devise a more fine grained algorithm for adapting the display of IDLabel
to a situation with size constrained layout, e.g. for a time calibrated canvas.
We still do not implement the shortening of ID labels (see #1242),
since doing so would be surprisingly expensive. But at least we
do proceed in several steps now
- first attempt to reduce the name-ID (for now: hide it)
- if this doesn't suffice, also hide the menu
- and as a last resort, hide the icon and thus make the IDLabel empty
as it turns out, this is a self-contained separate concern,
and thus this arrangement of two icons plus a caption shall
now manage itself as a custom widget.
And while touching this subject, I have also reconsidered
the purpose and arrangement of those icons and completed
the specification with some decisions...
- context menus will be left-click, selection right-click (Blender!)
- we will always show those two icons, just allocate different graphics
- when there is no expander, the 2nd icon will just serve to open the menu
- so the button is almost redundant in that case (except when dragging)
identify the various dimensions, which require flexibility
to support the intended use cases; try to come up with a
design draft, allowing to settle on a preliminary version
soon, while not hampering further development later on.
Obviously this is a very deep and challenging topic,
and we're far from even remotely addressing it adequately;
we just need to get to the point to use this drafted version
as building block, since these usages will then push us further
into the right direction...
Investigate how the GTK implementation allocates size extension
to widgets and child widgets; identify possible extensions points
and work out a solution strategy to make GTK observe our specific
size constraints, which are derived from a time calibrated canvas.
The flexible custom styling yet needs to be definied.
Just adding a stock icon and a standard sized label field for now.
Widget can be constructed and successfully attached to a track.
Complete the investigation and turn the solution into a generic
mix-in-template, which can be used in flexible ways to support
this qualifier notation.
Moreover, recapitulate requirements for the ElementBoxWidget
In 2017, I did a first design draft, followed by a design critique,
which partially obsoleted some ideas regarding command binding.
Mostly, the reason to abandon parts of that initial design was
due to the fact, that to many actual construction details of the
UI framework were not worked out at that time.
Thus I rather focussed on (re)-building a backbone for the timeline display,
in order to support that kind of flexibility aspired within the session model.
Now, when re-visiting the topic of an UI gesture (using simple dragging
of a clip in the timeline as an example for a first draft), I picked up
some of those planned structures, but tend to bind them together in
a slightly different way -- more akin to a state machine and less
in the way of an LR-parser.
This chagneset updates the relevant part within the TiddlyWiki
and the corresponding UML drawing to better reflect my actual thinking.
- it seems such a feature is not possible to implement in a totally
sane and safe way, since intermixed other UI messages might cause
removal of some widgets for which we scheduled a change. And there
is no simple and performant mechanism available to track the lifecycle
of all the widgets involved
- as it stands, it is actually not necessary to schedule the resizing
for later, since the UI runs single-threaded, and thus GTK has no
opportunity to act on them while our evaluation pass is running
This changeset documents the current known state of UI startup into the TiddlyWiki.
It summarises all information and notes from various places in my mindmap.
Fazit:
* largely, the startup sequence is sane
* there are some open gaps and possible races -> see #1192
* these are rather hard to fix; maybe it's preferrable to rewrite the subsystem runner #1177
basically the solution was a bit too naive and assumed everything is similar to a vector.
It is not, and this leads to some insidious problems with std::map, which hereby
are resolved by introducing ContainerTraits
basically this attempts to work around an "impedance mismatch" caused by relying on Lumiera's Diff framework.
Applying a diff might alter the structural order of components, without those componets
being aware of the change. If especially those components are attached into some
UI layout, or otherwise delegate to display widgets, we need a dedicated mechanism
to reestablish those display elements in proper order after applying the change.
The typical examples is a sequence of sub-Tracks, which might have been reordert due
to applying rules down in the Steam Layer. The resulting diff will propagate the
new order of sub-Tracks up into the UI, yet now all of the elaborate layout and
space allocation done in the presentation code needs to be adjusted or even
recomputed to accomodate the change.
