After 6 months of laziness LIST-VIEW 0.0.52 is finally out with numerous bug fixes and additions.

You can check it out in the Downloads area.

Every now and then I get the question whether LIST-VIEW will be available for RebGUI. As I'm a VID person, there's little chance I'll ever get to do a RebGUI version. I know only little about RebGUI and so it would take even longer for me to figure out the inner workings of RebGUI to do a port.

Therefore, if you are a RebGUI developer/user and really want LIST-VIEW there, I will support a port of it! In fact, I will go so far as to answering questions you may have about the inner workings of LIST-VIEW. Nice, eh?

Some requirements would be that the VID version and RebGUI version remain in sync. So if I make some changes for the VID version, they can get in the RebGUI version as well without too much fuss.

Perhaps this can be done by building LIST-VIEW for each GUI system with a simple build script, but we'll get to that.

LIST-VIEW for VID3

LIST-VIEW is a large, monolithic beast, with currently over 100 kb of code, of which about 20% of it is not used at all. This is currently more than the entire of VID3's source code (excluding styles) and is of course unacceptable. Furthermore the graphics system in VID3 is quite different from that used in VID and the mechanisms of drawing the list can't be done without a rewrite.

Therefore there will not be a straight port of LIST-VIEW for VID3. Instead, the VID3 team will work on a very capable list view style that won't do everything that LIST-VIEW can, but instead have essential features, be faster, smaller and be easy to expand with more features. Furthermore some data processing features like filters and sorting are likely to be moved outside of the style. The final result will hopefully be better than the current LIST-VIEW.

A few critical bugfixes are fixed in the latest 0.0.51, particularly with regards to SET-FACE and CLEAR-FACE. It can be downloaded, as always, from the downloads section.

The old Demo lab is gone now, since it was not useful since version 0.0.15, which is quite a long time ago.

This has now been replaced with a demo section, which can be seen here.

It's been a long time, but LIST-VIEW 0.0.50 is available now! There's a ton of fixes and a few new features.

Check the downloads section to see more.

I've focused on the things that happen when you click on an empty row, that is, a row that is not represented in it's block data.

Out of that came the three new EMPTY-ACTION, ALT-EMPTY-ACTION and DOUBLECLICK-EMPTY-ACTION, which mirror their LIST-ACTION counterparts, except they are only used on empty rows.

Sorry for skipping the announcements of a few versions, but many smaller changes are under way, and it's a bit tiring to just report on them when the History does that so well. Instead of repeating that here, I will comment on some hidden obscured code in LIST-VIEW. Perhaps you have noticed that LIST-VIEW has gained some weight over the past couple of months...

Drag'n'drop columns

There's a bit of work done already for drag'n'drop columns, but there is still a large amount of stuff left for doing this fast enough. Speed is essential and I want this feature to be done so you can see clearly what's happening when you try to drag a column away from its original position. Therefore I'm modelling the feature on how MacOSX does it.
This involved making images of each column and moving them around, instead of redrawing the entire list when moving the mouse. It'll be interesting to see how this works on slower machines and how much memory it requires.

It still looks crappy, but it'll get there.

Completed Keyboard Support

Even though there is keyboard support, it's only properly supported in SINGLE-ROW mode. This is because I'm implementing a Cursor mode, which will allow you to use a cell cursor, similar to what is used in a spreadsheet to navigate the list view regardless of which selection mode is used. When this is done, you will have a very large amount of freedom in what can be done with the keyboard.

That's about it for now.

I skipped mentioning about 0.0.39 and 0.0.40 because I considered them to be too unstable for general use. But here is 0.0.41!

In short, there's been a lot of work done in the area of the new selection system and I think it's moving very well towards stability. The new selection system is awesomely flexible (perhaps too flexible?). A few other bugs regarding the new update method has been fixed as well.

I'm going to take a few days "off" to work on some commercial stuff which takes advantage of LIST-VIEW, while I think through some of the upcoming features. Which one will be implemented next? I don't know yet... but it's going to be a high priority feature.

There's also been a little bit of talk about porting LIST-VIEW to RebGUI. I hope this happens, but there is a need for studying how this should be done, because I know nothing about RebGUI at this stage. I hope this will be a simple matter of providing a build script that provides a few changes to LIST-VIEW. I expect to do a lot more work on LIST-VIEW and porting should take a minimum amount of time every time there is a new release of LIST-VIEW.

I'm afraid it will be a while before LIST-VIEW 0.0.39 comes out. The new select system is giving me a big amount of issues with most functions in the list.

Two new select modes have been added so there are a total of 7 different select modes. Basically I haven't tested for anything but the original SINGLE-ROW select mode type yet, so there's a long way to go.

Many bugs have been squashed, but many still remain and I want some degree of stability before I can unleash it to avoid having your applications break.

This one contains some updates to UPDATE, which should help you to make LIST-VIEW update faster when doing complex operations. This really speeds certain things up, and by example, building all the images for the documentation is about twice as fast now.

