If you have followed my last couple of posts, you have seen my TransformWrapper in action. In this post, I am going to show you one more function. Apart from providing rotation, translation and scale functionality, the TransfromWrapper also inherits from CompositePart,which means I can wrap more than one of my cairo components with it.
Transform Grouping
I will spare you more reading about why this helps and jump straight to the videos…
I still have more work to make the process of grouping a bit more bulletproof as well as more flexible. In particular, standard VisualWorks components can’t be part of a transform group at any level, so checks need to be put in place to make sure the component adheres to my cairo compatible widget protocol. I also want to make it easier to move components within the group hierarchy simply by dragging and dropping. In the video, I also mentioned that more layout / modeling tools need to be developed. As it stands now, I still need to use Photoshop or Illustrator to get pixel coordinate values that I then use for either inter-container offsets, or XY values for arbitrary anchor points. All in time…
