascia while I've been at school, but I may have more free time now that I'm home. I'd like to continue work on the project, and if anyone has suggestions or even wants to help, that would be great!

Just send me a message at robot (at) thbbpt (dot) net

Thanks,
Brendan