LTE Feature #1

Over the last few posts, we’ve talked about how World Machine started, and the fact that the UI is a critical blocker. Last post, I introduced the new framework we’re moving to – QT.

As promised, I’m going to try to write more frequently about small bits of the work being done to move World Machine to the new framework.

So let’s start with something very simple – the left side toolbar.

Views are a changin’

In the old MFC framework, every button and objects on screen required that its location was set manually and specifically. You could use a visual editor for some items, but the resulting designs were brittle and couldn’t be resized easily.

We’ve moved on. In the web world, so-called “responsive design” is the norm – the idea that if I change the size of my display, the design should adapt to the space we have.

Luckily, QT defaults to something very similar with its concept of Layouts. You specify the contents you want and the constraints that you want to apply, and it will figure out where to place things.

This is a tremendous tool!

For example, let’s look at the left side toolbar. In the existing 3028 build, everything is hand-placed and hard-coded. You CAN resize the space allocated to the toolbar, but it doesn’t do anything useful..

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This is almost certainly not what you want 😉 But manually adjusting all of the positions and sizes of the various elements on a resize is a very obnoxious chore.

Being able to make the leftarea bigger or smaller has been requested since the start. In QT, with minimal additional work, we get it for free:

We can now easily resize the left-side toolbar to get a bigger preview, and all of the buttons and elements resize and re-position themselves in response. This is particularly powerful in combination with the new high-def previews that occur – but we’ll talk about those in another post 🙂

Until next time!

Stephen