New GUI and Controls

So, when do we have a chance to play with it?

Very soon! The new textbox and VirtualKeys were my big hurdle. Went a lot smoother than I expected. And those numbers include render time.

Tinkr is so much faster than Clix, I’m very pleased. 4.2 fixed a couple of things I used to have to work around which has really helped as well as a total code overhaul.

I start full time work on this Wednesday morning so you can expect an emailed linked that night. There is absolutely no documentation yet though, which is why I wanted big hitters testing :slight_smile:

Rock on!!!

For comparisons sake I updated Clix to work with the CP7 and ran it side-by-side against Tinkr.

They both had the same text which composed 38 lines, the same width, and the same height.

Clix rendered touches caret updates at an average of 63ms
Tinkr rendered the same events at an average of only 15ms

Making Tinkr roughly 4.2X faster.

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Hi, It looks very promising!! When will it be available? (for testing and development)

We’re getting very close to a release. 25 controls/helpers have already be built and tested. We have just over a dozen to go.

Right now I’m working on the demo for creating AppDomain launched applications in Tinkr. At the same time that allows me to code TinkrLink which is a tool that allows you to send programs and applications to your device over serial to be tested in RAM instead of using up a flash write cycle. You’ll also be able to use it as a sort of FTP appliation.

[Double-post from timeout issue, seems to be happening a bit today.]

Hey Ian you going to have some time to test a new build this weekend? Big changes, easier to use and more controls.

Absolutely. Most of my weekend [nights anyway] is going to be spent working on Gadgetab UI and trying to integrate in some other projects and give them UIs. Send it along!

Living the dream with this stuff.

Tinkr now as built in application support that dwarfs Pyxis & Gadgetos. How about being able to send messages to any running application? What if those messages could reference back to controls outside the AppDomain? How about a nice response code too?

Here’s my current example:
Main program creates an Appbar, AppBarIcon and Bluetooth object.
Main program gets an event on every application launch.
On that event main program sends a message to application giving it access to the Appbar.
New program puts its icon inside the Appbar.
If Bluetooth isn’t marked as used main program sends the serial port to the program
If the program responds with ā€œUSEDā€, the Bluetooth gets marked as used and its AppbarIcon gets sent to the program as well.
The program now controls both the Bluetooth serial port and the Bluetooth AppbarIcon.
Bluetooth is marked as used and no longer sent to new applications until an ApplicationClosed event fires for the app housing Bluetooth’s SerialPort.

Cool. If this is in the new build your sending me, please include a sample. I’m not sure how all this is supposed to be stitched together but it sounds perfect for my application.

Already included, I’m just about to send it off.

The application requires Bluetooth, which I think I saw in your video.

Got it. Yea, I have BT.

Chris’ Pacman runs on Tinkr…and you can scale it. :wink:

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Good one

Well it doesn’t look like I’ll have everything finished before I return to work this Wednesday but thanks to Ian’s testing and input this will e a very great product pretty soon.

Right now I’m just getting the last few bugs out and creating sample applications and documenting.

Since I can’t rely on users having any goodies besides a screen the sample project will be pretty basic like Clix was.

However I want to show off what it can really do when it’s got some nice hardware behind it so I’ve returned to a bit of work on the tablet. Applications now run off the SD card and can update themselves via Bluetooth.

And Ian, I took some more suggestions. Appbar now has a ā€œlarge modeā€ with 32x Icons and I put in a couple of larger fonts. Using Calibi 18 regular on context menus makes them super easy to tap. I’m sure I’ll take a few more of your suggestions before the final release. :smiley:

The tablet has adaptive font sizing. All 4 icons are exactly the same custom control with no font initially supplied, font is chosen by the control whenever the text changes.

In this case it’s choosing each of the 4 fonts it allows itself to pick from in order: Calibri 18, Calibri 14, Calibri 12 and Calibri 9

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Awesome. Looking forward to putting my hands on it. Due to some problems on my end and lack of time, I ended up just showing the Gadgetab video during the last few minutes of my presentation yesterday at CoderFaire to show off Tinkr and what’s possible on the Gadgeteer UI front. It was a big hit! I had several people approach me afterwords to learn more. Although I normally try to stay away from including displays in my own projects, folks that know nothing except PC development are really drawn in when they see that these devices can have a UI. I’ll take 'em any way I can get 'em :wink:

On another note… One big thing that came to surface yesterday is that there is an Arduino users’ group in Nashville of which I was unaware. I had a long talk with the founder during lunch and he’s a little tired of running the show. So, he’s handing his membership over to me and we’re becoming one big NashMicro.net! Also, I met with a local vendor who has a great meeting space and has offered to let us use it. I still have to nail down the exact date but sometime in the next 6 weeks we’ll be kicking off NashMicro and hopefully converting over a bunch of arduino users :slight_smile:

Nice! So, does that mean you have to include four sizes of your fonts or does it only use them if it has them?

The control in question is special made for the tablet. I plan on including it or some other with the samples to show how you can create your own controls easily to work with Tinkr. That specific control clocks in at about 40 lines of code and yet still has every feature the others do because it derives from a base class. :slight_smile: