- sectors (graphics) kh/ok add help
This item is based on Ricardo Moran's project "Sectors.8.pr" circulated in November and December 2011 on the Squeakland Educators' Google Group. It provides a new kind of object called a "Sector" which resembles a pie wedge.
The code from that project has now been extracted and submitted separately as a new item on the Squeakland tracker at:
http://tracker.squeakland.org/browse/SQ-1007
In this version, brief balloon-help messages have been provided, so if people have no objections, it should be good to go. I also attach a copy of the compressed fileout to this message for convenience in testing.
There has been a certain amount of discussion of this feature in the Educators' Google Group, including one request for a variant in which instead of presenting a true sector of a circle, the endpoints of the arc subtended are connected by a straight line, thus resulting in a triangle. But in the version described here and posted to the tracker, Ricardo's original circle-segment implementation is used.
Anyone wishing to try this out: download the proposed fix from the tracker url given above, or use the attachment accompanying this email. Fire up an up-to-date 4.1 etoys dev image; open a file-list and navigate to the fix file, and "install" it.
Now look in the Objects catalog, under "Graphics", for "Sector". Drag one out. Open its Viewer. Shift-click on the object to get a yellow angle-changing handle. Change the angle using this handle, and watch the value of "angle" change in the Viewer, and vice-versa. Try placing a watcher for the "angle" variable right beneath the sector -- you could even embed both a Sector object and a corresponding angle-watcher in a larger structure, such as a Rectangle.
Comments, please! Any objection to this going into the release? It would be great for a nice example or two of each new feature to be included in the release. Something involving pie-charts might be good for this one…
-- Scott