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Dimitri


7,413 post(s)
#24-Dec-18 07:20

I'd like to wish everyone celebrating Christmas tomorrow a very merry Christmas!

A few words on plans for the rest of the year before many people switch into New Year celebration mode:

Plans are to wrap up many details in Style while the iron is hot. There are many small details and a few more significant items, such as repeating vector patterns in areas, that really should get wrapped up now and not included later, as originally planned.

Conversely, there are a few items that were planned for further out that should get done just before Legends, namely, grouping of frames and grouping of other elements, such as, perhaps, layers. This is important for legends because legends from an internals perspective are really constellations of constituent sub-elements where there has to be convenient and orthogonal means to deal with elements individually or as a group.

The general notion of grouping layers/frames/elements is something that occurs in many places, where often you want one "handle" for a group while retaining the ability to work with just one element, if desired. For example, it would be convenient to drop an entire layout into another layout. To the extent user interface controls can be the same for such things, you can make it a lot easier for people to learn how to do something just once and then be able to apply it in many places.

So rather than do an implementation of legends and then re-do it with sensible grouping, it makes sense to enable basic grouping capabilities first, even if that pushes Legends into the first build of next year. The Cutting Edge build planned for the end of this week, therefore, will wrap up details for Styles and then the first builds in January can do a better job with Legends.

It looks like Legends and grouping and a few other items will make a good place, together with well-rounded Styles, to issue a new official build in January. After that, Cutting Edge builds can move on to Rasters, Geometry, etc., as mentioned in other threads.

All in all, it is a very productive time right now. It is an interesting effect how in Silicon Valley many marketing people disappear between Christmas and the New Year, while for development that often is a very productive, calm time to make great things happen.

I hope everyone on the forum has the opportunity to make best use of this special time, either for taking a break or for a relaxed, but strong, push forward to sign off the year with a flourish!

KlausDE

6,410 post(s)
#24-Dec-18 09:32

Giving consent to this road map I want to add if the focus on groups isn't the right place to invest developing time into a component collector component or a map in a map.


Do you really want to ruin economy only to save the planet?

adamw


10,447 post(s)
#24-Dec-18 11:48

That's exactly one of the reasons we want to hold legends off for a bit - to try and use item (layer / frame) groups not just in layouts, but also in maps.

tjhb
10,094 post(s)
#27-Dec-18 22:12

Thanks very much for this outlook Dimitri. Much appreciated. The detail bears repeat readings.

It's often the case that great design shows levels of self-similarity. The planned treatment of layers/frames/elements as things that can be grouped, or nested, has a similar feel to how whole Manifold projects can be nested now. (And at a language level, the way SQL statements can be nested, whether as ordinary subqueries or via FUNCTIONs, table VALUEs, or the EXECUTE statement; or the way a query can reference a script, and a script can execute an SQL command, and so on.)

I think once the new grouping structures are in place they will feel familiar and quickly obvious.

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