Brainfart: A skinners tale

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Reorganizing xModule Settings

I'm discovering that the documentation for modules like xTray and xTaskbar could be made easier to follow. After being away from LiteStep coding for so long, the documentation looked alien.

One of the problems/tools I've run up against is that of multiple states on multiple taskbars. I initially put together a template xTaskbar parameters file that contained empty parameters for the module that could be copied and pasted into new themes as they're being made. Unfortunately, when I made these templates, I entered all the parameters in a linear fashion for each particular button state.

Here's an example:
tasks1NormalFontAlign left
tasks1ActiveFontAlign left
tasks1MinimizedFontAlign left
tasks1FlashingFontAlign left
tasks1HoverFontAlign left
tasks1GroupedFontAlign left

tasks1NormalFontVertAlign center
tasks1ActiveFontVertAlign center
tasks1MinimizedFontVertAlign center
tasks1FlashingFontVertAlign center
tasks1HoverFontVertAlign center
tasks1GroupedFontVertAlign center

The problem with this is that when I'm tweaking the settings, I'll typically do it one element at a time, in this case, the hover state button, or the normal button state. For this reason, I've been rebuilding the structure of the module parameters. Here's what happens to the above code:
tasks1NormalFontAlign left
tasks1NormalFontVertAlign center

tasks1ActiveFontAlign left
tasks1ActiveFontVertAlign center

tasks1MinimizedFontAlign left
tasks1MinimizedFontVertAlign center

tasks1FlashingFontAlign left
tasks1FlashingFontVertAlign center

tasks1HoverFontAlign left
tasks1HoverFontVertAlign center

tasks1GroupedFontAlign left
tasks1GroupedFontVertAlign center

Now if I want to edit just a particular button, all the parameters are grouped, rather than hunting for the shadow settings here, the outline settings there...

It's a small change in design paradigm, but it's dramatically improved the speed at which I can tweak the xTaskbar parameters.

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