In Netlogo how can I make a second page to the interface, or a pop-up HUD (Heads up Display), to store widgets that I don't use frequently and simply clutter up the main interface?
Rationale: multiple widgets ( sliders, switches, etc.) are helpful for SETUP but then I'd like to hide them to keep the interface clearer, smaller, and less overwhelming to viewers.
Volker Grimm suggested that a set of tabs, each opening a pop-up window to manage different portions of complex models would be helpful.
Since the pop-up might have its own viewing area, you could use it to visually adjust parameters, such as a Normal or Poisson distribution that you want to use for input, without having to use your main interface's viewing area to accomplish this.
In fact, being able to open a second ( or Nth ) graphics window ( "world") into your model could be helpful
Preferably the pop-up would have persistent memory and could be hidden or shown with a single click.
Here's my own solution to the pop-up HUD question.
I used the LevelSpace extension ("ls") in the main model to pop up a second model containing the widgets I'm trying to show or hide as desired.
The main model has more details about how this works in the INFO tab.
In this prototype proof-of-concept, the main model simply displays a few turtles wandering around the world and has hide/show buttons to pull up the HUD.
The HUD has 3 sliders that can be used to set the number of turtles, size of turtles, and shape of turtles, and a button to upload those new settings all at once to the main model. The main model will check once every GO step for updates and apply them and mark them applied.
Alternatively, the HUD can be set to be in automatic-update mode, so the sliders are basically live and as you move each one the changes immediately show up in the main main model ( at the next GO step ).
It works! The full models with the interface buttons and INFO tabs are in the Netlogo Modeling Commons as "Popup-HUD part 1 of 2" and "Popup-HUD part 2 of 2" for download. ( just search for "HUD" as there are only two hits. )
They won't run over the web because they use the LevelSpace extension which isn't available there. You need to download the main model to be able to read the INFO tab.
These are free to copy, modify, etc. so long as attribution is made ( CC 4.0 )
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A big problem for me creating diagrams in visio (and powerpoint and similar programs) is that if you have a background object, it blocks you from selecting multiple objects by lassoing. Instead you end up moving the background around, this is annoying.
In many applications there's an option to "lock" or "protect" a specific object so it becomes un-selectable while still visible on the drawing. In Visio there is no simple way of doing this as far as I'm aware.
There's a rather convoluted way of doing this, it feels to me like Visio designers wanted to make this difficult on purpose. The methods I'm aware of I list here, feel free to let me know of a better way(s)
You can protect objects from selection by going to (hidden by default) Developer tab and pick "shape design"-> protection -> selection. However this does not actually protect them from selection, which makes sense . To actually protect the said object from selection, you have to open drawing explorer, which is also hidden by default and the visibility tickbox is in hidden by default Developer tab under show/hide section.
Drawing explorer, however won't highlight whatever object you have selected in the drawing, another unexplicable design decision. If you want to see the name of the object you've selected with live update, you have to enable the diagram navigation pane. That's found in View tab on Show section under "task panes" icon. This pane does highlight whatever you've selected and you can rename the object to give it a meaningful name, but not change the shape in any other way.
To finally protect that shape from selection, right click on the top level document on the drawing explorer and pick "Protect document" and tick "shapes" and hey presto, now your background rectangle is visible but not selectable. Very straightforward indeed
There are also layers which offer similar functionality but they naturally come with their own gotchas.
You can see layers on the Drawing explorer under foreground pages, page name, "Layers" tree. To move an object on a specific layer, you cannot do it by right clicking on the object, because of course you can't. There's an assign to layer button in Home->Editing->Layers->"Assign to Layer", which will let you select the layer(s) for the selected object. You can also do this by right clicking on an object from the Drawing explorer, but you have to know the object name, because there's no reverse selection .. The object name you can get from the Diagram navigation. By default "protected" and "lock" layers do nothing.
To change what the layers do, you again go to the Home -> Editing -> Layers and select "Layer properties". This is also available from Drawing explorer by right clicking on the "layers" tree under a specific page. Here you can control if the layer is visible and/or protected. However, if you lock a layer, you also cannot move objects to/from it, as that'd be too easy. So you have to untick "lock" if you want to move stuff in and out of a protection layer.
So there are two awkward ways of doing that that I'm aware of.
If the shape really is a background object then maybe you should be looking at putting the shape on a background page. You can then make it the background page for your active page. That'll fix all your shape selection problems.
I need to know how to set the order of elements shown in EA's project browser programmatically (in order to mimic the green arrows).
