I keep reading about how bad Frames are. One feature I really like is how the user can drag a splitter to resize the frames. If I don't use frames, how might I go about providing the same feature?
If you insist on having a splitter you can easily find a JavaScript one, for example this jQuery Splitter Plugin.
Personally, for a regular website I believe it indicates a design problem, your design should be good as is. Very few users tweak it anyway.
Related
I've been trying different tiling WM's to see which one best fits my needs. Every time I try a new one, it looks good but I find other things that don't quite work the way I like. My requirements have evolved as I go. Initially, I didn't want to get into Awesome because having to learn Lua is not on my wish list but maybe I should give it a try IF it can do what I want better than the other tiling WM's out there.
I'm going to as specific as I can about what I want. I am running a 3440x1440 monitor. I want to use as much vertical space as possible (meaning, a full width, persistent but mostly empty status bar is not an option, but I do like the notification area and a date/time).
I understand it may not do everything exactly the way I want, which is oke. If it does more or less most of what I want I can weigh my options between Awesome and other tiling WM's (actually, only i3 which is what I'm using now but I'm open to better suggestions). I would very much appreciate it if people don't just say no to something it can't do, but say "no, but it can do ...". In other words, feel free to suggest alternatives that might be helpful as well.
Divide the screen in 3 columns, initially 30/45/25, with the right column split horizontally; Fully adjustable and resizable as needed during my work session;
Persistent layout; when closing the last application in a tile, I don't want that tile to disappear and the remaining tiles to resize. Just show an empty space and leave all tiles as they are.
tabbed tiles, so I see which applications are running in a tile (similar to i3).
Resizable tiles with the keyboard into 1 direction; When making the middle column/tile wider, I want that into a specific direction into another tile and leave the other side alone.
Certain applications I want to always launch into a specific tile. For instance, terminals always go into the right-most column top/bottom, browser/spotify always into the middle, atom/IDE always into the left. Some applications should always be floating. Obviously I want to be able to send them to a different tile after launch.
I don't want a 100% width status bar. It will be mostly empty which is a waste of screen estate. Preferably, I'd like a statusbar part of a tile, for example in the right-most tile, resizing with it. Otherwise I'd like it to be fixed to 30% and allow tiles which are not beneath it to use the full height of the screen. My reason for a statusbar is mute; I actually only want a notification area and a date time permanently visible. I don't need a "start menu", dmenu or similar is perfect, which I believe it has integrated.
Many thanks in advance!
The general answer is "Awesome configuration is code and it can do whatever you want". But there is a catch. Can Awesome be configured like you describe? Yes, totally. There is at least 2 distributions coming close enough (mine[1] and worron[2]) (at least for the tiling workflow, not the look).
The "catch" is that the workflow you describe isn't really the "Awesome way". Awesome is usually used as an automatic tiler. You have layouts that describe a workflow (code, web, internet) and manage the clients according to their programming. Manual tile management is rarely necessary once you have proper layouts. That doesn't mean you can't, I did, but it might be worth thinking outside the box and see if you can automate your workflow a bit further.
Also, the default layout system isn't very modern and makes it hard to implement the features you requested. My layout system (see link below) can be used as a module or as a branch and supports all features described above. Awesome is extremely configurable and it's components can be replaced by modules.
https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/pull/644
The layout "serialization" documentation is here:
https://elv13.github.io/libraries/awful.layout.html#awful.layout.suit.dynamic.manual
It is similar to i3 but has more layouts and containers. As for the "leaving blank space" part, it is configured using the fill_strategy:
https://awesomewm.org/doc/api/classes/wibox.layout.ratio.html#wibox.layout.ratio.inner_fill_strategy
As a word of conclusion, I would note that what you ask is "work exactly like i3". If you want such thing, well, use i3. Awesome is a window manager framework. Its goal and purpose is to create a customized desktop shell / WM. If it's what you want, then go ahead and learn it, nothing else can come close to the possibility and the level of control you can get out of it. However it takes time and effort to get to the point where you have "your own perfect desktop". Our users perfect desktops:
https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/1395
[1] https://gfycat.com/SmallTerribleAdamsstaghornedbeetle
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yNALqST1-Y
The WM your are looking for is herbstluftwm (hlwm). Its a manual tiling window manager. The tiles which you are talking about are called frames in hlwm. Each frame can contain multiple windows. A frame can also be empty. Only if you kill a frame the other frames will automatically resize. You can add new frames vertically and horizontally and resize them. Each frame can also have a different layout to organize the windows inside. The layout you are looking for is max. This will stack the windows inside a frame on each other. It doesn't show you tabs like i3 however. hlwm allows you to create rules to open certain applications always in certain frames and workspaces. hlwm doesn't have a statusbar buildin. I personally like to use tint2. It can be used as a replacement for your requirement to see running applications as tabs.
