Sunday, June 12, 2005

update on the hypercard idea...

Well, after backuping OSX, then formatting my hard drive, then reinstalling the backup image on it.. I was able to easily install ubuntu on my powerbook, and now I've got a working gnustep env :-)
Ok, no touchpad support, no wifi support (damn you broadcom !), no luminous keyboard support... but it works :-)

So I was able to start recoding a palette for Gorm.. with a bit of help from gregory casamento, it now works :-)
Well, sort of. It's not persistent in "test mode" yet. And I need to finish my IB Editor subclass to support the Card connections (eg, connect something to the Card, not just to the Stack object). So what's working ? Well:


  • There's a palette containing a Stack object -- you can drag'n drop it on you window

  • The Stack object contains one Card by default, and you can drag'n drop things on it (buttons, textfields...)

  • There's a Stack inspector, so you can add new cards, and navigate through the existing cards

  • There's also the possibility of creating a card from an existing one (eg, the second card will be a copy), which I need to implement the "background elements" thing, useful in the database case


So what needs to be done ? Well, as said before, add connection support to the Card view (so you could for example add a button that when clicked go directly to the card); then add persistency to the cards (I will probably just encode them for a first try... perhaps in the future something with CoreData (if we have a clone ..) or GDL2 ? or a custom solution ? but who knows, simply using encoding will perhaps be good enough for the use I expect, eg, very small databases...)

So anyway, good progresses... and now I have a much better idea about palettes ;-) so i'll probably do some more -- for example, a palette containing NSArray/NSDictionary could be rather useful, particularly if they have an editor to let you add data, and particularly in my "hypercard"-like scenario.. then, I'll just need a Steptalk palette ! :-D

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you say your touchpad isn't working, I'm assuming you have one of the new-new powerbooks with the usb-based trackpad ... you likely need this.

also, checkout pbbuttonsd for the "special buttons" to work, including keyboard luminosity and such.

Nicolas said...

Thanks for the link !

I browsed the debian-ppc list and saw that a couple of drivers for the touchpad are beeing developped, as well as indications that pbbuttons should work for the luminous keyboard. But I didn't have the time to test all that yet.. :-)