X-Designer 7.0 - The Enterprise Edition
New Features of Release 7.0
For more information on the other great features
of X-Designer
you should refer to:
Motif 2.1
X-Designer 7.0 has first class integral support for Motif 2.
You can use all the features and new components in your
design.
Accessibility
Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act requires, amongst other things, that Federal employees with disabilities are able to use any computer program. X-Designer 7.0 complies with this legislation by being 100% keyboard accessible:
- All resource dialogs are fully keyboard accessible
- Navigation via keyboard has been reworked for natural tab flow in dialogs
- All menus throughout the interface have been reworked for keyboard mnemonics
- There are enhanced visual clues of the current focus
- The Pixmap editor and Palette Editor have new keyboard support
- Associated tools, e.g. XDcapture, XDreplay, XDconfig, XDadmin, etc., have been reworked for keyboard accessibility
Tooltip Help
X-Designer 7.0 includes tooltip help for the items in the toolbar, the widgets on the widget palette and the tools and toolbar items in the Pixmap Editor. Brief descriptions are displayed as you pass the mouse pointer over these items.
Using a portable library provided with X-Designer, you can also add tooltip help for widgets in your own designs; in MFC, Java and Motif. In addition they support Motif 2.1 render tables, can be Internationalized and are fully backwards compatible with Motif 1.2.
Usability
Much work has been done on X-Designer to make use of the Motif 2 features, and to increase ease of use:
- SessionShell front end: X-Designer participates in session operations
- Notebook/TabManager resource panels
- Enhanced Search: can now search by Widget Class Name
- Better geometry management of the main front end
- Examples reworked for Motif 2.1/X11R6.
The Uniform Transfer Model
The Uniform Transfer Model is new in Motif 2 and provides a way of implementing drag and drop, clipboards and selection. This is provided as part of the toolkit. Each widget comes with a Destination Callback and a Convert Callback. These are called by the Uniform Transfer Model when it requests data from a widget or sends data to a widget. The Uniform Transfer Model is not available for Gadgets.
Support for Popup menus
Motif 2 provides automatic support for Popup menus within widgets. They no longer have to be parented off the XmDrawingArea.
New Widgets
The following Motif 2 widgets have been incorporated:
- ComboBox - a composite TextField and ScrolledList widget
- Container - a constraint widget for IconGadget children
- IconGadget - displays both text and a pixmap
- Notebook - a container which lays out its children in "pages"
- TabManager - a pre-configured Notebook set to provide a tabbed panel. It is used for X-Designer's resource panels
- SessionShell - enables an application to save and restart a session
- SimpleSpinBox - cycles through a list of simple text fields
- SpinBox - cycles through a list of items
- GrabShell - immediately grabs the pointer and keyboard
- PrintShell - enables a widget hierarchy to be printed
Note that the GrabShell and PrintShell do not appear on the X-Designer palette by default. They provide very specialised functionality and should only be used if you have a specific need for the behavior they provide.
Other Extensions
The new Motif 2.1 extensions to existing components have been incorporated:
- Tri-state toggles, new indicator styles, indeterminate colors, pixmaps
- File Selection Box path mode
- Paned Window orientation
- Scale Tick Marks, Scale and ScrollBar Thermometer mode, Slider marks and visuals
- Gadget coloration
- Layout Direction
Resources
The resource panels have been redesigned to use tabs and a SpinBox in place of option menus.
Resources which are no longer valid in Motif 2 are marked as deprecated.
There are extensive new resources for Gadgets and for the Scale widget.
There are three new general callbacks which affect every widget. They are not applicable to Gadgets. They are:
- Destination Callback - called by The Uniform Transfer Model to request data from a widget
- Convert Callback - called by The Uniform Transfer Model to send data to a widget
- Popup Handler Callback - called by the Popup menu handling mechanism
XML
X-Designer 7 provides the ability to save your design as XML. In addition support for parsing/processing the XML for browser/web pages is included.
Code Generation
The Code Option dialog from the Generate dialog contains a new options menu with the following options:
- Motif 2.1 - ignores anything marked as deprecated
- Motif 1.2 - ignores anything marked as Motif 2 only
- Default - generates all, irrespective of version
If you have used any of the new widgets and wish to generate Motif 1.2 code, the widgets are mapped automatically to a sensible available variant.
When generating Java Swing code, X-Designer 7 allows you to choose between versions 1.2 and 1.3 (as a single option) or 1.4.
UIL code
There are a number of enhancements for UIL code:
- Abstract and nested UIL object generation
- Enhanced UIL resource generation
- Motif 2.1 support
- UIL support for the Java Layout components
Other
The Java Emulation widgets and other supplied sources, including Tooltips, have been enhanced for multi-threaded environments and are `thread safe'.
There are Motif 2.1 feature and Motif 1.2 deprecation indicators.
Deprecated Motif 1.2 code has been replaced with Motif 2.1 enhancements.
Compound string generation has been reworked to the new model, including support for Tab separator segments.
Support is included for X11R6 extensions: Xt SessionShell, SessionShell resources and callbacks.
Work has been done on X Visuals and Colormaps:
- Private colormap generation and application
- Application Visual depth and class discrimination
Support is provided for application Xlib/Xt error and warning handler generation.
Application-specific command line Xrm options can be specified.
There is extended Java support:
- Motif 2.1 mapping
- Java 1.4 and the JSpinnerModel
- Several other fixes and minor enhancements
There is improved MFC support:
- Motif 2.1 mapping
- Several other fixes and minor enhancements
The Client/Server code has been reworked to give Motif 2.1 component support for Java, MFC and Motif.
A number of other miscellaneous fixes have been incorporated.
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