Is there a Windows server with Photoshop running that process all these templates? It just happens too quickly. How did they achieve that?
I've been looking for the answer for quite a long time and didn't find anything worthy.
A way something like this would be done would be to have an overlay template that you'd place your image under and then all of the shading and such would would go on top of it. Then it's just a mater of rotating and skewing the angle of the picture underneath the overlay to get the right perspective. This can be done programmatically in a language of your choice like PHP, Python, C#, etc.
I believe what you're describing may be achieved using the Adobe Photoshop API. Click on try demo and take a look at the various options, including the Smart Object demo.
I am trying to build a simplified EA from 'top to bottom', what I mean is I have a large diagram which has multiple objects, mainly ERDs Entities. I also have more and more detailed diagrams and can successfully drill down by hyperlinking to the next level down.
I have even setup a hyperlink on each of the lower level diagrams to go back to the previous.
So far, so good. When I publish as HTML, I get a really useful web tree that pretty much does what I want, except for one thing!
Each of the lower diagrams are reasonably small, so when I drill back up, I am happy with being positioned at the top left of the previous diagram (with me so far?).
When I drill back up to the primary diagram, I get returned to the top left.
BUT - as this primary diagram prints out on 12 A3 pages, it would be really good to be able to return to the area of the primary diagram that refers to the diagram that I just clicked into/out-of.
I am no deep HTML expert, but I know there is methods in HTML to hyperlink to a specific part of a page. Can anyone think of a way to tweak the returning hyperlink to position me at a specific point in the primary diagram?
PHEW
Thanks, PGB
To my knowledge there is no way to achieve this using EA's hyperlinks. EA does not use HTML internally, and an EA diagram hyperlink has no space for offset or zoom level, it simply opens the diagram.
Normally I would say that if you want an element to do something like this you can code it up yourself in an Add-In, but I'm pretty sure you can't specify pan/zoom when opening a diagram in the API either.
So I'm afraid this is one of those rare occasions where the answer is "you're doing it wrong." Adding all information everywhere is a sure-fire way of ending up with a model that's both impossible to navigate and a nightmare to maintain.
To build a better model you should work with abstractions and/or aspects (hard to say which is the better route forward without doing an actual architectural analysis).
What I do is to create sub-domain diagrams and then drag those onto an overview diagram. They scale down to nearly iconic size but still give an idea of the contents. Now I use large text to explain those sub-domains. This can usually fit to some A3-size (A2 if you like to show off). But from this overview you can easily focus to the single sub-domains by double-clicking the diagram frames.
I am developing an interactive CD most of my life I wrote console applications writing something mostly graphical is akward for me.
So here is my approach :
I am drawing on the canavas using shapes and images the left and top position are stored in a file. Is there any easier approach ? I thought using shapes objects would simplify my work what do you guys think ?
Any examples are welcome.
If you consider this question subjective please vote for closing.
The proper way is to write an OnPaint handler (that is, listening to the WM_PAINT message) and drawing using the GDI.
Here are a couple of simple examples:
Moving triangles
Bouncing ball
Drawing by moving controls is very awkward.
Since you didn't specify a any version, I assume you're not wasting your time with an ancient Delphi, so maybe you should also take a look at FireMonkey.
That also opens the door to having your interactive stuff work on other platforms..
I recommend the Delphi GDI+ Library which I have used with success. It's a wrapper around GDI+ which takes alot of the pain out of it.
I am looking for a graphical component in Delphi winch have such features:
allows to paint text in different font types, sizes and colors
allows to select previously drawn text and copy it
paints images on a given coords, gif support would be nice
its very fast in terms of CPU usage
I need this component as a main chat window. I don't want to use it as a text editor.
I've tried two solutions so far:
TVirtualStringTree
THtml
Currently I am using THtml. It performs quite nice but it is a bit to slow due to two facts:
It supports many features which are not necessary in my case
Each time I want to add some content to it, I must reload the whole content
I really don't want to go into its sources and modify them until I have no other choice. So maybe someone of you knows some nice lightweight component which I can use instead?
Take a look at TRichView. It's derived from TCustomControl so no external dependencies. It's third party commercial component, but a very good one. Skype Win client uses it.
What about a TRichEdit? Most of the things you mention should be easiliby possible with this component.
Concering the insertion of a bitmap, see this article on Delphi 3000.
Did you consider using TWebBrowser?
At least it ticks all your boxes...