Given that the work I'm doing to the RISC OS frontend has already expanded in scope from my original intention[1] of giving the toolbar module an external interface in order to make it more practical to finish off the treeview UI and consider further updates, it seems sensible to briefly summarise what I'm up to and where I think it might be leading. Comments welcome: either on the plan (if that isn't too strong a word) itself, or on how and when the new code should be brought into the trunk. While it would be nice to get updates into test builds as I go so that it gets wider testing, the size of the internal rework and the lack of any user-visible changes might make it more sensible to keep the work safely in its own branch until we reach a suitable point to bring it across as one lump (whenever that might be -- perhaps after the next stable release, depending upon when that is). Until visible new features start appearing, there's less benefit to be gained from destabilising things. The work described here is in /branches/stevef/toolbars -- the name reflects the original optimistic intention. :-) As noted above, the aim of the branch I took in December was to start to make the toolbar implementation invisible to everything outside of the toolbar module. With the exception of a few outstanding issues, this is now largely complete. In addition, menu handling has also been moved (or is being moved, in a couple of cases) into event handlers and split out of the menus module into the modules that 'own' the individual menus (with the menus module just looking after the generic menu creation, translation, display and tracking requirements). The code in the branch is currently (as of r11218 or so) fully functional, and should operate from a user's POV exactly as current test builds do. Once the remaining few bits of toolbar interface have been tidied up, I can then finish off the holes in the RISC OS treeview UI which are still present in the trunk, and it should be complete as far as it goes. The next step I'm considering is to update the toolbar implementation, since it should by then be hidden from the rest of the front-end and so 'safer' to do. This would probably entail breaking the constituent parts up into something approaching separate widgets within the overall toolbar and refining their interfaces to the rest of the GUI; after this, it should be practical to add additional bar widgets (thinking specifically about a tab bar for the time being). At this stage, the toolbar's interface could be refined to abstract things like button-bar selections from the Wimp implementation (along the lines of how the menu actions currently work), and the theme code could be split out from the toolbars (at present, despite the new toolbar module, it's all still one lump inside to some extent). Beyond this, I'm clearly thinking about what would be required to give the RISC OS frontend features like tabbed browsing. Timescales are probably best left suitably vague. 1. On starting on the work, it became apparent that my initial investigations had seriously underestimated just how entwined toolbars and menus were in the RISC OS GUI. On realising that the menus module would require serious work, it seemed daft not to bring the remaining menus in line with the new code used in the treeveiws, and then remove the messy hacks that I'd made to the menu handling within the menus module to allow the old and new systems to co-exist. -- Steve Fryatt - Leeds, England Wakefield Acorn & RISC OS Show Saturday 16 April 2011 http://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/ http://www.wakefieldshow.org.uk/