The tree view can not be sorted freely. EA puts a couple of constraints on the sorting. So diagrams, packages and a couple of other elements appear always on top and in groups. This is hard coded.
Use Element.TreePos to change the order where appropriate to simulate a manual order.
FWIW: Features have another queer behavior sometimes. You might need to uncheck the following in Tools/Options:
in the mobile game we are designing there exists three somehow similar menus:
Main Menu (with a bunch of icons like home, settings, share,toggle
sound,....)
Pause Menu (almost the same with just the text and icon sizes and
placement changes)
EndGame (very similar to pause menu with options to restart game)
now, there are at least two ways I can think of creating these menus:
Create one menu and change positions and sizes of needed icons/texts
in script
Just create 3 different panels in unity UI and call each one that is
needed.
As the assets used in both cases will be the same (well, in second case maybe more game objects) which one is a better solution?
I can write the script as easily as I can create menus (both take almost the same amount of time to develope)
I would recommend to make some kind of MenuViewManager class, with ability to load menu view from XML file. This can lead you to nice translation system in the future and can be very responsive for changes.
Here I've found some article, which can help you start:
http://unitynoobs.blogspot.com/2011/02/xml-loading-data-from-xml-file.html
I recommend having one Canvas with multiple panels. Each panel can be for a different menu (main, pause, game over) or a different set of options in the same menu (main, settings).
Have a script on the Canvas with places to drag each panel. Then turn on/off the panels from code.
You can also create a script to attach to the panels, which has public Button variables, which you can assign in the inspector. The Button objects you drag there in the inspector can be prefabs, so you can reuse them in any menu.
The more reuse you have, the more efficient it will be.
Here's the issue, I build a special book reader/browser (For holy quran), my code behind loads the page and constructs how it should look. and then it should bind that look to a some kind of data-bindable custom control to view it properly. the problem is, the look differs from page to page, so I cannot bind to a certain control or wrap panel.
here's how it generally looks:
The decorative border top of the page is always there at any page, it indicates the part and chapter the viewer is in.
If you're starting a new chapter it have additional image under that decorative border or anywhere in the page (there can be multiple chapters in the same page) something like this
or this:
The normal text is not an issue, it's just a special font, however, I put each individual word in its own text block for reasons of user selection by word.
The issue here is, given the previous information, and knowing how random it is to place the decoration picture or the amount of words (text blocks) per page. how can I bind that to some kind of view to separate the view from the VM and Engine that builds the page.
my past solution was to actually build everything in the VM in a wrappanel built inside a scrollviewer having lots of textblocks and images according to the page. but that's naiive solution. I want to rebuild that in a more professional separated way. I also want to do this for Windows RT beside Windows phone so I need to reuse the code behind in a Portable class library.
I think all you need to do is slightly adjust your current design. So perhaps have a VM that represents the entire content, and that would have a Collection of say Pages or Sections. A second VM would represent the Page/Section, allowing you to create a property for the WrapPanel content (i.e. the words) and another property for the Header and or other things.
In the View you would have the scrollviewer and bind to the main VM collection. Then create another View or DataTemplate that represents the Page/Section.
You should be able to do this is a strict MVVM sense quite easily and it will be dynamic based on the content.
You could even cater for advanced scenarios where each section has a different template/view.
My understanding of GWT's Activities and Places is that for a given region on a screen you have an ActivityManager and an ActivityMapper. You can have multiple regions on the screen which means you can have multiple ActivityManagers and ActivityMappers (one per region). So, whenever there is a PlaceChange the ActivityManagers ask their respective ActivityMapper what activity it is supposed to be showing given the Place. This works great as long as your Places all have a common layout that they reuse in different ways to perform different activities. My question is how do we handle the case where different Places use radically different layouts? My first thought is to just have even more ActivityManagers and ActivityMappers, if the Place doesn't use a particular region then the ActivityMapper for that region will simply return null when we change to that Place. If there is a better way I would appreciate any wisdom.
I found it much easier to use a single ActivityMapper/ActivityManager pair for the entire app.
In a typical case you have a "menu" region and a "main" region. The menu region is very basic: a click on a menu item sends a user to a new place. It also highlights the newly selected item and resets the style of the previously selected item. All of this can be easily done in a simple widget that you can include in all views where this menu is required. Having separate ActivityMapper and ActivityManager for the menu region just complicates everything without providing any benefits.
I use the same approach for "top menu" region and "left menu/tree" region: a widget that tells the presenter which data to show in the "main" region.
I have over 50 different places in my app, and it really helps to have a simple architecture: each place corresponds to one view and one activity.