Many late nights have been spent hunched over the laptop, the progress has been harsh on my body. Work has returned to the GUI toolkit & applications now that the Pascal environment is becoming more stable.
Rapid Prototyping Underway
It is now becoming much, much easier to throw together quick GUI mockups, which is allowing me to start developing many applications as simple GUI examples and I’m starting to get an idea now of which ones I want to keep developing into full apps.
Many New GUI Item Types
While initially designed just for menus & buttons, the GUI toolkit has since evolved to include tables, scrollable areas, text editing and more. Now I’m extending it with other features I initially missed such as progress bars, tabbed interfaces and more.
The new compiler is making it much easier to develop reusable compound items as well, some like a standard application “About” dialog have already been added and soon work will begin on file dialogs and other things.
Now that the selection of item types is starting to feel close to complete more work can be put into improving core features like styling…
PDFs Will Be Banned
Work has begun on a new vector graphics format, this will be heavily integrated into the GUI and the Pascal environment allowing for vector artwork to effortlessly adapt to system themes & preferences.
In the future this could be used to drive printers or other things as well, for now it will be primarily used for fonts & icons within my GUI but a more flexible backend is planned!
Advantages Of Simpler Formats
This “vector” art format will probably also be expanded to cover use of pixmap/bitmap data as well, since it would be pointless to require a second container format and a second set of APIs when bitmap data can just as easily be stored as a vector file that only contains a bitmap object.
This would probably be a pain in many other vector file formats, but because I’m using a straightforward series of commands encoded in a plain binary format the pixel data can just be placed in a command following any necessary dimensions & formatting information.
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