[sword-devel] Windows CE: application layout

[Johan Gorter]

Hello Troy and other people interested in the windows CE application,

About Troys latest remarks:

>When displaying a lexicon, this is a simple edit box that does an 
>incremental lookup as you type.

>When displaying a general book, it is a 'path' textbox, with an expand
>button.. e.g. [Topic 3/Chapter 1/Section V/][*]
>If the [*] button is pressed, a tree control is displayed that shows
the 
>book's table of contents and lets the user navigate and select a new 
>location.

>This seems like a lot of work, but for me, it would be straightforward 
>to implement if I could have the UI designed and functional.  If I had 
>the controls in place, and an example of how to populate/respond to the

>controls, I should be able to hook them up to the engine with no
problems.

>I understand that you want this to be a basic reading application.  I 
>would like to honor this desire and not show any of these controls if 
>these types of books are not installed.  I'll try to keep the interface

>only as cluttered as required for the books that are installed.

>Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

I do think that these would be valuable extensions to the windows CE
application, but the current design is aimed at an audience who just
want to read the bible instead of studying it. I think that just
extending the current program would not lead to an optimal application,
therefore I suggest the following approach:

We make two applications, one for just reading the bible and one, more
complicated, to also study the bible. In practice this only means having
two gui's for the same dll. The best way implement this, I think, is to
have a new compile-option (like -DSIMPLE) which, when turned on, results
in the simple application. The current code is modular enough to support
this. We can simply use all the current code when we design a second
'navigator' object (or do something with inheritance).

You-guys should realize that I am not an expert on bibly-study tools. In
fact, I do not even know what a 'Strongs number' is. This is why the
complicated application requires a lot of cooperation. I think that the
idea of using the menu-bar as a tab control is a very powerful method,
which we can easily extend. If we replace the text of the menu-items by
icons (only in the study gui), we can add more pages. My first
suggestion, based on the remarks above, would be to add the following
pages:

- A page displaying the greek/hebrew (accessed by clicking on a link in
the normal text)
- A lexicon page
- A books table of contents.
- A books text.
- An options page containing several available options.

I can do the work on the gui (providing I have the time) while other
people work on hooking in the engine parts.

I am looking forward to feedback and additions to this idea

Greetings,

Johan