Hi,
> On Apr 8, 2018, at 10:27 AM, Hernán Morales Durand
> wrote:
>
> Hi Tudor,
>
> Very nice! Thank you for sharing, this seems to be hard work.
Thanks.
> If you welcome some feedback:
>
> Live tab:
> - When I select "Figure" button, then choose from the figures toolbar and put
> a figure, the selection focus goes back to the "Select" button loosing the
> figures toolbar. It would be nice to save some clicks by staying in the
> Figure when putting a lot of figures.
Indeed, we are thinking about keeping the Figure mode when pressing Shift.
> - The "Figure" are actually UML figures? It would be cool to categorize the
> types of figures available in a toolbar.
The Figures is actually any figures. The figures available are there for
validation to show that both simple figures and complicated one (such as a UML
class) can work fine. But, you can define your own stencils (factories of
figures) and they will appear there.
> - Clicking "Line" button does not display any lines to select (maybe ToDo?)
ToDo indeed :).
> Events tab
> - I guess is used for Undo/Redo
> "User data", "Resizers", and "Transformation"
> - I didn't understood what are they for.
These are element specific views in the inspector, each interesting for
different purposes. For example, the Events presentation shows a log of all
events that reached the element - a very useful input when debugging UI logic.
> I am intrigued by the "inject visual attributes" per-instance, maybe
> something like the old Parts Workbench from VisualSmalltalk?
I do not know what the Parts Workbench is. In our case, we want to be able to
specify the look of an element independent from the element itself, and we want
to be able to do that per element instance, not per type, and not as a global
behavior (like in the current theme).
Cheers,
Doru
> Cheers,
>
> Hernán
>
>
>
>
> 2018-04-07 13:39 GMT-03:00 Tudor Girba :
> Hi,
>
> We are happy to announce an initial version of GT Diagrammer, an engine for
> constructing diagrams interactively. This is the newest addition to the next
> generation GT built on Bloc.
>
> It looks like this:
> https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/976341449267531776
>
>
>
> We chose to work on Diagrammer for multiple reasons. First, developers often
> need to create hand built diagrams to communicate intentions, and an
> integrated experience should not require us to leave our environment to
> create them. At the same time, Diagrammer is an application that requires a
> widgets and interactions, and thus it is a nice exercise for Bloc and Brick.
>
> One requirement we had from the beginning was to make it work with any Bloc
> element. This means that the editing part had to be reasonably generic. To
> this end, we now have elements that can define visual editors. This is
> somewhat a combination between Magritte descriptions, and inspector
> extensions. An interesting side effect is that now we can edit visual
> properties when inspecting any element. In other words, we got the basic
> infrastructure of a UI painter. It looks like this:
> https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/982656456968241152
>
> The user interface essentially relies on two widgets: scrollable list and
> toggle button. While the visual look of the toggle button is inspired from
> material design, the most interesting part is that now we have an
> implementation for controlling looks per element instance. A key issue here
> is that looks can react to events coming from the element and inject visual
> attributes and possible even change behavior (for example, changing an icon
> while pressing a button). We will post more about looks soon.
>
> We now also have a nice solution for overlays. For example, we have an
> overlay showing selection and an overlay for resizing elements.
>
> Perhaps less obvious, Diagrammer also offers a basic infrastructure for the
> area of visual languages. As Diagrammer works with any Bloc elements, we can
> simply create dedicated visual elements. As an example, Diagrammer comes with
> an implementation of a UML class figure. Furthermore, as the functionality
> does not impose a specific model, custom language semantics can be mapped on
> visual actions.
>
> There are several things to do still for it to become a mature solution. An
> important next step is to serialize a diagram scene in a reproducible manner.
> Currently, the diagram (or any element) can be exported as pdf
> (https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/976580153802358786), svg
> (https://twitter.com/feenkcom/status/976578060429484032), png, gif or jpeg by
> directly using the low level canvas. However, for the diagram to be truly
> useful we need to store the result in either code or another reloadable form
> such as STON. Other future directions are related to figure controlling (for
> example, custom anchors or line bending points) and to enhanced editors.
>
> To play with it, the easiest way is to download t
