Dialog Preferences (was whatever)

On 25 Feb 2005, at 17:32, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
> Francis James Franklin wrote:
>>>> For the Cocoa-FE I had a major problem with the current Preferences
>>>> dialog and ended up using a new one...
>>>
>>> That is not consistent at all with all the platforms. And that is
>>> VERY
>>> BAD.
>> Yes, I know it's bad. It was better than the alternative solutions to
>> the problem.
>
> Which alternatives ? Rewritting it in some way would have been
> solution, but not for that release.

I had earlier looked at the Preferences code and decided it needed a
rewrite, but hadn't intended to use it as part of 2.2, but then
everyone was complaining about crashes and the reason was the
preferences dialog expected there to be at a frame... ahh, yes, but...
k, right, how to fix this without significant changes to the xp base
class? er.

Two solutions:
1. Use the new dialog which works mostly?
2. Try to fix the old one, which I really didn't, and don't, have the
patience for?

I have more important things to do.

>>> My dialog work was targetted at helping addressing these problems by
>>> simplifying the code. I just didn't put any work in it recently due
>>> to
>>> personal issues.
>> I'm not at all happy with your dialog work. I hope we will survive it.
>
> Tell me what's wrong with it. I was seeking for comments, and so far I
> didn't get much, so I'm going with my idea....

The problem I have with it is that the whole approach is the exact
opposite of the way I prefer to do it. Let me see whether I understand
what is happening:

The xp class maintains references to all controls and as necessary
notifies them of their new state, so simon says:

A, you are 3
B, you are 5.62
C, you are 9in
D, you are "English (U.S.)"
E, you are red
F, you are dotted
G, you are true
&c.

so that the widget class has methods for setting various types, not all
of which make sense to the control in question.

This assumes that the dialogs are identical across platforms, which I
accept is one of the goals - but is it an absolute requirement? Doesn't
it put an undue burden on development of dialogs?

I don't really know. I like some aspects of the approach but I dislike
others, and it runs contrary to the way I like to do things.

What I much prefer is having an xp class that provides a simple way for
platform implementations to retrieve information, so that simon says
"hey, you - update!" and the platform implementation asks:

what is A? 3
what is B? 5.62
what is C? 9in
what is D? "English (U.S.)"
what is E? red
what is F? dotted
what is G? true
&c.

This is, to my mind, a much more transparent way of doing it, and no
need for an intermediate class, and you can handle exotic types as
necessary.

What's more, you can implement new stuff in xp and your platform of
choice without worrying about other platforms; they will catch up in
their own good time.

And it's not so different from the way we do things already.

Apologies again for my bad mood this morning,
Frank
Received on Fri Feb 25 20:54:49 2005