2010/12/14 Jasper van de Gronde <th.v.d.gronde@...528...>:
On 2010-12-14 04:49, Jon Cruz wrote:
On Dec 13, 2010, at 3:20 PM, Yu-Chung Wang wrote:
2010/12/13 Thinker K.F. Li<thinker@...2486...> ... It is not enough to provide a flexible environment. We still need a way to make it possible to insert a widget defined by an extension to a specified position. Firefox does it well (XUL overlay), but it is complex to implement it.
XUL is, in my opinion, exactly the wrong approach for extensions. It really leverages the pixel-tweaking of detailed graphical UI construction, whereas we should be focusing on logical and functional constructs.
> ...
I agree, making Inkscape "understand" what an extension does makes it possible to a lot of things centrally, and thus consistently. It also makes it a lot easier to evolve the interface and tie things together. (Not to mention that it makes it a lot easier to develop and maintain an extension.)
Also, some mention was made of things like a time-line, and I agree that it might be hard to make Inkscape "understand" that when it has no concept of a time-line. I would like to argue though that perhaps it might be better to first make sure Inkscape DOES have such a concept and then thinking of a UI. Or, alternatively, if you want to go really overboard with UI changes, I could imagine Inkscape separating the UI from rendering and such. In that case you could conceivably build a completely different UI on top of the same core technology.
In order to make inkscape understand what is timeline, there are two approaches.
(1) Add the timeline concept into the inkscape directly. (2) Add the time line concept in the extension. The time line is constructed by using the function available in the inkscape.
Currently, I take the second appraoch. The time line is exactly implemented as a sub layer. Any layer in the inkscape can have multiple sub layer. The timeline UI ensure that only one of them are visible. For the inkscape itself, it does not need to know the timeline at all.
The inkscape itself is too complex for average people to extend it in the C++ directly. However, a well-designed extension will allow more people to reuse the wheel invented by the inkscape for diffrerent purposes. I try to use the existing extension to implement timeline before. However, it's obvious that the current extension model is not power enough for this purpose. This is why Thinker start to implement a new script engine, whose target is to use our purpose to figure out the appropriate extension framework for the inkscape and then we can have a complete python script environment for the inkscape.
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