[etoys-dev] Copying Graphing tools and Speech Bubbles to Inbox

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 14.08.2010, at 19:00, Ricardo Moran wrote:

> Hi, I've just uploaded a new commit to the inbox. It contains all the graphing tools and speech bubbles with most of Bert's suggestions fixed. I'm sorry for the big commit but I moved my older commits to treated because they were incomplete. Now the only commits needed to have these tools working properly are: Morphic-Richo.33 and Etoys-Richo.32
> I hope they got accepted into Etoys. I'm excited :)

I think they will :) I cleaned out the inbox today, merged all submissions, made minor modifications. 

I only did not merge Etoys-Richo.32 yet. It is much nicer than the previous version, but still not quite there IMHO:

* the "remove" tile duplicates the existing "erase" tile
* barColor duplicates color
* a lot of graph tiles duplicate holder functionality
* a "bar table" is something in a club ;) I think calling it "table of values" would be better  
* privateExtent:/privateCenter:/privatePosition: methods duplicate the existing extent:/center:/position: methods
* there is still a reference to Vector (though only in an example method)
* there already is another object called "Graph" in the object catalog
* none of the new slots have a balloon help
* some of the "plot - ..." categories are quite short, they should be merged
* apply, max, min, remove, are all a bit short. There is already minVal/maxVal and getMinVal/getMaxVal for example which you could reuse

I think the apparent complexity could be simplified when adopting more of the holder vocabulary. Instead of "index" call it "cursor". "point x" would be "x value at cursor" or so. Etc. 

Ideally, the graph would just *be* a holder/playfield. E.g. in a bar graph, the user might just put plain rectangles or sketches or whatever. Instead of extra labels, use the rectangle's name. The value would simply be calculated from the object's width and the bar scale factor (just like you did for points, which can be moved freely - cool). Same for xy graphs - the points could be *any* object in a playfield. And possibly even points and vectors could be unified - a point would just be a vector of length 0? That might be not the best idea, I don't know. How much more time do you have in your project?

I have no serious complaints about the bubble implementation (except for the empty help balloons on the tiles), but you submitted both together so I could not merge them yet.

- Bert -