X-Designer 4.5
X-Designer Release 4.5 is full of exciting features including
the following.
You should also look at the
X-Designer 4.0 description and
the screen shots page.
XD/Capture
You can breathe new life into your old, hand-coded, Motif
applications by using XD/Capture, thus easing the pain of
legacy software maintenance.
XD/Capture
recreates the interface design of a running Motif/Xt application
so that it can be read into X-Designer, enabling you to:
- Migrate hand-crafted applications
- Check the accuracy of dynamic layout code
XD/Capture analyses running
programs, so you don't even have to relink.
X-Designer 4.5 is the first
GUI builder to give you a way to migrate and update those old
Motif interfaces without requiring the source.
XD/Replay
XD/Replay can record and playback any Xt
based application.
XD/Replay records a high level description
of the user's actions e.g. "push hello_button, type Hello
World". You can then replay the sequence as and when you
need.
In playback mode, you can check the state of any widget in
the application and control the rate of playback.
XD/Replay has
a user extensible command set which is powerful, easy-to-use and
very flexible. It can be deployed in many ways:
- Record and playback Motif applications
- Produce demonstrators of your product
- Debug your application
- Recreate problems found in an application
- Develop tutorials for your product
- Automate the testing of an application
No recompilation or relink
is necessary and no special test environment is required.
XD/Help
X-Designer 4.5 provides the means to parse
and view on-line HTML help documents. This is easily built into
your applications, and you are free to take the code to any platform,
along with the code generated by X-Designer.
XD/Help removes the
need to purchase expensive help packages or desktop publishing
products.
By choosing HTML for your help system, a user of your
software can choose to view using XD/Help or a web browser of
their choice. XD/Help ignores any HTML commands not in its basic
set. So you can design your help to have full graphics, and other
advanced HTML features, for viewing with a web browser, whilst
guaranteeing that the basic help system will work for all users.
In
addition X-Designer 4.5 supports a generic help API to enable
you to easily integrate help into your application. This can be
a DTP such as Interleaf or FrameMaker, or any help package that
supports a document/tag interface.
For Microsoft Windows support
a converter is supplied to produce a version of the help system
in RTF ready for compiling to WinHelp.
AppGuru
AppGuru provides a quick start to application building by priming
a design with a pre-defined application template.
X-Designer 4.5 has Motif style guide compliant templates that
can be configured on-line to meet your particular application
requirements. You can also add your own templates, enabling you
to set up corporate or project configured designs.
AppGuru's features with X-Designer's current definition mechanism
makes rapid application development through re-use even easier.
Callback Editing
X-Designer 4.5 supports editing of all
your callbacks directly from within X-Designer using your favourite
editor.
Prelude Editing
You can edit the code preludes 'in-line'
and preview the generated code using your editor.
Advanced Pixmap Editor
Designing a set of consistent pixmaps
is easy with X-Designer 4.5's new palette features. Colour palettes
can be saved and applied to other pixmaps, and the palette editor
can add, remove and rearrange colours. Facilities have also been
added to scale, reflect and rotate pixmaps.
Transparent colour
support and production of a stippled version of an icon, great
for insensitive pixmaps, makes life much easier for the icon designer.
CDE Support
Integration
files for some of the CDE widgets are provided.
Resource Bindings
You can generate X resources that use
either loose or tight bindings. Loose bindings allow widgets to
share resources, so you can use them to ensure a consistent interface.
Tight bindings remove ambiguities across your application resources.
Multiple Selection
In a single operation you can set resource
values for any number of widgets selected from one or more dialogs.
Only those resources common to the selected widgets can be set.
Code Generation Overview
Specify and generate all your files
(headers, main module, resources, Makefile etc.) from a single
dialog.
Layout Editor
The layout editor has been streamlined and
a number of other improvements incorporated, including:
- The ability to move a widget without breaking its attachments
- The ability to select overlapping widgets
- Support for RowColumn layout
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