User Interface

The primary intention of my previous article was to make it very clear why and when locking is needed in multithreaded applications. In this article, I want to present my experiences in writing a new prototype for a replacement of the document model in WonderBrush and how it is manipulated and rendered asynchronously.

Though I am programming on BeOS since 1999, only in recent years I have slowly become more comfortable with various multithreading related issues in my programs. So I thought I'd like to share some of my experiences here for beginning programmers or programmers skeptical about multithreading. I hope to be extending this as a series of articles to help learn the benefits and pitfalls of multithreading. All with an emphasis on programming for the Haiku API.

How is it that the Haiku vector icons are so small? You might expect great hackery, but actually HVIF is pretty simple. When I tell you all the "secrets", you might just go "doh!". The most important thing is that the format is optimized for icons. Once you take this simple assumption and think it through, you find all sorts of ways to reduce the storage space.

[Obnoxious, snotty narrator begins]

"....When last we left our heroes at Munstris Diveloperz Inc., they were left wondering how applications can be made truly simple. Some software just worked well and other software just seemed bad, but they couldn't figure out why. It seemed like finding a good software tool was no simpler a task than navigating a vast digital jungle with little more than a pocket knife while wishing for a razor-sharp machete. As digital carpenters, the development team needed a good whack with a Clue-By-Four™ or face being left pretty much to the same shoddy equipment as everyone else. The management just needed a good whack."

With this article I hope to explain the basics of scripting using BeOS and how it can enhance the Haiku project. To try out several examples mentioned in this article, you'll have to download a program called hey, which enables you to script BeOS applications from a Terminal.

The program hey was developed by Atilla Mezei, an early BeOS developer, who unfortunately seems to have left the BeOS community. He created this tool to have a good testing tool when implementing scripting in BeOS applications.