Monday, November 12, 2007

Version 0.6 Released

Version 0.6 has been released (slowly but surely making my way to version 1.0). This version is functionally complete and the APIs are relatively stable. The developer toolkit now contains a modified version of the Abeille Forms Designer. This version has a new file menu option that allows Abeille forms to be saved as SDF. Most of the property forms in the Widget Explorer were designed with this tool.


The Widget Explorer allows most of the widgets and their associated properties to be visually configured and explored in real-time. You can play around with multi-color gradients, semi-transparent background and overlay images as well as non-rectangular line borders, all of which can be combined to create some interesting visual effects. These features are supported for most widgets.


You can also check out the MS Outlook Demo again which highlights the support for gradient selection painters with custom borders and having the border (and focus rectangle) around the row instead of the column (when columns are not selectable)


A note on colors:

  • plus and minus (+- ) are used to adjusts luminance
  • when using hex, you can specify the alpha value for a color by adding it to the end of the normal 6 character hex string (e.g. #ffffff80 gives a 50% transparent white) or if you use a named color then you can say “white@50” to get 50% transparent white.
  • you can type any shorthand color value into any of the color fields and it will resolve to the correct hex color value