Carbide.c++ Developer 1.1 - the missing features

[jimgilmour1]

Well I have had a test of Carbide.c++ Developer 1.1 and I feel its missing a lot.

Due to the fact that in 21 days time we have to PAY for this SDK I am going to be blunt about this rather than my forgiving way in the Express version.

I am going to ignore the install problems, cryptic error messages and many other "UNEXPECTED features".


GUI design is always a difficult because when the design is programatically complete we naturally expect that is what peolpe want. The reality is like the build process of edit, compile, run, debug, re-test, modify over and over again.
GUI' s are an art. Graphics is an art. Sometimes the way to display these need changing.

The ability to drag and drop GUI components is paramount to RAD Rapid Application Development. The pressure is to get a working GUI is paramount is a project.
How many times have we heard. "What do it look like?"."Can I see what it looks like?" from the customer or manager.

I took an original code example that I have been desiging in a GUI and tried to rebuild it using the GUI builder supplied with Carbide.c++ Developer V1.1. I failed because of the missing GUI Palette Controls

So whats missing?, well heres my top three.

In the palatte there a 2 layouts. in S60 there are 18 layouts I can count.
So why pick 2. Reading the style and theme guidlines there are no such restrictions. Take a look at Carbide.UI this has a lot of layouts, problem is the documentation does not show you how to get there.


Avkon has Forms. The code is in document "S60 Platform: Avkon UI resources: -Forms"
Does a Multi Form wizard exist? No. See page 13 for Code
Does a Forms resource generator exit? No.
See page 16 "Section 4.3 Creating Form from Resource" line 20 onward for the code.

Does a Form Layout with Double-line field with sting and icon label template form wizard exist? No.
See page 16 "Section 4.5 Creating Form Fields Dynamically Resource"

Does a XML to Form Field Layout Wizard exist?. no For example See Microsoft Access.
refer to 4.5 Defining Menu items in a form.

Akvon Listboxes

refer to document
"S60 Platform: Avkon UI resources: -Listboxes"
How anyone could have left off Listbox controls on the drag and drop after the amount of postings in this forum is amazing.

Surely this is the most requested feature in S60 development ever
I got 420 hits on a search of Forum for "listbox" Mostly how to create one!.

I tried to find one that would suit most and my choice is
in Section 4.2.10 Double item with small graphic
The code for this is in Section 6.3 Creating a Selection listbox page 21

Then of course there is Editors, What use is information if you can update it on the move.

Here we need to generate a resource file the template code is on
Akvon Editors

refer to document
"S60 Platform: Avkon UI resources: -Editors"

Section 3.4 page 14
Multi Field numeric editor resource Definition structures
This Section shows how to create the resource file needed.

page 15 details the code needed to create the editor controls.



Finally some of you might think this is all too hard but the code is generated from code templates and as there are 3 controls already available the code generator must be available.

If you want to have a look at extending controls is eclipse visual editor.

see the Eclipse tutuorial "Build GUIs with the Eclipse Visual Editor project"

This is of course neccesary to have an indepth understanding of java when you try and extend Visual Editor.

Jim Gilmour
Forum Nokia Champion 2006

[jimgilmour1]

Since reading the Carbide.c++ help notes for the Developer version I found a description which says that the Avkon Form screen layout is supported but not a control, but this is limited to minimal activity and needs manual update of the code for the Rich Text and Global Editors.

from Carbide.C++ UI Designer Release Notes

CAknForm has a built-in menu. For this reason, no menubar object is created by the wizard for a Form design.
In view mode, the only menu item is "Edit" which switches the form into edit mode. In edit mode, the default items are "Add field" "Save" "Edit label" and "Delete field".
The code generated by the UI designer for the DynInitMenuPaneL override removes all edit mode items except for "Save" since this is the more common use case. However, to use these items, users can remove the appropriate lines and override the appropriate CAknForm methods.
(E.g., to handle "Add field" remove the line for EAknFormCmdAdd and override CAknForm::AddItemL())

Rendering for these components reflects only 'default' formatting (no formatting is applied at designtime). Only char formatting properties are exposed in these components reflecting only those listed in the "Formatting" section of the S60 document titled S60 Platform: Avkon UI Resources — Editors which is available with the S60 documentation plus bold and italics.

