Nicolas Richeton

This week end, I added Smooth Scrolling for the Gallery view of ShareMedia. This is implemented using a simple class which captures the mouse wheel event and replace the standard behavior by a nice smooth movement (duration can be changed easily).

(Planeteclipse readers : video is not displayed there, just click on the title of the post to go to my blog)


ScrollingSmoother s = new ScrollingSmoother();
s.smoothControl( anyScrollableControl );


Currently, this only works on the Nebula Gallery Widget (maybe others), because fake events which are generated do not include all data required by standard SWT controls. The next step is to handle any scrollable control, and smooth scrolling even if scrollbars are used.

This class can be found here.
This is only a POC, the code is horrible but will be cleaned up soon.

UPDATE : this class currently work with the following widgets :
Shell
Canvas
StyledText

NOT working :
Tree
Table
Text

BTW : ShareMedia 0.3.1 is finally released, download it on sourceforge

Here are the latest news of the Nebula Gallery widget :

JFace Viewer : a viewer is now available for the Gallery widget :
The widget can be used this way :

GalleryTreeViewer viewer = new GalleryTreeViewer(shell);
viewer.setContentProvider(contentProvider);
viewer.setLabelProvider(labelProvider);
viewer.setInput(new Object());


See SnippetGalleryViewerTester

Item-level font and color settings :
Each item can use a different font or color :

item.setFont( font );
item.setForegroundColor( textColor );
item.setBackgroundColor( backgroundColor );


Fixed H_SCROLL problems :
A gallery can be created using H_SCROLL and previous issues like partial redraws and margin problems are fixed.

Improved API : better consistency with SWT controls :
- getSelection() does no longer return null when nothing is selected.
- other small fixes.

Thanks to Peter Centgraf who contributed the jface viewer and several other patchs.

Gallery Navigator plugin :
I’ve also started to write an eclipse plugin which displays the current folder’s content in a Gallery. Images are loaded so you can get a quick overview right within Eclipse. Thumbnail size can be set in real time.

Sources are on sourceforge, see Gallery navigator plugin.

Until next time…

Just publishing a screenshot of the latest and soon-to-be-released build of ShareMedia. This is me, browsing a Google Picasa album in ShareMedia on a dual monitor setup running Windows.

UI is is french but will hopefully switch to english depending of your locale.

ShareMedia latest features include :

• Write support for Picasa Web Albums (create new albums, upload files)
• Better information view
• Bug fixes
• A lot of new extension points for developers

About ShareMedia : This is an opensource project, which goal is to create a multi platform photo manager and viewer (well, there is a basic support for videos too and music is planned), being able to use any backend for file storage : (your computer, friends computers, Picasa, Flickr, FaceBook, ..) while keeping the same features (copy, edit metadata, 3D slideshow, …). It is based on the Eclipse RCP framework.

The latest nightly builds can be found here (be careful, these are dev builds. Linux builds have problems with OpenGL)

The project page is here at sourceforge.

Thumbnails are displayed using the Nebula Gallery Widget
(We’re looking for help too )

The Eclipse Nebula project has now a new home page, based on SWT’s widget page, with screenshots and direct access to snippets.

This page now conforms to the guidelines for incubation projects. With the upcoming rename of all nebula download, Nebula will be fully conforming at last.

On the Gallery widget side, I’ve recently fixed bugs 197959 and 197952 both submitted by Richard Michalsky who has already contributed 4 patches for bugs and enhancements. Thanks Richard.
I’ve also started to write some technical documentation on the Nebula wiki. See Nebula Gallery Status (work in progress).

Two new Nebula committers have been elected lately, so stay tuned for more updates and widgets.

The following Gallery widget issues were resolved this week : bugs 195415, 195443 and
195439. These were only small changes but they were the first patches provided by users other than me. I hope to see more and more apps using this widget to diplay pictures, projects or files.

I also updated my Gallery examples page with a new screenshot and a screencast. This screencast shows several features of Gallery widget : real time items resizing, auto margins, drop shadows, multiple item selection, groups and 2 items renderers.