TV_Text_GUI Primitives ???

[jazzed]

Has anyone given much thought to what Text based GUI element primitives can be used with TV_Text objects?

Same goes for VGA I guess, but that seems a little more developed.

I've been playing with TV_Text_Half_Height.spin and friends Baggers provided. I'm quite happy with that so far.

Amazingly, I'm working with a screen geometry of 44 columns and 54 rows (26 text) on my dinky DVD player LCD, and the colors are no more horrible than normal on NTSC :)

I'm able to get some "button" look with it. The thing missing for me is the "dark side." On a VGA button, you have control of the top/left and bottom/right side shading of a button, but I can't get a dark side bottom/right shading without causing distortion in the text on the button.

Text boxes, list boxes, etc... are on my TODO list.

One thing that concerns me is being able to specify a color by name. There is an HTML color chart that gives lots of names and swatches here (http://www.computerhope.com/htmcolor.htm), but many of the names are not intuitive and I'm not sure the colors are actually right - steel blue for example means something else to my eyes.

So, has anyone been down this road who is willing to help develop a list of methods and constants that make sense? What's a good approach?

I want to move on to coding applications and will probably use the yucky definitions I have for now. At some point it's going to be hard to turn back and fix the mess though.

BTW, I'm also looking for a mouse cursor pointer bmp for TV.spin :)

TIA.
--Steve

[jazzed]

Guess the questions are too complicated. Let's try a simpler one.

Did you know that a good TV GUI Graphical User Interface is possible?

[Invent-O-Doc]

Try searching for "visual spin" on the forum - somebody was working on a new IDE approach and it had nice text based GUI features.

[jazzed]

Try searching for "visual spin" on the forum - somebody was working on a new IDE approach and it had nice text based GUI features.
I'll look again, but IIRC that was for VGA only.

[Cluso99]

I am unsure what graphics you are trying to get. The Apple //c ROM could provide an excellent set as they painted tabs etc with their ProDos. The PC's line graphics could also be useful.

But this doesn't get you shading which you seem to be after. I am not sure where to begin here.

[Rayman]

BTW, I'm also looking for a mouse cursor pointer bmp for TV.spin :)


Check out my Chess program for TV and VGA for a "magic" cursor (multi-color). The code is a mess, but I want to fix it up and add it to Visual Spin soon.

I do want to extend Visual Spin to TV, but haven't gotten to it yet..

[jazzed]

For now, I'm just hoping to have a few methods that allow me to:

fill/draw rectangles
make buttons with with outlines kind of like VGA_Demo.spin (almost doable)
Specify any color on the screen with a space or other character (possible?).
Have get* methods to get the screen pointer, geometry, and row/col position.
Have a consistent color specification interface.


Stuff like that - preferably without needing to use an extra tool to get there although having a tool at some point is fine. I rarely use windows these days.

[jazzed]

Ok, part of the puzzle is solved by the Graphics_Palette.spin colors example.

That program produces all simultaneously displayable TV colors on screen and allows users with a mouse to identify the color number used for display.

The only thing this doesn't do is provide color names. I think I'll try to associate the available colors with names in the HTML spec and provide a color key table - I have to make up some names to replace the numbered ones.

@potatohead,

If you're reading this, could you do me a big favor and capture the Graphics_Palette.spin output to a .png file and post it here? Thanks.

[potatohead]

Sure...

I would suggest a blur operation be applied to average the colors captured. Edit: Maybe that isn't needed. The capture looks pretty good, though there is variation in each swatch. Up to you.

Also, this set is the "official" colors. There are more possible, depending on display device tolerance.

[Dr_Acula]

I think some of the answers might come out of potatohead's all color thread.


fill/draw rectangles
make buttons with with outlines kind of like VGA_Demo.spin (almost doable)
Specify any color on the screen with a space or other character (possible?).
Have get* methods to get the screen pointer, geometry, and row/col position.
Have a consistent color specification interface.


draw rectangles - that could be done with 4 corner tiles, a vertical line tile, horizontal line tile and a fill tile
make buttons - as above but better shading (possibly even start with a screen capture of a button and then chop it up into bits.
specify any color. Yes - I'm working on that now. I'm thinking of starting with 3 byte/pixel as per a bitmap, then writing a bit of code to map it to the nearest prop color. Paintshop has a palatte that you can move the cursor around on and watch the three RGB values change from 0 to 255. I'd like to be able to plug those 3 values into some code, and get a single byte value for vga, and a (what will be different) single byte value for TV.
Screen pointer - not sure about that one
Color specs. see above.