Subject: Re: catching up with pending design issues
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Feb 29 2000 - 03:50:25 CST
At 07:19 PM 2/22/00 -0800, I wrote:
>There's been so much excellent design and development work going on since
>0.7.8 shipped, that I've really been struggling to keep up with what
>everyone's been doing. For example:
>
> [...]
>
>Every morning, I tell myself that *today* will be the day that I finally get
>through my backlog of folks I owe feedback to, only to get swamped with new
>issues. After spending most of the afternoon working my way backwards
>through the list, I know that today is *not* the day, either. :-)
Argh! I'm still digging, and I've barely managed to keep up with all the
new stuff this past week.
I keep telling myself that this is a Good Thing, because it means so many
people are working on cool features. Still, it's frustrating for me
personally to not be getting back to folks sooner, and it's gotta be
frustrating for you too.
So, here's a quick status review:
> - tabs dialog (shack)
> - word count dialog (Sam)
> - symbol dialog (Martin)
In all three cases, there's a mostly-complete Unix and XP implementation,
but we're still waiting on a final patch to review before folks can start
porting to other platforms.
AFAIK, no further design feedback is currently needed here. If so, please
send mail to the list summarizing what you need.
> - to patch (Joaquin)
Either Shaw or Bob mentioned to me today that they're still working out some
final details to help make sure that this feature Just Works. However, I'm
fuzzy on the specific details of what, if anything, still needs to happen
before this patch can be applied.
> - overwrite mode (Alexey Sinutin)
I've got a patch from Alexey in my in box which looks quite complete. As
soon as we settle the "stickiness" debate, we should be close to getting
this checked in.
> - image handling (Justin)
This one's been bugging me all month, ever since Justin and I missed each
other at Linux World. We know that we'll want image converters which take a
blob of raster image data and convert it into PNG format so we can use it.
Once we have them, all three of the following kinds of code will need to be
able to select and invoke these converters:
- Edit / Paste menu
- Insert / Image menu
- importers for Word and other file formats
Essentially we need a tiny switching mechanism (kind of like the impexp
ones) which decide which converter to invoke. Once we have that mechanism
in place behind the appropriate APIs (hand wave, hand wave), it should be
reasonably straightforward to add in the relevant XP image libraries to do
the conversions.
At this point, I'm not interested in revisiting the usual stale ImageMagick
discussion. Instead, I'd like to make headway on the precise spots we'll
need to insert APIs to allow each of those codepaths to either generate PNGs
or realize that no conversion is possible.
> - CJK stuff (hj, hashao)
I wish I knew enough to comment intelligently on these discussions from
earlier this month. If anyone else can help out until Henrik gets back,
please do.
> - lists (Luke)
> - fields proposal (Keith)
These two are probably the meatiest issues on the table, and I'd love to
start making serious headway on them -- especially since there's such a
strong relationship between them. I'm having a hard time deciding which one
to tackle first:
- the lists implementation is definitely further along, but
- there are more 1.0 features which need the new fields design.
I did manage to spend a few hours this afternoon looking at various list
UIs, and I'm almost to the point I can talk intelligently about some of the
issues involved.
Expect more on one or both subjects by, say, Wednesday.
bottom line
-----------
I'm still swamped. If you feel like you can help make headway on any of
these issues, by all means jump in and start discussing them. It gets kind
of lonely for all the authors of these features to post stuff to the list
and have to wait patiently for feedback.
So, if there's anything you can do to help get this features finished off so
we can get them into the product, that'd be great.
Thanks,
Paul
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