This would mean a specific style template could not be applied and running the code would be the only way to see the layout of the form.



Jim

[dpodwall]

Hi Jim,

I'm the tech lead for the Carbide.c++ UI Designer. I think some of the things on your list may be things we do currently support, and others are things we need to add. I'd like to work through your list in detail to make sure we've covered everything.

>In the palatte there a 2 layouts. in S60 there are 18 layouts I can count.
>So why pick 2. Reading the style and theme guidlines there are no such
>restrictions. Take a look at Carbide.UI this has a lot of layouts, problem is the
>documentation does not show you how to get there.

Do you mean the UI design creation wizard, or the palette shown once you're already in the designer editor? The wizard has four choices:
1) empty container. This starts you with an empty CCoeControl container to which you can add anything
2) Form
3) List Box. This is a shortcut for a CCoeControl with a list box.
4) Setting item list.

The palette general has a lot of items, but I think I'm getting tripped up on terminology. I'm not sure what you mean by 'layout' in this case, and which one's we're missing. Please give a few examples?

>Avkon has Forms. The code is in document "S60 Platform: Avkon UI
>resources: -Forms"
>Does a Multi Form wizard exist? No. See page 13 for Code

It's true we this release doesn't support multi-page forms. We couldn't support everything in the first release, but we will be expanding the control set. Customer feedback will drive the prioritization.

In the current release you can use Avkon view switching and the tabbing support in the Application Editor to accomplish the same UI, but of course the code is different. See this for more info <http://blogs.s60.com/creatingcarbidecpp/2006/09/s60_ui_designer_application_ed.html>

>Does a Forms resource generator exit? No.

The designer definitely generates resources for the design you create. It also generates the C++ code you need to run the form, but it puts as much in resources as it can. Note that the resources are put in a file with the extension .rssi that's included from your project's main .rss file. Is it possible you didn't see that file yet?

>Does a Form Layout with Double-line field with sting and icon label template
>form wizard exist? No.

Once you have a form open in the editor you can configure both of these. See the "double-spaced format" and "show image in prompt" properties in the Properties view.

>See page 16 "Section 4.5 Creating Form Fields Dynamically Resource"

So you'd like to see a feature to define fields from data other than resource? Any details/use cases you can think of will help us understand better.

>Does a XML to Form Field Layout Wizard exist?. no For example See >Microsoft Access.

Any more detail you can give on this? Is there some standard XML schema/pattern you typically use for this?

>refer to 4.5 Defining Menu items in a form.

The requirement here is that you want the designer to support custom menus in forms, in addition to the default one?

>refer to document
>"S60 Platform: Avkon UI resources: -Listboxes"
>How anyone could have left off Listbox controls on the drag and drop after
>the amount of postings in this forum is amazing.

We haven't left them out. They're support in CCoeControl containers, but not in Forms or Settings item list containers. To work with list boxes you can either:
a) Choose the list box design in the wizard (as mentioned above), or
b) Start with the empty container and add the list box from the palette.

One thing worth mentioning is the list box can't be used with other arbitrary controls in a container. So once you've added, for example, an Image control, the List Box is remove from the current palette. When there are no such other controls in the container then the List Box is shown.

Carbide.c++ also support the single and multiple item list query dialogs. This post talks about working the dialogs from within the editor <http://blogs.s60.com/creatingcarbidecpp/2006/08/s60_ui_designer_working_with_q.html>

>Then of course there is Editors, What use is information if you can update it >on the move.

All the editors have quite a few properties you can modify to customize their appearance and behavior, at any time. These are in the Properties view when the editor is selected.