By applying a Diff, the children of some timeline element (track) may be re-ordered.
This imposes specific problems, since these elements hold onto slave-Widgets,
which are already attached into some elaborated and nested widget structure.
To keep complexity under control, we can not allow the TrackPresenter to have
any knowledge regarding the implementation structure of these target widgets.
Thus I am pondering the idea to represent that relation as an abstracted ViewHook link
Especially note the tricks we need to play in order to allow for (limited) usage of CSS3 box-shadows.
The reason is, all these CSS3 effects are rendered in one shot and combinend on the StyleContext::render_background() call
Thus we need to ensure that the background is properly aligned with the frames
- at some (yet to be defined) location, a virtual WidgetPath is constructed
and used to build a Gtk::StyleContext in accordance to the curren CSS
- within the drawing routine, we use Lumiera's Advice-System to access this info
- most notably the NOBUG logging flags have been renamed now
- but for the configuration, I'll stick to "GUI" for now,
since "Stage" would be bewildering for an occasional user
- in a similar vein, most documentation continues to refer to the GUI
same pattern as the existing EntryID, i.e. a human readable symbol plus a hash
but the hash is just random, instead of deriving it from the symbol text.
Use case is when we explicitly need a distinct identity, even when the
human readable symbolic name is the same. Actual example: the fork root in the timeline
the solution idea is to use a helper frame, and an "anchor functor",
which is passed down from the respective parent context, and which
does the actual work of injecting the child widgets at the apropriate
position within the parent display.
This is an obsolete feature, since the JavaScript engine in modern browsers
is way faster than it used to be, and people are accustomed to some loading time
due to all those "single page applications".
I haven't seen this splash screen even on the old Firefox for quite some time;
moreover, the TiddlyWiki 2.9.1 now displays a "JavaScript is required" alert
anyway, so there is really no need for all this messing around.
The (very old and long abandoned) SplashScreenPlugin
was written in a very hackish style, as it injected a <div> with the splash screen into the <head> tag.
In those olde days when evil reigned, browsers just happily displayed such documents.
But our new gem, Firefox Quantum, now "sanitises" such a malformed document
by closing the Head right before the <div> and relocating the opening BODY tag
to this place. Which then causes the TiddlyWiki self-modification routine
to flounder, because the opening body tag is now in the middle of a "markup area",
which is replaced by existing tiddler content (in this case the "MarkupPreHead" tiddler).
So we end up without an opening Body tag, and this is what we save -- Resulting in a corrupted wiki!
The obvious fix is to use the MarkupPreBody instead
Firefox Quantum adopted the idiotic behaviour of Chrome and does no longer
retrieve Cookies for pages read from local file system. It stores the Cookie
data into its local cookies.sqlite, but it does not retrieve it anymore.
For aledged "security reasons", however it happily retrieves HTML 5 web storage
Since TiddlyWiki classic just accesses the document.cookie at 3 points,
it is easy to patch around that problem. Just check, if we're using a modern
browser with support for HTML5 web storage and branch accordingly.
Basically, TiddlyWiki "classic" is in maintenance mode, but it is still supported.
This minor upgarde brings some bugfixes, most notably a minor adjustment to work well
with the new Firefox Quantum, which switched to the more restricted WebExtensions
and discontinued support for the old-style XUL based plug-ins.
This bold move by the firefox project placed a lot of well established, mature
extensions on the brink of extinction. Especially TiddlyWiki has gradually lost
its original appeal of a low-ceremony guerrilla wiki. However, it is still
a sweet little gem for experienced users, albeit a bit brittle to use.
You are now either
- forced to enter the target destination on each save
- or forced to arrange tiddly wiki to reside within your default download folder
and use a firefox plug-in to automate the save process (I use at the moment
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/file-backups/
- or forced to install a 100 MB blurb of java-script based local server
to run TiddlyWikiDesktop
The bitter irony of the situation is, what still works more-or-less painless
is to place your TiddlyWiki into the cloud. Yikes, here we go.
