I am learning some principles of X, and I want to know how to listen selection event of Xlib and transfer text selected of the application.
I read the mannul from
https://tronche.com/gui/x/xlib/
https://github.com/python-xlib/python-xlib
and as a newbie that is too complex for me.
I have no plan to try gtk+ and Qt and others which lead to extra dependencies.
so please give me some advice or a demo if could, thanks.
Related
When I use iBooks on Mac, and highlight a word with a mouse, English Thesaurus is shown:
I'd like my program to do similar thing - to appear like this Thesaurus in iBooks. How can it be reached?
The simplest idea is recognizing that some text is selected, but maybe iBooks has some API (nothing useful at https://developer.apple.com/ibooks/). Or maybe Mac OS has event "single word selected", and I can subscribe for it.
What kind of app is best suited for that: Cocoa App or some extension/plugin?
I'm not interested in "long way" (context menu):
Any advices will be highly appreciated, because I don't know anything about that.:)
What I think you are looking for is NSView's showDefinitionForAttributedString:atPoint: method or one of its siblings. HTH
I'm here because my research and testing lead me nowhere.
I have made a little calendar application and now I want to improve the user interface with nice controls. I'm trying to achieve an interface where you can create an event by dragging over it (as you can do in Google agenda, in fact this a school project and I want to reproduce this week view).
For this purpose I have tried this approach:
For each cells of the area (a GridPane that contain VBoxes) I attach handlers that achieve that feature (setOnDragDetected, setOnMouseDragEntered and setOnMouseDragReleased). And it does the job well but in some case this don't work (if the mouse move over another event, which do no have the handlers, the drag feature stop).
As I saw this too heavy and subject to bogus (3 handlers x 7 columns x 48 rows = 1008 handlers !! ), I thought about other approach but I'm a beginner in javaFX and I don't know if there is other mechanism to perform this. (I thought about a transparent layout/pane that will handle this feature and act like a "touch screen" over my application but I did not found satisfying answers). Can someone enlighten me about this kind of problem ? For a good example of what I try to achieve take the behaviour of the Google agenda for an event creation with the mouse (I do not need to manage overlap of event). Thanks in advance !!
I post a picture of what the actual view look like.
So as Tomas Mikula suggest me I only attached my handlers to the GridPane (and not to each "cell" as I made previously): setOnDragDetected, setOnMouseDragOver, setOnMouseDragReleased and setOnMouseDragExited.
As the handlers are triggered on the GridPane, moving the mouse over other element doesn't stop the feature.
With this I reduced the number of handler, simplified the code (As I do not need to manage extra behaviours as mover over another child).
Thanks !
I am just beginning to learn about accessbility specifically in relation to JAWS - so newbie alert!
I am looking to modify an old vb6 app which has a form with a 3 column flexgrid. There is a custom edit box which is overlaid on the form for editing in the right most column. On row change, ideally JAWS needs to read the contents of the 2 leftmost columns on that row.
I am wondering how best to implement this?
I have seen possible solutions of loading into a text file and shelling out to JAWS on a row-change type event. This seems a bit heavy but maybe it is a good solution.
I have also read about the IAccessible interface. This sounds like a good solution to me, but I don't know if it'd give me what I was after ie whether JAWS uses this interface to get its info.
I would be grateful if someone could advise me/steer me in the 'right' direction about the way I should be thinking about this.
Visual Basic 6 is unsupported by Microsoft many (12+) years ago. It doesn't have any easy way to incorporate MS Active Accessibility (MSAA), the previous versions were missing support in many of the default graphic widgets, and many controls did and do not have keyboard access.
Don't use it is the best answer, but not to your question. If you must continue, you'll have to look at the MSAA route (you are headed in the right direction with IAccessible interface)
I'm new to Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode and Interface Builder. I've got some C background in the past, as well as a fair amount of RealBASIC experience.
I'm working through Mark and LaMarche's iPhone 3 Dev book and I'm really just sort of stunned about how tedious some things are. Maybe someone can shed some light on this for me. My question really is, why does the process for seemingly simple actions involve such a complicated number of steps? Is there a benefit to the complexity which I'll come to love later? Or is it just a brute fact that is unavoidable?
For example, in RealBASIC, if I want a slider's value displayed in a text box, I simply add:
myTextBox.text = mySlider.value
to the slider's Changed event. I can program this in well under 1 minute.
In Xcode/Interface Builder, I have to physically type a declaration for both the text box and the slider, then type a property/outlet declaration for each as well, then create a method declaration and implementation for the ValueChanged even, then set up a (relatively) complicated typecast of the slider's integer value into an NSString using initWithFormat. I then have to return to Interface Builder to link up the controls with the control and method outlets I typed in. I don't see how this can be done in much less than 10 minutes. Maybe 5.