>Here we need to generate a resource file the template code is on
>Akvon Editors
>
>refer to document
>"S60 Platform: Avkon UI resources: -Editors"
>
>Section 3.4 page 14
>Multi Field numeric editor resource Definition structures
>This Section shows how to create the resource file needed.
>
>page 15 details the code needed to create the editor controls.

I'm not sure what you mean. We do generate resources these editors. Please look at the .rssi file and let us know what we can improve.

Again, thanks for this post, and I really do hope you can follow up so we're sure we've understood your issues. I can also be emailed at dan.podwall [at] nokia.com.

Regards,

Dan Podwall

[dpodwall]

This is a reply to Jim's second post.

On the Form & menus issue, it's true we don't support a custom menu resource here, just the standard one. The release note is pointing out how to support the "more advanced" menu items, such as "Add field".

On the Rich Text and Global Text editors, the note is explaining that we don't simulate arbitrary format of text in the designer. It's correct that you need to run the program in the emulator to see rich text. However, this is not a limitation applying generally to editors and other controls in the designer. It's really a specific issue for those two controls.

Dan Podwall
Nokia

[jimgilmour1]

Thanks for your answer glad to see someones listening. I think developer going well. I have used the Java Visual Editor palatte system and perhaps the most difficult is to decide what to leave out and what would be most useful otherwise you get code bloat.

Jim

[dpodwall]

Thanks Jim.

I don't know that we got closure on the points your raised in your original post. I understand if you don't have time, but any indication of which things are still lacking vs. which were adequately explained in my reply would be very helpful.

Regards,

Dan.

[jimgilmour1]

Hi,
The Rich Text well I personally dont believe its a big problem. However judging by repsonse of other posters they may not be as easy going, especially as they will have to PAY for it, and paying always make people more sensitive. My main worry is that editoral reviewers (zdnet) tend to make comment on this sort of thing.

I have discovered an interesting fact that I do have a "List Box Item" control in the Birthdays example in the Controls Palette, but ONLY when I am in the BirthdaysList.uidesign.

When I flip to the BirthdaysForm.uidesign my "List Box Item" disappears and a "Pop Up Field Text" item appears in its place.

When I switch back to BirthdaysList.uidesign my "List Box Item" reappears


My finding of the Listbox above came from looking inside the Carbide Developer plugins at
C:\Program Files\Nokia\Carbide.c++ v1.1\plugins\com.nokia.sdt.series60.componentlibrary_1.1.0.5\components\listbox. The help system intially gave nothing because the word "listbox" was used

The Menu Palette has similar problems, This changes from 1 control to 4 controls in

When using Help Search I entered "List Box Item" and after ages help came back. (Not the first item but the 13th on second page!) I found a picture of a palatte control box with 4 items (Image,Label,List Box,List Box Item) of course I only have one !.

There is a spelling error on this page as well, trivial for English speakers.
"List Box - a list that maps to the baisc S60 list boxes"

There is no reference to this context switching of Palette Control or Menu controls.

Clearly help documentation does not remotely match the way the UI works.

This is of course why I originally thought the features did not exist.


This is different functionality to the original Visual Editor for Eclipse.
Some clear message is needed to get this through.
The Cabide Video tutorial for Carbide.C++ UI for example based on the original Carbide.C++ video.

When you load a VE custom Widget it stays there. see page 14 of the article
"Extending The Visual Editor: Enabling support for a custom widget"
link at
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Arti...tomwidget.html

Hope this helps,

Jim

[dpodwall]

Hi,
The Rich Text well I personally dont believe its a big problem. However judging by repsonse of other posters they may not be as easy going, especially as they will have to PAY for it, and paying always make people more sensitive. My main worry is that editoral reviewers (zdnet) tend to make comment on this sort of thing.

Understood

I have discovered an interesting fact that I do have a "List Box Item" control in the Birthdays example in the Controls Palette, but ONLY when I am in the BirthdaysList.uidesign.

When I flip to the BirthdaysForm.uidesign my "List Box Item" disappears and a "Pop Up Field Text" item appears in its place.

