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Date:Mon Aug 24 08:42:35 2002 
Subject:RCLIB being upgraded 
From:Aaron Sloman 
Volume-ID:1020824.01 


Jonathan wrote

> Although I'm not sure that I'll continue using the motif version:
> it doesn't seem to have any significant advantage over "raw" xved,
> and I'll probably be using RCLIB for graphical stuff anyway.

I am in the middle of making substantial extensions to RCLIB to make
it easier to make programs interact with panels created using
rc_control_panel (which automatically formats multi-component panels
containing buttons, sliders, dials, and other things).

At present, although it is possible to get a program to read or update
values associated with individual components of such a panel it is
messy.

I am introducing a simplification which allows the user when creating a
panel to give each field (e.g. a field containing sliders) a label, and
then within the fields to give individual component (e.g. individual
sliders) labels.

Then to access or update the value of a component (e.g. a particular
slider, or dial, or counter button, or scrolltext menu) one will need
the panel, the field label and the component label, whereas at the
moment you specify the panel, the field and then an integer N specifying
the Nth component. This is protentially buggy as panels are developed
and new components inserted, or the order changed.

I am also cleaning up and generalising various other things including
the notation available for specifying features of panel components to
over-ride the defaults for the class.

The need for some of this was accelerated by the fact that a student
here is using RCLIB  to produce a graphical tutorial interface to the
SimAgent toolkit, so that rclib panels specify options in constructing
classes, agents, etc. and running test scenarios. He found the need for
several improvements/extensions to RCLIB.

I have nearly finished these changes and will be installing the new
RCLIB package soon. Documentation is likely to take longest...

However, I intend to make all the changes backward compatible: i.e.
everything that previously worked should continue to work, except
programs that used undocumented implementation details!

So if anyone has been using rclib and has noticed gaps or infelicities,
now is a good time to let me know. I may or may not be able to remedy
them.

Aaron
====
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/ (And free book on Philosophy of AI)
FREE TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html