I'm creating some UI controls in Lab Windows CVI programmatically, and I saw on NI's site that there are two different graph types, "CTRL_GRAPH_LS" and "CTRL_GRAPH". Many other controls have the same suffix. What are the differences between the two?
Thanks in advance.
_LS is used to indicate Lab Style controls.
Using one over the other is completely preferential. The primary distinction is that Lab Style is a new style, as opposed to Classic, or old style. Lab Style has a richer, 3D look, where the old style is flatter in appearance. In terms of functionality, I have seen no advantage using one over the other. When using the NewCtrl function to programmatically create your UI controls, you can select Lab Style controls by including the _LS suffix option for controls that offer it.
This is the closest I've seen to that, and even it doesn't do a particularly good job; it certainly doesn't integrate (if it can even be said to do so) as well as the the highlight.js blocks reveal.js supports by default (which aren't responsive and lack a bunch of the other nice features of ACE).
I tried naively embedding an ACE textbox in a slide myself, and it didn't work out well. Reveal changed the size of the thing, but even after fixing that (and setting "text-align:left") the visual cursor didn't align with the actual cursor, and the editor warning icon was tiny.
The problem with ACE and reveal.js is the are the css attributes zoom or transform: scale() which reveal uses to fit the content to the screen. ACE requires pixel fonts and does not use the scaling in calculating mouse cursor positions.
I made a small fork and added a reval.js specific check for the editor.
see https://github.com/waywaaard/ace
https://github.com/waywaaard/ace/commit/e4e3da28515ef7a58fe85378dd4dd557918fc4a6
This fixes the problem for my use cases.
My way of solving those issues is embedding ACE in an iframe instead of using it directly. I wrote a reveal.js plugin that makes embedding an ACE editor easy:
https://github.com/Gottox/reveal.js-ace
I have a point-of-sale application written in Perl/Tk. I use X11::GUITest to do automated testing of it, driving the app via hot-keys bound to the buttons and other widgets (it's normally touch-screen driven). However, X11::GUITest doesn't have a way to "read" text back from the screen, so I resort to augmenting the app to write temp files as well as putting data on the screen. The test scripts then look at the temp files, not the GUI. But I'd love to extend X11::GUITest or make a new CPAN module that can scrape text strings from X11 GUIs. I'm not after graphics-to-text conversion; it's my (faint) understanding that somewhere in the depths of the X window system, label text and such are stored as text strings and rendered to bitmap form late in the pipeline (?).
Anyone have guidance on how to do this, or pointers on where to start?
Yeah, I know I should've adhered to better MVC separation and not actually test at the GUI level, but just below it; however reality got in the way and it is what it is!
The best way to do this is to make your program work with an accessibility framework like ATK (used in GTK applications) and then use that to query for the strings as a screen reader would have to for text-to-speech translation. This is the approach taken by the Linux Desktop Testing Project and dogtail testing frameworks. You get the bonus of using existing, well tested code and making your application more usable by disabled users (as may be required by laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act in the US and similar laws in many other countries).
If your application is using modern font frameworks, like libXft2, this may be your only choice, as those strings are only in the client application, not the X server, and the character to pixmap conversion is done in the client. (If your text is antialiased, it must be using these instead of the legacy X11 API's.)
Even with the legacy X11 API's though, the X server doesn't store the strings once the text to bitmap conversion is done, so there's no good way to query them short of intercepting them in that case.
The program listres lists resources in widgets, including label texts and I think the contents of text entry boxes. You may be able to use its output directly, extracting what you need, or you may need to look at the source and see how it's done.
Terminology question !
In many graphics packages the user can draw a line between two objects (two boxes say) and then when the user moves one of the one boxes subseqently the line moves to keep the (visual) connection in place.
I want to learn more about this functionality might be implemented (really good to find some open source code to read).
So I want to find some terminology for what this type of stuff is called. I saw a reference on stackoverflow to 'wire-based drawing' but that seems to have been an invention of the author rather than a generally used term.
Is there a proper term for this area of graphics software technology ? Any open source libraries that implement it ?
thanks
I believe that most common name is "connectors". You can draw them using pathfinding algorithm (depends on how your objects are represented)
Here is an example of designer that implements what you described.
Diagrams - bloc, flowchart and so on. This type of drawings is usually created by software like Visio and Dia.
Btw, Dia is open source, so you can look at it to see how this is implemented.
These are connectors.
OpenOffice.org implements them. The feature is available in the Writer, Draw and Impress components (the Connectors menu on the Drawing toolbar). However, I have no idea how easy it would be to dig that feature out of their source code. Nevertheless, OpenOffice.org is open source.
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I'm a blind college student who is taking an introduction to programming class that focuses on user interface design. The class is using Processing, which is completely inaccessible. I'm looking for a language that will allow me to create GUI's without drag and drop and hopefully be smart enough to do most of the layout without forcing me to specify control positions in pixels.
I know Perl, Java, C/C++, c#, and HTML. I was considering creating HTA applications. My only requirements are that the language must run under MS Windows, and must not use SWING or GTK as the underlying toolkit.
I would say that xaml would be a good choice:
Pixel manipulation is not needed
Item functionality in code behind
Can add pixels changing for control
later on
There is a lot of documentation on
how to use it
Maybe if you give us an idea of what you will need the language for we can give you better suggestions.
