andrei

I’m very interested in designing the GUI for our next products we’ll be working at. MDI is *very* outdated, I won’t ever bother to search for .NET components in this area. Tabbed GUI like VS.NET’s are also nice but not for our application (they fit better with Firefox). SDI is the latest trend in this area, so we’ll let Windows’ window manager do its job. Another issue are the panes – here the old-fashion style is the using docking ones. 3D Studio’s scrolling panes are original but not very usable, and the conclusion is that floating panes is the way to go.

Some friend of mine working for Symbian told me it’s not possible (I’m talking about streaming in the opposite direction, i.e. from phone to PC) because the major operator companies feel that this will threaten them (VoIP is just an example). I will surely take a look over the existing APIs to ensure they don’t allow this and afterwards study if it’s really not feasible at all.

Next year the final of the ACM (or ICPC?) contest is in San Antonio, Texas. I was lucky enough to go in 2002 in Honolulu, Hawaii for the finals, and now I think to get into ACM again. What’s cool about San Antonio is that iD Software is pretty close, I’m starting to get excited about seeing John Carmack.



The regional phase will be in autumn but until then we’ll go to some internal competitions in our University. As for the team (there should be three people) we are still looking for one person, me and one friend Adrian ‘Micutzu’ Drumea being definitely together. But beware, the third mate should be from our University too.



Anyway, I got some sites where the contestants practice before the official competitions, they are http://acm.timus.ru and http://acmicpc-live-archive.uva.es/nuevoportal/ . So I open a new category of posts entitled “ACM” for all the comments related to this contest, hoping to get into problem solving pretty soon this month.

Or the float:left attribute is deprecated? (however couldn’t find at the first sight something to replace it with). I guess tables, but I don’t want to mess this way the .Text asp.net code. If you didn’t see the issue, beware that the posts should be left-aligned in the browser window (just open the page with IE).



UPDATE: Dragos (no blog, no link) told me how to fix it (there is no Mozilla bug actually), however there are still some issues with the page layout (a big margin somewhere). We all want it to be corrected.

But what’s so cool with Cocoa and Xcode is the Interface Builder and the MVC pattern. Basically one can implement much of the functionality just by dragging and connecting objects. So by using the NSArrayController class it shouldn’t take more than 2 minutes to design simple add/remove functionality on a list(array) of objects (that are stored in an internal array ready to be used in the code, later). It’s definitely this will be the path in my next project, also writing some other really useful and flexible controllers is necessary (something like a NSTreeController to manage a tree-like structure in the code). Oh, and you can bind undefined fields of one object (later, those fields will be implemented with Objective-C code in the class) to other fields (even from standard controls also like edit box value). So Cocoa is a very nice step in the good direction (me coming from MFC), even if the C++ interfaces are missing.