[Glade-devel] Building User Interfaces by Direct Manipulation (Cardelli paper)

[dufresnep at gmail.com (Paul Dufresne)]

2008/3/21, Tristan Van Berkom <tvb at gnome.org>:
> Note this is very toolkit specific, as a designer, what we try to accomplish is
>  a modular way of editing widgets that exist (for example try
>  positioning children
>  inside GtkFixed or GtkLayout),

My guess what I cared about is a variant of GtkFixed (well, the idea
is to not be fixed when stretching, but obey 2 next rules of
stretching).

The big idea is about adding for each children (called interactor in the paper),
four attachment points (North, South, East and West),

Let me extract the usefull rules:

"First rule of stretching: as a dialog stretches from a minimum size,
all the attachment points move proportionally to the stretching of the
dialog."

"Second rule of stretching: as a dialog stretches from a minimum size,
the distance between an attachment point and its interactor edge
remains constant."

That's all about what I care!

To help understand better, the next paragraph:
"An effective heuristic for setting a roughly correct stretching
behaviour is to select all the interactors in a dialog and double
click one of them. This will project all the attachment points of all
the interactors to their corresponding closest dialog edge. (In the
case of the card file dialog, this is exactly what we want:
interactors close to the corners will stick to the corners, and
interactors near the center will stretch in the appropriate direction.)
The few incorrect attachments can then be fixed by hand."