On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 04:32:45PM -0600, Aaron Spike wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
Like bulia, I also wonder if this could be folded into the current star tool, to make it more powerful? If not, a new shape could be added, but that could be a lot more work. In any case, I'd be happy to give pointers for getting into the codebase if you'd like.
I wonder if this wouldn't be a good place to start looking into pluggable tools. There are a number of things that I've seen pointing in this direction lately. Flood fill being another.
Ted, is the extensions system ready to start building up a mechanism for pluggable tools?
Not a bad idea. I suspect in addition to support in the extensions system, we'd need to have a kind of 'Super Shape' that supports being scripted, or something.
An idea I've been kicking around for a while is something similar to Dia's Shape objects, which seems to correspond most closely to our (unfinished) SPSymbol object. Symbols are basically like groups, except they support some aspect-ratio preservation capabilities. Dia's shapes also include some dynamic information, like descriptive text, parameters, and so on; they also allow shape-specific dialogs to be associated with them. I wonder if all these ideas could be fitted together into a single solution? Being able to implement these different 'smart shapes' as extensions would be icing on the cake.
Bryce