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

5 comments:

Ollie said...

Great stuff Don. I see you have options for Applet Sandbox. Is that a prelude to running Sage in a browser in an Applet?

Don D said...

The sandbox versions on the site refer to versions of the current applications that do no require any special privileges on the client. Having made that work does give me the ability to have a pure Applet version of Sage that can run in a browser without having to be signed. I intend to have that option available by version 1.0

Ollie said...

That's what I hoped you would say. This could easily give many if not most of the AJAX toolkits a run for there money. Version 1.0 eh? Can't wait.

Ollie said...

Any thoughts on google gears or some kind of synchronized offline capability?

Don D said...

I use the built-in offline capabilities of Java webstart (it will cache JARs and will run from the local copy if it cannot make a network connection or if the jar has not changed).

Sage has the concept of Static, Dynamic and Hybrid apps (which is determined by the URL).
- Dynamic apps load everything off of a server.

- Static apps load everything (resources, UI, data) from a jar and thus the whole app can run unconnected. When the user reconnects it will check for newer versions of the jars.

- Hybrid apps combine the two (generally resources and some static screens in a jar, and data and dynamic screens on a server).

You can also have desktop shortcuts automatically created for the apps.

If I had configured the static versions of my demos to create a desktop icon then you could double click on the icon and launch the demos without having to be connected.

The only thing I am missing (which I thought of while I was writing this) is an option to automatically switch from static to dynamic if the server is available. Right now you would have to write a couple of lines of javascript (or ruby etc.) to do that

I haven’t played around with gears to know how they transition from connected to unconnected and how you get their database on the user’s machine.