haiku/docs/user/interface/_interface_intro.dox

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/*
* Copyright 2010 Haiku, Inc. All rights reserved.
* Distributed under the terms of the MIT License.
*
* Authors:
* Alex Wilson, yourpalal2@gmail.com
*/
/*!
2015-01-28 03:15:11 +03:00
\page interface_intro Introduction to the Interface Kit
\ingroup interface
\section Overview
The Interface Kit holds all the classes you'll need to develop a GUI.
Building on the messaging facilities provided by the Application Kit,
the Interface Kit can be used to create a responsive and attractive
graphical user interface.
The most important class in the Interface Kit is the BView class, which
handles drawing and user interaction. Pointer and keyboard events are
processed in this class.
Another important class is the BWindow class, which holds BViews and makes
them visible to the user. The BWindow class also handles BView focusing
and BMessage dispatching, among other things.
A new addition Haiku has added over the BeOS API is the Layout API, which
is based around the BLayoutItem and BLayout classes. These classes will
take care of making sure all your GUI widgets end up where you want them,
with enough space to be useful. You can start learning the Layout API
by reading the \ref layout_intro.
\section coordinatespaces Coordinate spaces
All APIs using coordinates (such as BRect or BPoint) refer to
a specific space where these coordinates are interpreted. BView and
BWindow provide various conversion function to translate coordinates
between different spaces, as needed, or provide separate methods such as
BView Bounds() and Frame(), returning results in different spaces as needed.
The initial coordinate space, from which all others are derived, is the
screen space. Its origin is at the center of the screen's top-left pixel.
Coordinates can be converted between this and a specific window or view
space is done using the ConvertToScreen and ConvertFromScreen methods of
the corresponding object.
Each BWindow has its own coordinate space. Its origin is at the center of
the top-left pixel of the window client area (just inside the window border).
Root level views added to the window have their frame rectangle defined in
this space.
Each BView also gets its own coordinate space. The origin is initially at the
top left of the view, but this can be changed by scrolling the view
(programatically using ScrollBy or ScrollTo, or by the user acting on a scrollbar).
Additionally, each BView also has a drawing space. This is further transformed
from the BView coordinate space by calls to SetOrigin, SetScale, SetTransform,
ScaleBy, RotateBy, and TranslateBy. The effects of the first two of these
methods are independant from the other four, and it's not recommended to mix
the two types of transformations in the same BView. Note that this is the only space
that can be scaled and rotated, and translated by non-integer units. All other
coordinate spaces are only translations of the screen one and remain aligned on pixels.
All drawing operations in a BView use coordinates specified in the drawing space.
However, the update rect passed to the Draw method (or passed to the Invalidate
method) is in the BView base coordinate space. Conversion between the two can
be done using the affine transform returned by BView::Transform, or in case the
legacy transformation functions are used, by applying the scale and origin returned
by the Scale() and Origin() functions.
*/