Dev-Picayune

Didn’t get very last night with the launching application. I did come up with a project codename for lack of a good official name for the program. I decided to call it Nevada in reference to the Vegas slots since one of my favorite features of the program (as it was back when I originally did something like this in Clarion) is the ability to quickly rotate or roll to a different bar. The toolbar will have an up and down (or left and right depending on the orientation) set of arrows that when pressed will rotate the bar to the next or previous group of icons. This allows the user to have a set of general icons, programming related icons, graphics or games related icons, etc… I have my friend and mentor Mike Ledet to thank for this design as he suggested the concept in the early days of my work on an application launcher. At this point, I am struggling a bit with my abstraction of objects. I have layed out (at least in my head) a few of the general objects. There will be a generic baritem class from which I will have several child classes — GroupBarItem (which will contain a group of icons) and a FileBarItem (which will contain a single file related item). I may also have a SpacerBarItem (which will be a blank space) as well as a AppBarItem which would be the icon that represents the bar program itself (the item you drag to when you want to add a new item to the bar or you click on to configure the bar). The only trouble I am dealing with now is related to rotating bar concept… whether I want the GroupBarItem to contain an extra property that is a bar number or ID or if I want to handle the rotating just purely programmatically, or how I will actually do it. I can see one day wanting to have sub-bars that appear when you click on the item on the main bar so I have to take that into account as well.