[ge-talk] A layout manager

[Christof Lutteroth]

Hi!

I am a researcher at university, and my colleagues and me, we have done
some research on GUI layout. In particular, we are using linear
programming to calculate a layout that is specified in terms of linear
constraints, and higher-level constructs that are easier to use but can
be translated to linear constraints, such as spreadsheet-like layout.

I was wondering if this could be interesting for Haiku. It has been
suggested in the scientific literature many times before but has never
really made it into the real world, although it has clear advantages. It
allows GUI designers to focus more on the specification of a GUI in a
declarative manner, i.e. how it should look like, instead of on the code
that renders the GUI. If you are interested have a look at this paper:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/lutteroth06user.html
This is old already but it explains some of the basics. In the meantime
we have extended the approach to use linear programming so that the
layout manager can automatically consider the preferred sizes of
controls. For example, this can be used to solve font sensitivity issues
automatically.

We implemented our ideas in C#, and it would be relatively
straightforward to port that to Haiku. For example, as a BLayoutView
control. What do you guys think about those ideas?

Cheers,
Christof