When I switch back to BirthdaysList.uidesign my "List Box Item" reappears

Yes, I think I mentioned above that list boxes are not supported in forms. Do you have a use case where you want a form that contains a list box?

There is a spelling error on this page as well, trivial for English speakers.
"List Box - a list that maps to the baisc S60 list boxes"

Thanks.

There is no reference to this context switching of Palette Control or Menu controls.

Clearly help documentation does not remotely match the way the UI works.

This is of course why I originally thought the features did not exist.

Good feedback on the help content, thanks.

This is different functionality to the original Visual Editor for Eclipse.
Some clear message is needed to get this through.
The Cabide Video tutorial for Carbide.C++ UI for example based on the original Carbide.C++ video.

When you load a VE custom Widget it stays there. see page 14 of the article
"Extending The Visual Editor: Enabling support for a custom widget"
link at
http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Arti...tomwidget.html

We're not based on the Visual Editor. One thing that's different about Symbian/S60 over something like Java, is that there's more specialization of containers and controls. One of the bits of early feedback that we got was that users didn't want a palette populated with all sorts of controls that couldn't be added with the current container. After we added the filtering to show only relevant controls we have much improved feedback.

Regards,

Dan Podwall
Nokia

[jimgilmour1]

We're not based on the Visual Editor. One thing that's different about Symbian/S60 over something like Java, is that there's more specialization of containers and controls. One of the bits of early feedback that we got was that users didn't want a palette populated with all sorts of controls that couldn't be added with the current container. After we added the filtering to show only relevant controls we have much improved feedback.

Thats fine, but some sort of map of what control is available at what point is needed.

More updating to help file is needed could just be on-line document. A section in help is needed to indicate whats available when and where. In my opinion you cant beat video for learning about GUI. A series of screenshots often works just as well.

Jim

[ddubrow]

Thats fine, but some sort of map of what control is available at what point is needed.

You can always turn off palette filtering with the toolbar icon (the one that looks like a palette). This toolbar item is documented in the UI Designer help under Reference/UI Designer Editor/Toolbar. Here is the help on this:

Enable palette filtering to dynamically update the Palette to only show components that can be placed into the UI design and hiding all unusable components. When disabled, all components are shown.
Palette filtering is enabled by default.

Turning it off, you can see everything in the palette, even if it's not applicable to the current design's context.

I hope this helps.

David Dubrow
Nokia

[dpodwall]

You can always turn off palette filtering with the toolbar icon (the one that looks like a palette). This toolbar item is documented in the UI Designer help under Reference/UI Designer Editor/Toolbar. Here is the help on this:

Enable palette filtering to dynamically update the Palette to only show components that can be placed into the UI design and hiding all unusable components. When disabled, all components are shown.
Palette filtering is enabled by default.

Turning it off, you can see everything in the palette, even if it's not applicable to the current design's context.
Nokia

But this still won't show a list box in a form container, or a slider in a CCoeControl container, for example. Turning off palette filtering toggles whether the designer filters based just on the container types, or also takes into account other items currently placed in the design.

[ddubrow]

But this still won't show a list box in a form container, or a slider in a CCoeControl container, for example. Turning off palette filtering toggles whether the designer filters based just on the container types, or also takes into account other items currently placed in the design.

It will allow the editors to be visible in the palette for the listbox design (e.g., in the birthdays tutorial) since removing the listbox from that design would then allow an editor to be placed in that design.

[jimgilmour1]

Checking the help information with various expressions I found most of the information I need.

Functionality is fine and its the looking up the documentation thats the problem, but as the engine is embedded in Carbide and is built in Eclipse.

Looking back if the indexing of documentation had been better I would not have encounterd these
I cant see any more problems.

Jim

[frank_T]

Jim --

I'm the lead for the Carbide.c++ documentation and I have some questions I hope you can answer that would help me improve the manual for everyone.

As the Eclipse documentation is automatically indexed when help is opened for the first time, I'm wondering what you were searching for and not finding. Was it some technical terms that are present in the SDK docs but not used in the UI Designer manual, or something else?

