greetings,
it's long time with no news, I hope some of you are still playing
with the module ;-)
I think I'll throw out Win32::GUI next release on the mailing list
somewhere in the weekend, and I wanted to anticipate some of the
news/changes so far:
New control classes:
Win32::GUI::Timer
Win32::GUI::UpDown
Win32::GUI::Slider
Win32::GUI::Animation
Win32::GUI::Tooltip
they are all pretty operative except tooltips, on which I'm
still working on.
New non-control classes:
Win32::GUI::DC
Win32::GUI::Brush
Win32::GUI::Pen
they are intended to do some colorful drawing in a window :-)
supported DC methods are:
AbortPath
Arc
BeginPath
BkMode
Circle
Ellipse
EndPath
Fill
FillPath
GetPixel
InvertRect
LineTo
MapMode
MoveTo
Pie
Rectangle
Restore
Save
SetPixel
StrokeAndFillPath
StrokePath
TextColor
TextOut
phew! I think there's enough to have some fun, for now :-)
I've also added a cool SaveBMP() function to dump the content
of a window into a bitmap file.
...and now for the big things: architectural changes!
the biggest one is that basically you don't need to
create variables to access a window's controls, eg.
you don't need:
$Button1 = $Window->AddButton( ... );
but, instead:
$Window->AddButton(
-name => "Button1",
...
);
and "Button1" (the -name of the child control) becomes a key in
the $Window object (read: hash), so that you can access its methods
with:
$Window->{"Button1"}->Text();
furthermore, I've tweaked an AUTOLOAD mechanism that enables
such "keys" to be seen as subroutines, so you can even use:
$Window->Button1->Text();
to reduce your typing stress ;-)
of course, the old way is still "supported", eg. is always valid
to have a $Button1 variable.
I've tested all this and it seems to work fairly, let me know
what do you think and... hold your breath for the next build :-)
other than that, I'm working on some *precious* suggestions
by Dave Roth (you're great, Dave! :-) to have a version that
will work with every perl build around (ActivePerl 5xx,
ActiveState 3xx, "core" 5.004 and 5.005) and to extend the
message processing and event triggering capabilities.
great things, but I didn't had time yet to make it real...
hope that's enough to keep you awake :-)
bye,
Aldo Calpini
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
LIBERA ME DOMINE DE MORTE AETERNA
IN DIE ILLA TREMENDA
QUANDO COELI MOVENDI SUNT
ET TERRA
