Hi to all,
I am here because I need your help. I am studying AmigaOS4.1 SDK and I have read a lot about it on the AmigaOS Wikipage (Dev Section) and I read one good tutorial here about the best practice on what to do and what to do not..
Now I am able to manually open libraries, get the base library pointer, get interface and use functions inside a library. I am also able to create a window object and put inside of it a button object. So far so good (thanks to wikipage and the tutorial of OS4Coding.net).
What I am not able to do or to better say I wasn't able to find is updated documentation about the gui building and about the gui layout.. What I have to read? I red the layout.doc file inside the SDK/Documentation but it talks about the method.. What I am looking for is something that explain how to place object inside a window... In this way I can understand how to build my own gui..
On OS4Depot I found a gui tutorial but it uses macros and, I guess, old code style that is not good (my guess)
Thanks a lot for your help!
P.S.: my final goal is also to write simple tutorials to explain how to start from scratch with amiga os development for newbie like me...
Not sure, but inside SDK a PDF file called Reaction_Guide.pdf can help you e little more, and as you posted in os4depot reaction examples will help you too. Maybe in os4depot there are tools/programs that comes with sources so it can help too (example DrawerExplorer)
Or check here in the forum pages: http://www.os4coding.net/forum
AOS4.1/SAM460ex/PPC460EX-1155MHZ/2048MB/RadeonRX550/SSD240GB/DVDRW :-P
Your questions are right on target.
In the heyday of classic Amigas, we (or at least _I_) was working without Reaction, and managing all the GUI stuff in a very simple way. It was easier to learn, but it was limiting. If you read the older SDKs, or download old examples, you'll see about "Gadget Structures" and how to work with them.
With Reaction came lots of very nice changes.. Personally I am "old school" and classes and Objects are not my favorite topics, mostly because they seem to lack documentation by hiding the internals.
The Reaction macros looked nice, but they don't adapt well to change. Personally, I could not get a grip on Reaction until I read the rather excellent guide to Reaction programming that Trixie wrote. Once I decided to take every one of his suggestions as rules, everything started making sense.
I'm not an expert, but I highly recommend his examples as _THE_ starting point, and the other people here as helpful guides along the way.
Like many others, I have put together my own "starter project" that includes lots of stuff that is common to most of my projects. I have standard code for opening all the libraries, devices, and classes. Code for parsing command line arguments and tooltypes, and some other common things. I also have a set of routines for dynamic string management, which eliminates fixed string lengths in almost all cases.
If you'd like to see my "starter project", I'd be happy to share it. Not as "the way", but it works as "my way" for my own needs.
And good luck with your project. It could be valuable to a lot of people!
LyleHaze
LyleHaze
Thanks for the replies and the informations! I did progress since i opened this thread and now I am able to create a little gui with four buttons placed in the window both horizontally and vertically.. I think I have figured out how layout works about the gui.
Next step is understand where to find all the information about gadgets as it seems to be placed all over the sdk (autodocs, include, button_gc.doc, intuition.doc etc etc..)
fingers crossed! :-)
Thanks!
Edit: I forgot to say that I learned a lot of things with the examples that I found here on OS4Coding forum! :-)