So, what's the benefit of this? Why doesn't Interface Builder automatically create, or at least suggest, control declarations and #property statements, as well as method declarations and implementations? Why can't double-clicking a slider in IB offer you a list of events and offer to automatically insert a skeleton method into your .h and .m file? And why does IB even have to be a separate application?
I'm willing to accept that some of this is my unfamiliarity with all things Xcode, but is this really as efficient as the development environment can be?
My apologies if this is a dead-horse, flame-bait topic with opposing sides on full aggro. If so, please just say "yes, that it is" and move on.
Thanks,
-Rob
A lot of the reasons behind the way IB works will become more clear as you get used to the MVC paradigm.
Once you start using Cocoa Bindings, which update your model when the UI changes and vice versa, you should see an enormous productivity improvement.
I too used to think that Xcode and Interface Builder were unnecessarily complicated, until I worked through a book on both (specifically, Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK).
If you're serious about working with Xcode and Interface Builder and are as confused as I was when I started, I highly recommend picking up a book like the one I used. Granted, that was for iPhone development, but I think there is another book by the same publisher (or author) that is straight Mac programming.
Once you work through it and understand what is going on behind the scenes it starts to make a lot more sense. In some ways I prefer IB to things like Expression Blend or XAML for WPF programming in .NET.
Give a book a try and see if it helps :-)
Good luck!
I'm in the process of designing and testing various ideas for an application whose main functionality will be to notify users of occurring events and offer them with a choice of actions for each.
The standard choice would be to create a queue of events showing a popup in the taskbar with the events and actions, but I want this tool to be the less intrusive and disrupting as possible.
What I'm after is a good book or papers on studies of how to maximize user productivity in these intrinsically disruptive scenarios (in other words, how to achieve the perfect degree of annoying-ness, not too much, not too little).
The user is supposedly interested in these events, they subscribe to them and can choose the actions to perform on each.
I prefer books and papers, but the usual StackOverflow wisdom is appreciated as well.
I'm after things like:
Don't use popups, use instead X
Show popups at most 3 seconds
Show them in the left corner
Use color X because it improves readability and disrupts less
That is, cognitive aspects of GUI design that would help users in such a scenario.
For notification, I prefer small notification windows in the bottom right corner. If they have a minimum UI allowing me to take some quick action, it would be ideal.
As model: incoming mail notification from Outlook, Skype notifications for incomming calls, etc.
I have read and recommend:
About Face 3
The Design of Everyday Things
I don't know of any formal articles but the Ubuntu UI design team have considered this issue and you may find something of value in their notification design guidelines or in this discussion by Mark Shuttleworth.
Sorry, no book recommendation here, just one piece of advise: Ultimately, you should let your users decide.
In my experience, what one user considers to be a useful feature is seen as completely broken by the second, while the third doesn't care at all.
Offer them 3-5 options how they will be alerted (including the option to turn alerts off ;-). Of course you should optimise these options as much as possible, hopefully some other answers here can help you with that.
A collection of possibilities:
Change a static tray icon. Useful if the user doesn't have to answer each message immediately, and relatively unobtrusive. Should be an overlay on the original image, making sure that the user recognizes which application it's from, and should be different enough that the user immediately understands that it's not the original icon (for example, a red / yellow exclamation mark on a blue / green background).
Change the tray icon to a dynamic variant. This will be more obtrusive, grabbing the user attention periodically, but is useful when the message is urgent. Could for example be a revolving version of a circular logo, or a pulsating square logo. Depending on the urgency, the animation could repeat endlessly (highly distracting) or once in a while. Use with care :)
Pop-over box in a corner of the screen. This should give some context info, the primary object of which is to enable the user to decide whether or not it's worth checking out immediately. Could afford clicking by using a "More" link or big "+" sign.
Focus the application window immediately. Enormously intrusive, and should not even be used in case of nuclear meltdowns (what if the user already knows the meltdown is occurring, and is looking elsewhere for a solution?). Just don't.
I think an answer depends highly on the specifics of the UI you are working within. However, for general guides
The GNOME desktop environment's human interface guidelines (HIG) is a useful resource if your environment is GNOME, and perhaps informative if it's not. There is a section on using the "desktop notification area": http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/desktop-notification-area.html.en. This covers not overloading the area, etc. (perhaps analogous to the win32 tray).
Apple have their own HIG document. Part of this describes using the Dock for conveying status information: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/userexperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGMOSXEnvironment/XHIGMOSXEnvironment.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002721-TPXREF139
Apple also have a separate HIG document for the iPhone. there are several notification techniques described within, e.g. "alerts" http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/ModalViews/ModalViews.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006556-CH11-SW1 which are specifically described as to be used for critical information (due to their disruptiveness).
Several apple iphone apps adjust their icon to convey some status info: e.g. mail, SMS, phone all indicate the number of outstanding mails, SMS messages, or missed calls/voicemails as part of their launch icon. I can't, however, find any reference to that in a cursory scan of the apple iphone HIG.