Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 08:18:54 10/07/05
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On October 07, 2005 at 10:26:54, Tom Likens wrote: >Hey Tord, > >Regardless of which system you select, please make the board and piece >sizes are dynamic. The best method is to let the user grab the right hand >lower corner and resize the board. The pieces and squares should >automatically increase or decrease. If it doesn't have this then >using it on a high-resolution monitor becomes a nightmare. This works reasonably well even with the current version. The main window can be resized continuously, and it is also possible to resize the three different panes (the board, the move list and the analysis output). The only problem is that the pieces don't look good at very small sizes. Here are some examples of how it looks with different board sizes: http://www.glaurungchess.com/Small.png http://www.glaurungchess.com/Normal.png http://www.glaurungchess.com/Big.png >As for the more general question, my guess is that most Window users >will opt for the single window containing multiple child windows (the >MDI solution). Judging from the other replies in this thread, it seems you are right. I am surprised to learn that this is a common way to design a GUI program (at least in the Windows world). As I wrote elsewhere, the only such GUI I have ever seen was an old Linux version of Maple, which I found really awful. What's the purpose of the main window? It seems to me that it will just waste space on the screen, and restrict the posssible movements of the child windows. >I don't hate this solution, but I prefer separate windows. Unless somebody suggests an idea I like better, I think I will end up using one main window (the board) and several auxiliary windows (move list, analysis output, etc.) for each game, and automatically hide all auxiliary windows which do not belong to the active main window. >BTW, what GUI toolkit are using? I use Apple's Cocoa toolkit, which is actually an updated version of the old NextStep tools. Cocoa is written in Objective-C. Objective-C is not a bad programming language (I like it much better than C++ and Java), but still too low-level for my taste. I therefore use the Cocoa bindings in OpenMCL, the most popular free Common Lisp implementation for Mac OS X. OpenMCL and Cocoa is a very nice and comfortable combination for writing GUI programs, the only real disadvantage is lack of portability. Tord
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