This involves a fundamental decision about how to build structures in the Lumiera UI:
They shall be solely created in response to diff messages. Which leads us to
introduce a new (and quite challenging) concept: the »DiffConstituent«
This marks start of actual work on this fundamental task.
Extensive planning from 2016 is available, together with an almost
complete diff binding for the entities involved into timeline display.
The goal is to build a (in itself completely meaningless) ping-pong interaction
between the UI and Proc-Layer, for the purpose of driving the integration ahead.
The immediate challenge is how to create and place an apropriate "GuiComponentView",
i.e. a Tangible, which is connected to the UI-Bus with an predictable EntryID.
And the problem is to get that settled right now, without building the envisioned
generic framework for View allocation in the UI. When this is achieved,
it should be a rather small step to actually send those notifications over
the UI-Bus, which is basically implemented and ready by now.
In the end, I decided against building a generic service here,
since it pretty much looks like a one-time problem.
Preferrably UI content will be pushed or pulled on demand,
rather than actively coding content from within the UI-Layer
- activation signal is a facility offered and used solely by Gtk::Application
- we do not need nor want an Gtk::Application, we deal with our own application
concerns as we see fit.
...and while doing so, also re-check the state of the GTK toolkit initialisation.
Looks like we're still future-proof, while cunningly avoiding all this
Gnome-style "Application" blurb
I will abandon work on the ViewSpec DSL in current shape (everything fine with that)
and instead work on a general UI start-up and content population sequence.
From there, my intention is to return to the docks, the placement of views
and then finally to the TimelineView
looks like I'm trapped with the choice between a convoluted API design
and an braindead and inefficient implementation. I am leaning towards the latter
- polish the text in the TiddlyWiki
- integrate some new pages in the published documentation
Still mostly placeholder text with some indications
- fill in the relevant sections in the overview document
- adjust, expand and update the Doxygen comments
TODO: could convert the TiddlyWiki page to Asciidoc and
publish it mostly as-is. Especially the nice benchmarks
from yesterday :-D
This is essentially the solution we used since start of the Lumiera project.
This solution is not entirely correct in theory, because the assignment to the
instance pointer can be visible prior to releasing the Mutex -- so another thread
might see a partially initialised object
_not_ using the dependency factory, rather direct access
- to a shared object in the enclosing stack frame
- to a heap allocated existing object accessed through uniqe_ptr
This is a tricky problem an an immediate consequence of the dynamic configuration
favoured by this design. We avoid a centralised configuration and thus there
are no automatic rules to enforce consistency. It would thus be possible
to start using a dependency in singleton style, but to switch to service
style later, after the fact.
An attempt was made to prevent such a mismatch by static initialisiation;
basically the presence of any Depend<SRV>::ServiceInstance<X> would disable
any usage of Depend<SRV> in singleton style. However, such a mechanism
was found to be fragile at best. It seems more apropriate just to fail
when establishing a ServiceInstance on a dependency already actively in
use (and to lock usage after destroying the ServiceInstance).
This issue is considered rather an architectural one, which can not be
solved by any mechanism at implementation level ever
Problems:
- using Meyers Singleton plus a ClassLock;
This is wasteful, since the compiler will emit additional synchronisation
and will likely not be able to detect the presence of our explicit locking guard
- what happens if the Meyers Singleton can not even be instantiated, e.g. for
an abstract baseclass? We are required to install an explicit subclass configuration
in that case, but the compiler is not able to see this will happen, when just
compiling the lib::Depend
Most dependencies within Lumiera are singletons and this approach remains adequate.
Singletons are not "EVIL" per se. But in some cases, there is an explicit
lifecycle, managed by some subsystem. E.g. some GUI services are only available
while the GTK event loop is running.
