It's almost maddeningly unfair
Mar. 29th, 2005 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn the past half-hour, I've gotten further along on Arcline than I have in the past three months combined. Y'know why? Because I gave up on my initial language of choice, and went with something entirely new to me.
At first, my idea was to write it in GTK/C. this was not an unreasonable choice; all Unixen support GTK these days, and it's almost universal. Every distribution comes with it, even if they don't support it's overmassive brother GNOME.
In the past hour I've put together the central UI component and i've started on the back-end library. I usually do the back-end first, but in this case it gave me a chance to play with the UI builder, which I needed to understand before I proceeded. I'll finish the raw back-end sometime tomorrow, and then get the IO routines polished up. I'm tempted to blow off the whole XML thing; it seems to be popular, but I've never understood the need for it.
I also ginned this up over about fifteen minutes yesterday, only to find the original in a lost notebook later that evening:
Arclines Class Diagram
The secret ingredients have been: Dia, Dia2Code, Python, WX, WxPython, and WxGlade. The fact that I can toss that together so quickly and easily with the tools available to me makes me happy. Although, trust me, I'm going to go through the code generated by the UI wizard line by line; I never use code I don't understand.
I do have one big task ahead of me: wrapping my head around the idea of event-oriented programming. I've been doing it for years in a web-based way, but never for pure applications. I also need to build a pair of custom widgets: one for the plot lines themselves, and another for the scene-force-ratio diagram, a tool which, if you use the in-built Content Manager, will allow you to map out each scene, showing how long each scene is compared to others, and allow you to hover over each scene to read the summary; that way, you can see if a scene's length corresponds to its importance in the story.
And the nice thing is Wx has been ported to both Mac OSX and Win32. In theory, Arcline will run on Unix, Mac, and Windows platforms. In theory.
At first, my idea was to write it in GTK/C. this was not an unreasonable choice; all Unixen support GTK these days, and it's almost universal. Every distribution comes with it, even if they don't support it's overmassive brother GNOME.
In the past hour I've put together the central UI component and i've started on the back-end library. I usually do the back-end first, but in this case it gave me a chance to play with the UI builder, which I needed to understand before I proceeded. I'll finish the raw back-end sometime tomorrow, and then get the IO routines polished up. I'm tempted to blow off the whole XML thing; it seems to be popular, but I've never understood the need for it.
I also ginned this up over about fifteen minutes yesterday, only to find the original in a lost notebook later that evening:
Arclines Class Diagram
The secret ingredients have been: Dia, Dia2Code, Python, WX, WxPython, and WxGlade. The fact that I can toss that together so quickly and easily with the tools available to me makes me happy. Although, trust me, I'm going to go through the code generated by the UI wizard line by line; I never use code I don't understand.
I do have one big task ahead of me: wrapping my head around the idea of event-oriented programming. I've been doing it for years in a web-based way, but never for pure applications. I also need to build a pair of custom widgets: one for the plot lines themselves, and another for the scene-force-ratio diagram, a tool which, if you use the in-built Content Manager, will allow you to map out each scene, showing how long each scene is compared to others, and allow you to hover over each scene to read the summary; that way, you can see if a scene's length corresponds to its importance in the story.
And the nice thing is Wx has been ported to both Mac OSX and Win32. In theory, Arcline will run on Unix, Mac, and Windows platforms. In theory.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-29 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-29 09:39 pm (UTC)[topic switch]
Event-based programming in an application should be a cinch compared to doing it for the web, because you don't have to recreate the state of the program each time an event occurs :)
no subject
Date: 2005-03-29 09:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-30 09:12 am (UTC)Need any help?
Date: 2005-03-31 05:42 am (UTC)