Argos

GSoC Continues! New this week is the beginning of the ofxArgosUI toolkit. It’s using some of the base classes developed by Todd Vanderlin for his ofxSimpleGui API. One of the core elements of his API is the fact UI elements lay themselves out on a grid (thus the ‘simple’ in its name). ofxArgosUI ritually sacrifices all of this simplicity by specifying that core parameters need to be defined by the user, e.g. width, height, location, and so on – things that are more common to most GUI toolkits.

As some of the base GUI widgets are developed, the InteractiveObject is being iteratively refined. For example, a developer will be able to specify behavior under different multi-touch conditions (one finger, two fingers, etc). More to come on this front later.

A large source of inspiration for this part of the project is from an open source UI framework called Clutter.

Clutter aims to be non specific — it implements no particular style, but rather provides a rich generic foundation that facilitates rapid and easy creation of higher level tool kits tailored to specific needs.

While a lot of their base framework mirrors the task of openFrameworks (that is, to abstract a lot of the low-level openGL code), some of their higher level functions are quite useful. For example, their code to draw rounded corners is great.