From: Scott L Holmes <scottlholmes@...>
Date: 2006-05-18T02:26:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Need help designing UI

Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> So for you example, the "Close Window" toolbar button would have a
> message with an associated CLOSE command constant, with the target of
> the message being the window. When the button is clicked, the CLOSE
> message will be sent to the window and the handling of that message
> will close the window (of course.) The nice thing about this is that
> the CLOSE message could be used from other places without having to
> change how it is handled within the window.

Thanks for replying Ryan. This got me thinking about some design goals. 
Your description sounds like MS Windows, in any case, it implies some 
sort of Windowing management. What I'm building is pretty high level and 
the overall impetous of the project is not the UI - more of a library 
kind of thing. The UI is sweetness? So to keep things simple, I'm 
thinking I need to concentrate on two things.

A command constant. Definitely warming to this idea. The constant as in 
your description is merely a token to pass around.

Some form of context. A toolbarbutton is on a toolbar is on a viewer. In 
a generic way, when the viewer gets created, it would register a context 
which could be a simple random number. All sub-parts get the context? 
When the toolbarbutton fires it broadcasts a command constant and the 
context? Thinking out loud. Does avoid the references but now I gotta 
pass around a random number. In Ruby - that's a reference too. hmmmmm.

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