Speaking as a blind programmer:
C# + WinForms: You can either create the code by hand and use layout managers or calculate the sizes in your head, or if you're using the JAWS screen reader then there are scripts which will help you in the WinForms designer.
C# + WPF: Here you define your UI in XML, but it is more complex to get your head around. Certainly look at this as it is a very nice solution. the other problem with WPF at the moment is that not all screen readers support this newer technology.
Jamal Mazrui at www.EmpowermentZone.com has created something called "Layout By Code", but I have no experience with this.
HTML+Javascript would be nice, but I doubt it'd be allowed in your course.
WXWidgets: I don't have a lot of experience with this cross-platform, multi-language UI toolkit, but I believe it has layout managers and is thus used by several blind programmers I know.
Finally, I used to design Win32 resource scripts by hand, calculating sizes in my head (no layout managers). This is certainly achievable if you wanted to take this route.
In summary, WPF's nice, but make sure your screen reader works with this kind of app. The next best alternative is probably WinForms. If you like Layout By Code then use it, but if this is a skill you want for employment, then keep that in mind.
take a look on XAML. I think it could be a good start for both modern Windows and Web UI creators.
Tcl/Tk will do exactly what you want. The pack and grid layout managers are based on logical relative placement of the widgets.
Although the "native" language of Tk is Tcl, many other languages have a Tk binding.
label .l -text "this is a label"
button .b -text 'quit' -command "exit"
pack .l .b
Check out this project on codeplex. It may help you (as an alternative to processing&java)
http://bling.codeplex.com/
ling is a C#-based library for easily programming images, animations, interactions, and visualizations on Microsoft's WPF/.NET. Bling is oriented towards design technologists, i.e., designers who sometimes program, to aid in the rapid prototyping of rich UI design ideas. Students, artists, researchers, and hobbyists will also find Bling useful as a tool for quickly expressing ideas or visualizations. Bling's APIs and constructs are optimized for the fast programming of throw away code as opposed to the careful programming of production code.
Bling as the following features that aid in the rapid prototyping of rich UIs:
* Declarative constraints that maintain dynamic relationships in the UI without the need for complex event handling. For example, button.Width = 100 - slider.Value causes button to shrink as the slider thumb is moved to the right, or grow as it is moved to the left. Constraints have many benefits: they allow rich custom layouts to be expressed with very little code, they are easy animate, and they support UIs with lots of dynamic behavior.
* Simplified animation with one line of code. For example, button.Left.Animate.Duration(500).To = label.Right will cause button to move to the right of label in 500 milliseconds.
* Pixel shader effects without the need to write HLSL code or boilerplate code! For example, canvas.CustomEffect = (input, uv) => new ColorBl(new Point3DBl(1,1,1) - input[uv].ScRGB, input[uv].ScA); defines and installs a pixel shader on a canvas that inverts the canvas's colors. Pixel shading in Bling takes advantage of your graphics card to create rich, pixel-level effects.
* Support for multi-pass bitmap effects such as diffuse lighting.
* An experimental UI physics engine for integrating physics into user interfaces! The physics supported by Bling is flexible, controllable, and easy to program.
* Support for 2.5D lighting.
* A rich library of geometry routines; e.g., finding where two lines intersect, the base of a triangle, the area of triangle, or a point on Bezier curve. These routines are compatible with all of Bling's features; e.g., they can be used in express constraints, pixel shaders, or physical constraints. Bling also provides a rich API for manipulating angles in both degrees and radians.
* And many smaller things; e.g., a frame-based background animation manager and slide presentation system.
* As a lightweight wrapper around WPF, Bling code is completely compatible with conventional WPF code written in C#, XAML, or other .NET languages.
Bling is an open source project created by Sean McDirmid and friends to aid in design rapid prototyping. We used Bling to enhance our productivity and would like to share it with other WPF UI design prototypers.
I'd probably try using C#. It has reasonably friendly interfaces to windows common controls and the like even without making use of Drag and Drop. Just don't make use of the designer and code as normal.
I don't program in Java but I know that Java provides for the programmatic creation of the UI AND provides some wonderful Layout Management components (Native to Java without requiring SWING). I first got exposed to Layout Managers back in the good-old-days of X11 with X Toolkits (anybody remember Motif, OpenLook, HP Open View?) and Java seems to have adopted similar technology.
You can create Windows, Dialogs and Menus all from simple layout managers.
Being sighted myself and not having worked too closely on anything that has ever been audited for accessibility or heavily accessed by blind users, I don't think my answer will be terribly thorough. My first instinct however is to say that some kind of dynamic web server architecture that generates HTML like C#, PHP or ColdFusion is going to fit your description of handling most of the layout for you without requiring that you specify control positions in pixels. There certainly is the availability to specify control positions in pixels via CSS, but it's not required. And I know HTML also has well defined standards for accessibility, whereas I'm not sure what the status is on accessibility standards with other kinds of software.
You could use javascript and html. There's a port of processing to javascript, so you know that it is powerful enough for the things that your class will cover. You can author html without knowing a single thing about what it looks like. In fact that is the preferred way to author html.
The main downside of javascript is not javascript itself, but the browser dom. That is the interface into controlling the html elements. However, a library like jquery, or mootools, or dojo can take care of most of those problems.
As for accessiblity, have a look at WAI ARIA also opera's intro to WAI ARIA.a
WAI ARIA is a way to build rich javascript applications while playing nice with screen readers. It's very cool. I've not seen more work and passion put into making the web stack accessible in any other programming stack.