Talk:Window creation

These examples show a weakness of this site: Questions needed to be better formed.

The windows that are created here, while undeniably windows, are also undeniably useless.

A better formed contract is this:

Write a program which instantiates a main window with the following properties:

1. Has an absolute size of 400 x 300
2. Can be resized to as large as 800x600
3. Has a title of "Greeting!"
4. Has a child widget in the middle which is a text area with two lines of text: "Greeting:" and "Hello, World". The text should be selectable.
5. Has a menu bar with file and edit entries. In file there should be a "Quit" entry which quits the program. In Edit there should be "Copy" entries. It should copy the selected text to the main clipboard.
6. This should not be a cursor grabbing dialog box, it should be a main window.
7. It should have a background color of green.
8. It should accept commandline arguments to replace the two lines of text.

These are perhaps out of order, but I think people will get the idea. This is a skeleton for a real program. You could modfiy this and get some small but useful thing done.

I agree and have flagged the page for clarification so anyone better suited than I can see this. There are also many types of windows: translucent, borderless, fullscreen, etc. This page definitely needs a concrete definition. --macawm 16:01, 24 January 2007 (EST)

I don't think including widgets in the coding example is appropriate in this case. I could see the above example as a part of a new "Program Template" class, similar to "Programming Tasks". I would fully support the creation of such a class. Heck, I'd do it myself right now if I wasn't already half-asleep and afraid of screwing it up.

For this task, I would want to stick to the basics. I've never had the courage to try GUI programming in anything but VB; the programming examples described in this article have illuminated how to get started. Adding in a lot of code for additional widgets would make the code more difficult to read for beginners.

This also illuminates why it's important to start categorizing programming tasks. There should be a task for adding each kind of generic widget, but that would overpopulate the existing programming tasks. --Short Circuit 23:32, 25 January 2007 (EST)

Hmm

I don't necessarily know if that's correct. If we take the name of the site, Rosetta stone, to be some indication of purpose, than these little snippets are far from useless. They serve as a way to compare doing something, simple or complex, in a variety of different languages. I think it's quite educational, and pretty entertaining, to see the vast differences even on this small question.

Besides, theres no reason why you can't add your question there as another one. But understand its going to be far easier to get users to contribute snippets than skeletons.

Maybe what you actually have there are 8 different questions? Then you could draw the answers together to form your own skeleton. Frater

I agree with Frater, snippets are better than skeletons, the purpose of this site (in my opinion) is to just see tid bits of code to get a person going. Not a full blown app. Once the person has an idea of what to do then he/she can go to the language/library's website for further information. --Adonis 16:13, 24 January 2007 (EST)

Cite Notes

Removed from C+SDL example.

Submitted by Calvin Arndt 2007-01-21 2:49pm CST

Thanks Calvin! --Short Circuit 19:32, 23 January 2007 (EST)