Re: ndxCards v. 1.92 Re: Lessons from the World of Clip Mana

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2741

Posted by ckester
2005-02-15 12:55:13

Stephen Diamond writes:

“Maybe the two-pane format merely interferes _less_ in a database, and it seems easier to implement. Alex might be able to comment on whether that speculation about ease of implemention is correct.”

I don’t know what is meant by interference with a database, but most of the Windows-based two-pane outliners I’ve seen use a standard tree control to display and manage the outline hierarchy. Then, in the “data” pane, there’s an edit control or rich text control. Outlook-style three-pane apps add a list control (with accompanying header control) in the “second-level” pane. All of these controls are provided by the operating system, so the outliner developer is spared a lot of the coding work.

Using these controls and a framework library like MFC, I can whip out a basic two- or three-pane outliner in an afternoon.

A single-pane outliner, on the other hand, can’t depend on any of these built-in controls. The standard tree control, for example, is limited to single-line entries. The standard edit control has no support for outline levels. The rich text control might work, but it’s not obvious how. The best solution seems to be to write code to manage the outline structure yourself. But that’s an exercise I would recommend to any programmer looking to move beyond the beginner stage. It will pose issues with window layout, hit testing, memory management, etc. that will teach you a lot about programming on your target platform. (In the old days of text-mode interfaces, many journeyman programmers wrote their own text editors as this kind of exercise.)

—Charlie

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