The more I work with LIST-VIEW, the more I can tell how much there really is left before I'm satisfied and can call it the big 1.0. Plenty of bugs have been fixed, but there is still a long way to go. Currently I think LIST-VIEW is about 55% done. That's right. 55%,

I don't know how much longer it'll take to work the remaining issues out, but I expect development to carry on at varying intensity for the next 4-6 months. It's not really that I want to include the kitchen sink with LIST-VIEW, because there are some things I don't think it'll ever be able to do, such as making it work completely like a spreadsheet.

LIST-VIEW is first and foremost row-oriented: You can add, remove and change rows. You can select, move and sort rows. There are a few cell oriented operations, but they aren't flexible enough for use in a spreadsheet or at least in a data cell view that treats s and columns equally.

ROW-ACTION works great and immensely increases the flexibility of LIST-VIEW from this:

To this:

I hope you will take advantage of it!

Sometimes it's hard to tell the changes in a new version of a piece of software unless you use it for a while. With 17 changes in LIST-VIEW 0.0.36, I think it's one such release: Much better working sort buttons, eliminated some excessive redrawing, bugfixes and row actions.

I think it's working out pretty well now with the most basics in place, still missing some fancy things like drag'n'drop reordering of columns and horizontal scrolling. If I don't get too many bug reports back, I might take a short break from it to give it a workout in my other apps such as Tester and other apps that highly depend on it. This way I can shift between working on stability and features.

I can't stress enough how much of a benefit LIST-VIEW has become for me over these past three months. Setting up a layout and get a working advanced list literally in minutes is only helpful to productivity.

Finally with updated docs. Get the stuff from the download page. I hope column specific filtering will turn out useful.

I have not mentioned it yet on the demo page, but the demo from the screenshot in the previous entry is available here.

LIST-VIEW will contain more advanced filtering from version 0.0.35. Finally!

What does it all mean? It means that you can do column specific filtering, filter on whole words and use multiple filter simultaneously.

I hope 0.0.35 will complete testing over the course of the next 1-2 days along with the docs on this particular topic, so it can get released.

Stay tuned.

This one provides a minor update with a GET-RANGE function to let you get the data of multiple selected cells or rows and is useful.

Example:

If you have a list-view LI with a few bits of data selected as a multi-cell block:

You can get the data returned as a block of blocks:

  >> li/get-range

  == [["Meenie" "Miney"]["Green" "Blue"]]

This works on any size and shape of block.

No docs update in this round, sorry! There are a few quirks with programmatically selecting multiple cells, which I may fix for 0.0.33. That is all for now.

This is mainly a bugfix release, again focusing on inline editing, but also a few other areas.

I have opened up a demo page which I hope will grow over time with educational examples of using LIST-VIEW. This deprecates the current demo to a test suite. I don't plan to update it anymore as it's growing too big and complex for general use.

The blog hasn't gone dead or anything. Here's what I'm doing:

Work!

I'd like to have a chat with the guy who invented money. The concept of having to work for a living to make money removes my attention sometimes from LIST-VIEW and other exciting projects. Making money and then see them all being taken away again by the glorious government in the form of taxes, makes it seem a little futile and depressing. Money is unimportant to me, but unfortunately necessary for luxury consumer things like food and shelter and possibly later on a Macbook Pro.

It's hard being altruistic these days.

Back to seriousness: LIST-VIEW should be ready soon in 0.0.31. I've decided that I want to keep the few next versions to bug-fixing. Bug-fixing is boring, but necessary to make it more fun for you to work with. There are still too many bugs in it before I can call it "beta", and I'd be a lying A-hole, if I called it "stable". I was even attempting to build a new range of examples of LIST-VIEW for introductory purposes, but I had to stop, simply because I kept running into bugs.

Most of these should be fixed now, however, so I can start working on the examples again. The examples should provide much simpler and clearer insight to how to use LIST-VIEW than the List Demo program and that program will be phased out when enough examples have been made.

After this, I'll get back to implementing more features. See ya.

This is the biggest release yet, with 17 entries in the history list!

I've emphasized on inline editing and added a lot of features and fixed bugs related to that.

Get it from the Download area.

Riddled with both bugfixes and a few new features! It can be downloaded from the download page. The history of changes is there too.

This is required for Tester, which also can be downloaded in a very early prototype from the download page.

LIST-VIEW has been growing fast these past three weeks, but there is way more to come to make it really cool. You see, it's nice to use as an element in your own GUI, but it also has the ability to function as a stand alone data editor similar to the already built in text editor. Right now you can do this:

block: copy []



view layout [

  li: list-view with [

    data-columns: [a b c]

    data: block

    editable?: true

  ]

  btn "Add Row" [li/append-row]

]

And you can now graphically edit BLOCK using three columns, A, B and C.

With a few more modifications, you can add and delete columns in the list dynamically. This isn't possible directly in DATA yet, as it will only add columns to a single row, but I plan to add functions to let you do this to all rows in DATA. This will make it a fully fledged block editor with a few lines of code.