This special case can be integrated transparently into our lib::Depend<TY> front-end,
which defaults to creating a singleton otherwise.
we'll use a typedef to represent the default case
and provide the level within the UI-Tree as template parameter for the generic case
This avoids wrapping each definition into a builder function, which will be
the same function for 99% of the cases, and it looks rather compact and natural
for the default case, while still retaining genericity.
Another alternative would have been to inject the Tree-level at the invocation;
but doing so feels more like magic for me.
This looks like YAGNI, and it would be non trivial to implement.
But since the feature looks important for slick UI behaviour,
I've made a new ticket and leave it for now
several extensions and convenience features are conceivable,
but I'll postpone all of them for later, when actual need arises
Note especially there is one recurring design challenge, when creating
such a demand-driven tree evaluation: more often than not it turns out
that "downstream" will need some information about the nested tree structure,
even while, on the surfice, it looks as if the evaluation could be working
completely "linearised". Often, such a need arises from diagnostic features,
and sometimes we want to invoke another API, which in turn could benefit
from knowing something about the original tree structure, even if just
abstracted.
I have no real solution for this problem, but implementing this pipeline builder
leads to a pragmatic workaround: since the iterator already exposes a expandChildren(),
it may as well expose a depth() call, even while keeping anything beyond that
opaque. This is not the clean solution you'd like, but it comes without any
overhead and does not really break the abstraction.
...and there is a point where to stop with the mere technicalities,
and return to a design in accordance with the inner nature of things.
Monads are a mere technology, without explicatory power as a concept or pattern
For that reason
- discard the second expansion pattern implemented yesterday,
since it just raises the complexity level for no given reason
- write a summary of my findings while investigating the abilities
of Monads during this design excercise.
- the goal remains to abandon IterExplorer and use the now complete
IterTreeEplorer in its place. Which also defines roughly the extent
to wich monadic techniques can be useful for real world applications
...to limit them to the UI-Coordinates themselves,
while declining the possibility to mutate the target environment
through the PathResolver. Better handle changes within the
target environment by dedicated API calls on the target elements,
instead of creating some kind of "universal structure"
..this collection of ideas, terms and conclusions has been shaped
since some time within the TiddlyWiki. Since I've now started even
some supporting implementation regarding these concepts, its time
to publish them in the design documentation section of the Website
After completing the self-contained UICoord data elements,
the next thing to consider might be how to resolve UI coordinates
against an actual window topology. We need to define a suitable
command-and-query interface in order to build and verify this
intricate resolution process separated from the actual UI code.
...we have to face the problem that we need some generic strategy
for access to component views, which possibly will become customisable.
And the allowed patterns of access are quite different for the various
kind of view we know....
this starts work on a new UI global topic (#1004)
- coin a new term: "view component"
- distinction between veiw component and Panel
- consider how to locate view components
- WindowList becomes WindowLocator
This change was caused by investigation of UI event loop dispatch;
since the GTK UI is designed to run single threaded, any invocation
from other threads need to be diepatched explicitly.
A possible way to achieve this is to use Glib::Dispatcher, which
in turn requires that the current thread (which is in this case the UI thread)
already holds a Glib::MainContext
This prompted me to create a tight link between the external facade interfaces
of the UI and the event loop itself. What remains to be settled is how
to hand over arguments to the action in the main loop
After investigation of current GTK and GIO code, I came to the conclusion
that we do *not* want to rely on the shiny new Gtk::Application, which
provides a lot of additional "convenience" functionality we do neither
need nor want. Most notably, we do not want extended desktop integration
like automatically connecting to D-Bus or exposing application actions
as desktop events.
After stripping away all those optional functions and extensions, it turns
out the basic code to operate the GTK main event loop is quite simple.
This changeset extracts this code from the (deprecated) Gtk::Main and
integrates it directly in Lumiera's UI framework object (UiManager).
as it turned out, the former functionality was deactivated in 2009
with changeset 6151415
The whole concept seems to be unfinished, and needs to be reworked
and integrated with "Views and Perspectives" (whatever that is...)
See also #1097
