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And Good Now widen that little bit and pull ow tighten bit little tighter
Like that
Yeah uh okay Mike go ahead and just describe that that button bar
Okay when you were talking to Scott earlier he was he was explaining his routine
that took view of buttons and rearranged and resized and laid them out in such way
that uh you know they had icons and text or just text only or whatever and they were
sized sized appropriately and tiled correctly to look nice tVS and so that is all just
with it Urn but what that relies on is all of this uh all of these objects to be laid out first
have
um which takes these individual objects like Scott was describing things that
properties and allows you to visually rnove them around on the screen so that
you can
easily see where they where they should go rather than just saying uh maybe this
should go at 60 pixels left and 30 to the right you can just drag and drop it there Urn
so this-this toolbar is-uhcontains the buttons that are passed off to Scotts routine and
like urn the-sort of his analogy where you know lines of code are like rnusical notes
like taking instruments the functions and putting thern in certain spaces around the uh
around the music hall Say okay want these trombones to go here and want these
saxophones to
go here Urn and so then once-once you have all that you can uh you
So lets just sort of back up So those pictures those boxes are in essence the
Each one of these is single button that Scotts routine acts on So like this our back
button This is our forward button This is the-the reload button And-and so on and so
forth
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So were not just talking about the-what we were looking at was uh another
Right this is the toolbar that Scott was showing you right This top one here
dont think we-we didnt see that That wasnt the one we were..
Oh really okay
He was showing us the-the other one He was showing us one that had history
urn..
That was uh can show you here Computer noises That was this one here
Uh yes uh..
Yes
Okay urn but in-in that spirit of re-use we use the same code for-for both of them
Okay good
Urn where you know these are icons and-with titles that need to be laid out in uh this
case vertical fashion Urn we can re-use that same routine for the top level-the top-
level toolbar
Right
Urn because its-its just got objects that need to be laid out sequentially
Right
Urn and so part of the work thats different in-in user interface design rather than just
things thats not just writing lines of code in You actually get to-get to participate
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in the-in the look and feel and the design and constructing things and putting things
together like..
So this is like another-this is another uh code writing language This is the uh-do
you combine with-is this object uh some sort of object programming like..
Kind of but its not really language its more of you drag objects where you want
them to go and then at run time the program reads them in and then routines can work
with them
see
So theres really no extra programming here which is why its-its kind of nice-its-its
break from..
Right
From writing
Lets pan down this here and just click down on those-those buttons there
Yeah
Mmm Hmm
Mike eah why dont you just start at the top and just click down one after the
other
Sure
Okay Um this
top level is called toolbar dragbar and its basically an object that
Yeah
So you place one of these in the view and now you have new-a new toolbar that can be
dragged around Um and the two components-the two subcomponents of that toolbar are
the guppy pain the little control on the left side that-that
you use to drag which we-we
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call the grippy And then another view inside that contains all of these
affectionately pain
different buttons You know the back button and the forward button and the reload
button and search and-and all of that And then sort of attached to each little button is-is
another small attachment and little bit of code that can sort of be glummed on anywhere
you want Uh that does tooltips and so we just sort of stick one of these in in
Little bit of descriptive text to say you know this button does such and such Urn..
Do ou want to do one shot just going down the whole list Just click click click click
click
Sure
seconds
Okay
Yeah
So Mike how would you describe this-this element of the process Urn the-this-this
is not
Right
Um it can actually-it can before or it can come after It doesnt really matter
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Urn sometimes it comes before when you know basically you want to get an idea for
how something will look but you dont really have the code behind it You can
Mmm hmm
And then fill in the code later
Sure
Or you could know exactly how its going to look and write the code and then go back in
and create this hierarchy to uh to do what you want with the pieces have
you already
Okay urn so the oh let me bring this one over The main browser window uh is sort
HTML area here and then the status bar area down at the
very bottom And each one of
with Constructor And the-its-the isnt whats actually laying it out we-we it
lay
out you know visually Um and then the HTML pane is actually little bit more
complicated Heres the HTML part and this is where the-the actual HTML is displayed
when the user clicks on link But then we have of this here which
all is the new stuff in
were able to build on-build on top of Um and we just dropped it in and started going
Mmm hmm And can you show how this relates to the buttons Is there
connection
Urn this specifically doesnt The-the buttons are in this view up here
Right
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Yeah Yeah
And uh where is that drawbutton graphic Here we go And theres routine here called
Drawbutton Graphic which is you know fairly simple Its probably 20 lines total of
code using whole bunch of different objects to-to draw the icon and draw it
animating Urn we found out that the-the OS supply button can pretty much do all of
this for us already So we can remove this entire-we can remove this entire drawing
routine
And how do you connect it to the code and the operating system Do you have to
refile..
