[Newbies] Creating a coverflow effect in Squeak

[Bert Freudenberg]

On 14.06.2008, at 19:03, Ross Boylan wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 13:43 +0200, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> ....
>>
>> The path methods are a beautifully simple and useful, but they are
>> also a particularly bad example of Morphic programming.
> Does this mean that they could be done properly in Morphic?  In other
> words, is the problem here with Morphic, or with this particular
> approach?
>
> Or maybe it's just very difficult to do properly in Morphic?

It's more complicated - e.g., both definePath and followPath are  
single methods now, done properly it would require at least a few  
methods - setup, event handlers, stepping, cleanup ... the control  
flow would be sprinkled across a few methods. This is typical of  
almost any event-based UI, you typically would have a mouse-down  
handler that sets up a few things, a mouse-move handler to collect the  
path, and a mouse-up handler to gather the result. And these handlers  
have to be enabled only while the path is recorded.

> I also have a more general question: if I'm not doing fancy animations
> or 3D effects, are there any particular benefits or drawbacks of using
> Tweak?

Tweak has nothing to do with 3D, it is purely 2D. But for example, the  
definePath or followPath methods could be implemented in a single  
method with local control flow which is really nice to program.

- Bert -

> I was intrigued by some statements that Tweak has a clearer
> separation of model and the graphical/interactive part (View/ 
> Controller
> in MVC).  I definitely have separate model classes, and have found
> Morphic a bit awkward for that reason.  It does have pluggable Morphs,
> though.
>
> Ross
>> You may notice how the entire World stops while you define a path
>> (have a clock morph running to see this). Also it uses Sensor
>> directly, and calls displayWorld. Both big no-nos in proper Morphic
>> programs. The followPath method even does the actual animation in a
>> background thread. Really Bad Things can happen if you do that.
>>
>> Tweak did set out to allow this kind of programming (because it is so
>> convenient), and it succeeded in that.
>>
>> For the original question - if you want the actual cover flow effect
>> you need a 3D renderer. You could use Croquet and OpenGL for that,  
>> but
>> it might be overkill. The Balloon3D render should be enough for this
>> simple type of animating.
>>
>> If you can live with a pseudo-3D effect (like the carousel seen on  
>> the
>> amazon.com frontpage) you can use simple 2D morphic animation of
>> course. In that effect, the covers always remain parallel to the
>> screen but only move position in a 3D circle so that they become
>> smaller in the back and larger in the front, and of course are sorted
>> back-to-front ...
>>
>> In fact, that is so simple I couldn't resist to make an etoy version,
>> 4 lines of code :)
>>
>> Uploaded as
>> 	
>> 	http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/uploads/Carousel.pr
>>
>> - Bert -