Mike's Musing

I decided upon lookiung through the documentation for the latest version of libvtemm that the running of the build commands needed a revamp.  Previously the build output just plowed on regardless of whether the previous command succeeded or failed.  This as you would guess is bad, you want to find out things have fallen apart as soon as possible without the follow on errors that are caused by an early command failing.  Lucky for me the latest version of libvtemm (0.20.2) makes this very easy to do.

While stopping the build from running is a good start there was still more to be done, namely some way to indicate to the user the status of the build.  To deal with this a bit more of a serious refactoring was required, this substantially changed the code of the build output class to such a degree that it no longer inherits from the same widget as it did before.  Thankfully though it allowed for non-obtrusive place to add feedback to the user.  With this in mind a progress bar was also added so that a user could tell how far along the build was at a glance.

Perhaps the most sane part of the change to build system is that now when the a build is initiated the if the build output is not visible it will be made visible, something that is should have been doing from the start.  Finally a couple of pictures to show how the new build system looks in various states.

As I mentioned earlier tonight here is my coding related post, since the 14th I haven’t really worked on gIDE until today.  I finally got the build system all finished and integrated into the rest of the application.  You can now happily define and run the commands needed to build your project. The following images show gIDE building a test project and the other shows the dialog for defining the build commands.  I am currently not very happy with the properties dialog but am yet to think of anything better so what I have will have to do for now.

I’m happy to have finally gotten this finished as it was the big feature I wanted done before I would eat my own dog food and use gIDE to develop gIDE.  I also took this oppurtunity to port gIDE from vte to vtemm which made the task of the code to set the commands a lot easier than a previous attempt I had made with vte, this does mean however that there is now a dependency in gIDE that is to the best of my knowledge not included in any distrobution.  I do not see this as being much of a problem however because the primary audience for gIDE is developer most of whom would know how to build a library from source.

As always the latest changes to gIDE can be found in trunk of the svn repo at http://mlowen.com/svn/gIDE/trunk.

Today I decided to upgrade this blog to version 2.7 of wordpress, which I managed to screw up royaly.  I somehow managed to accidently delete most of wordpress file including all of the files for the theme and the plugins, thankfully I wasn’t touching the database or shit would have really hit the fan.  So after wasting time and finding everything again it is all up and running, nothing seems to be breaking so I’m quite happy at the moment.  I also finally took the time to enable OpenID for comments, doing this also turned this blog into an OpenID provider as well which is neat because I’ve been meaning to get myself an OpenID for a while.

So far I’m impressed the wordpress 2.7, the work they have done on the admin area is top notch both functionally and aesthetically.  It seems to have a much more professional feel to it than the previous versions did, I’m not sure if this was intentional or not but it is nice.

A quick update on gIDE while I’m at it.  The new add file dialog hit trunk earlier this morning it isn’t quite what I wanted but it is an improvement over what was there.  As I said earlier the remove file dialog was done away with entirely, just using a message dialog seems to be a lot better.  Along with those changes I finally got around to adding a right click pop-up menu to the project browser which allows you to add, remove and soon rename files in the project, I should have done that ages ago but I was lazy.  Hopefully the last of the overhauls will be finished this weekend so I can get back to adding new features.  To round the project off I thought I had better provide a screenshot of the new add file dialog.

The new Create project dialog I mentioned earlier this week has hit trunk as of about 5 minutes ago and everything seems to be working fine as always the svn repository is http://mlowen.com/svn/gIDE/trunk.

Before I get back to adding new features to gIDE there are a couple of more overhauls of the current system that I want to do, the parts I want to look at are:

• Configuration system.
• Add file dialog.
• Remove file dialog.

The configuration system doesn’t need much more than some tweaking and at the most is a nights work.  I’m also thinking about doing away entirely with the remove file dialog as it just seems clunky where a right click menu would do the trick.  The add file dialog is the only one that I’m not overly sure how to approach as of yet, originally it was a quick hack to get the functionality in there (much like the create project dialog) with the intent of replacing it later.  Well the time has come to do away with the quick hack but I’m just not sure what the new dialog should look like, all I know is I want something different from what I currently have which can be seen in the screenshots below.

Default add file dialog.

Adding a new file to a subfolder of the project

As you can see these are pretty bloody horrible, will probably brainstorm tonight and post some design sketches tomorrow or Friday.

Recently I finished the new Create Project dialog in gIDE which integrates with the project template system I wrote earlier, for those who saw the previous one this is a marked improvement. The new dialog is similar to create dialogs in most IDE’s where the user chooses the language they want to work in and the project type. Given that information gIDE will get the appropriate project template and creates the project.  It is currently using a placeholder image for the Project Icon,  I want to make this configurable in the project template and replace the placeholder image with a different default image.

This first screenshot shows gIDE when the create project dialog first opens:

This second shows just the create dialog with some random choices made:

Finally just to round things off a screenshot of gIDE in action working on another project I’m hacking away on:

The working create dialog has not been commited to svn yet as there is one or two small bugs I’m trying to track down but it should be up within the next day or two.