Thats where-thats-we do that in Constructor Urn part of each button has a-has whole
bunch of information and uh part of that is class ID and this class ID says what kind of
thing is this You know is this button is this scroilbar is this something weve
created And by specifying certain class ID we can say use the operating systems
Right Okay Lets do couple of-So Mike what was-so tell us what-how this all
Layout tools
Layout tools Right Just describe how they all interconnect and how-how much in
Okay um the laying out is fairly simple urn its just dragging components off of
toolbar say and then dropping them into window Um and then just placing them where
you want to go and specifying all of their-their attributes Um and so we do that say for
toolbar We drag buttons from palette and drop them into a-drop them into
container toolbar container um and give them buttons narnes and specify their icon
IDs and what cornrnand they should be-what they should call when theyre clicked and
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that happens
all that stuff And then while the program is actually running all
you
know beforehand and while the program is actually running urn we call different
routines on urn the toolbar as whole which goes through each button one at time
and resizes them and them out and rnoves thern appropriately urn to get them to-to
lays
look right um and so its a-a combination of high-level layout tools interacting with low-
level that knows what to do with each of these beasts while-while the programs
going on
Urn is there any-you know think we take all of this stuff for granted mean
because we have to Its beyond our comprehension But at some level there is uh
uh this sort of tremendous integration of-of urn commands and urn of-and its-and
it reflects lot code writing over long period of time Is there way for someone
Tara was just describing how the higher-level code writing languages are more-
are closer to English than the sort of base-level ones which are very simple
commands
Or yeah symbols rather Is this the-where code writing heading ultimately to you
Well different-different languages serve different purposes Urn them are the more
general-purpose high-level languages urn Java and those Urn and think to
stay powerful and widely-accepted there needs to be rnix of feeling like English but
still not just being English Because there are lots of ambiguities in spoken language and
all of that Which with mathematics and the language of mathematics definitely urn
languages and symbols symbology Urn there are other languages which are incredibly
popular incredibly powerful like Pear Pearl is loaded with tons of wacky symbols
and you know name any symbol in the alphabet you know that
you can type on a-on
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some meaning in Pearl Urn but you know that doesnt mean that
keyboard and its got
Pearl isnt very powerful that just means its little more difficult to a-to ramp up on
And there have been lot of attempts to make very English-like languages In fact
understand it
right um specify the scripting language so that it more closely follows
Scripts written to that would look like English Urn you know with the speech patterns
and the word ordering Or you could have a-a different dialect urn you know Russian
would read and look like Russian Urn it was very very lofty goal and they didnt
board Urn..
This is the rub in programming that you have to-that-that-that you want it be
the levels..
Right Thats why its-its very difficult sort of to write-to create general purpose
programming language that everyone is going to use and thats why there arent 250
couple and theres 250 that people use when they need to do something specific that
theyre-you know that they know that field already urn or that they take to the time to
learn because its very powerful like Pearl know is-is for scanning text and
you great
is great for doing lot of scripting like things Urn you know but youd never write
communicator in Pearl because its unreadable for the most part unless youre Scott
but thats another story Urn so there-theres-theres this balance and think it shows
that that balance is very hard to achieve by the fact that theres so few general quote
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Sigh Well what drives me is interesting stuff interesting work interesting ideas um
programming rather than just writing algorithms for someone you know to use is that
low-level code and urn youre not just writing code 24 hours day you actually
pictures for awhile And its-its mix between urn you know the hard-core developer
know and thats what keeps me going because thats really sort of really interesting to
me
Excellent
Okay
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