Was the table of contents not organized to make it easy for you to find the information you were looking for? Was there anything missing you'd have liked to see there?

And, the big kahuna, what would make the docs more useful to you in the future? If you had one thing to change, what would it be?


L. Frank Turovich
Nokia

[jimgilmour1]

Hi,
Example "list box control"
in Carbide Menu
Click Help
Click Search on the drop down
Gives a box the enter "list box control" (no quotes)
Click "Go"
I get 71 hits.

The results are not as you think about Carbide but about S60 Maintenance Release programming.
The first entry about Carbide.c++ Control Components is on the second page of 10
and 3 item (13th total) is Carbide.c++ UI "Controls Components". This is should have been a direct hit, see later about hit rates.

What I see is jumbled list with seemingly no index or order. This seems like grabbing loads of entries from anywhere

Anyone has to search through 70 entries to find the right one is going to have real problems.

The more words I put in the more it should narrow the search, but instead in Carbide I get more hits.

How do I say give me only Carbide.c++ UI entries?.
Can I switch off where the search results come from ie only from"Carbide.C++ UI help"


Should my search term have been list AND box AND control. AND UI to force a narrow search.
-------------------------------------------------------------
I have developed my own system based on Google Desktop.
I extracted all the help files into a series of directories.
I then ran the Google Desktop indexer on these files. Help files being HTML were easily indexed.

I can now search on this and as you would be expected the search list was 10 items all from Carbide.c++ UI.
This leads me to conclude indexing is the problem not the lack of information.

Another comparsion.
I enter search as before Tutorial
I get 63 hits in Carbide, but top 5 title hits in Google desktop. See below
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tutorials
Getting Started These tutorials will guide you through the process of using the
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tutorial: Birthdays
This example shows how to use the Carbide.c++ UI Designer for S60 to define the UI of an application and to implement the "real work" in the generated code.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tutorial: Yahoo! Image Search
This example shows how to use the Carbide.c++ UI Designer for S60 to define the UI
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ant & external tools tutorial

This chapter covers Eclipse's external tools framework, and its integration with Ant, the
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Basic tutorial
This tutorial provides a step by step walk-through of the Workbench. ...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
CDT Standard Make Tutorial

[Eclipse Workbench displaying The C++ Perspective] [IBM Copyright Statement].
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
UI Designer Tutorials
UI Designer Examples The following complete project examples include explanations of how the default UI
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
In this case you can see find exact keyword match
followed by alphabetcial sort of topics with the keyword Tutorial also the plural has Tutorials has been added.

When I used the exact wording "List Box Item", I got 86 hits.
The top hit should have been.
Control Components.
because it has the exact phrase
List Box Item - the content of a single item in a list control.

If I search the Oxford Dictionary of English Words for word tutorial I get 1 or 2 entries not 86.

So do I believe the Carbide help is like a huge book without a proper index. The documentation is all there. There is the occasional mismatch and the odd bit of detail missing.

The help text could do with running through spell checker, so could mine, but I am not trying to convince people to buy it!.

Why can Google Desktop work sensibly with the word " (Tutorial) " on Carbide.C++ documentation and Carbide.C++ cannot?.

Finally I am trying to make sure this product works out of the box.
No suprises. Due to the amount of complaints how hard it is to write Listbox code. I was suprised when I could not see the list box and the search of help did not initally work. This is why I started this thread.

David Dubrow quoted the documentation:-

UI Designer help under Reference/UI Designer Editor/Toolbar. Here is the help on this:

Enable palette filtering to dynamically update the Palette to only show components that can be placed into the UI design and hiding all unusable components. When disabled, all components are shown.
Palette filtering is enabled by default

This is when I realised the documentation was the problem not the program.


I still cannot find the documentation about how the palette controls switch on and off.
Using searching . I have to go via the Sections. All very messy.

Summary
I think it an indexing and searching problem



Hope this helps
Jim