 | | | Use Moi: Easy MUI | Use Moi: Easy MUI 2003-12-09 - By Pranav Negandhi
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Hi listers,
I've been busy dusting off some of my old code lately, and ran into
something very interesting. The scripts, labelled Use Moi, actually let you
make use of the MUI Xtra from Macr. The wrapper lets you initialise dialog
boxes quickly, exposes interfaces for adding widgets and modifying their
properties and generates callbacks for user interactions that occur in the
dialog box.
To create an empty dialog box, you need to only instantiate the dialog box
script. This instance can then be used to modify the window properties, as
well as add widgets to it. When creating the instance, you must also specify
the callback object, which will be informed of the interaction events.
The wrapper exposes a simple interface that lets you add widgets to your
dialog box easily. Widgets are grouped into six different categories -
groups, buttons, text boxes, sliders, popups and decorative widgets. Of
these, the groups category will be dropped off in the future as the system
matures. Buttons, and sliders have sub-categories.
Buttons - #checkBox, #radioButton, #defaultPushButton, #cancelPushButton,
#pushButton, #toggleButton
Sliders - #integer, #float
The text box category contains two variations - editText & label. Rather
than specifying the type, you can specify whether the text box is editable
or not. The wrapper then creates the correct type of widget based on this
parameter.
Decorative widgets are bitmaps. I haven't read up about these and the popup
widget types at all yet. So although you can create them, I'm sure they
won't work.
The callback system is implemented in a manner similar to VB. Each widget
needs a handler for each event that needs to be trapped. For example, if you
have a text field labelled "username", every time the user changes the text
in the field, the username_itemChanged event is triggered in the callback
object. If the object contains the handler, then it is executed. Else the
event is ignored.
Work is still pending in many places. Firstly, the groups widget category
needs to be dropped. The system will still have groups ofcourse, but the
definition and creation will be made easier. Sliders and popups are another
front that need work. Since both these types of widgets require an
attributes parameter, I'll probably change the creation interfaces for these
categories.
The biggest limitation of this system is that at present, you can have only
one MUI dialog box open. :( Sux, I know, but it fulfilled my immediate
requirement back when I started this thing. If someone can suggest a way to
make the system work with more than one dialog box at the same time, it'd be
super!
Since the callback system is something very different from usual Director
applications, I'm most concerned about how well it can be recieved. Are
there any pitfalls in the system? The source code of this system is
available on the following URLs -
http://www.cimultimedia.com/trials/use_moi.dir &
http://www.cimultimedia.com/trials/use_moi.cst. The movie contains a small
working example that I whipped up during the day. Looking forward to hearing
from ye.
Pranav Negandhi
concept-I
www.cimultimedia.com
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