CTabFolder, grow a skin buddy
On our E4 quest for a skinnable UI, tops on my hit list is CTabFolder. Presently that curve is carefully represented by an array of integer pairs, which are interpreted as a polyline draw. Fast, but extremely fragile.
The problem is that that curve is a really strong branding element of Eclipse. This was done on purpose to great effect. But now in the world of RCP applications, its too restricted. Its somewhat comical that you can spot an Eclipse application at 2o’ just by looking at the layout (skinny tall left, wide middle, skinny talk right) and those darn tabs.
We should consider a new ETabFolder that takes bitmaps, presumably 8 in total: 4 for each corner, and tile’able sides top\bottom\left\right so the tab length\height can grow.
And of course, the bitmaps would be supplied via CSS 
Posted September 5th, 2008 by Kevin McGuire in category: Visual Design
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7 Responses to “CTabFolder, grow a skin buddy”
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Tom Schindl Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Why has it to be a CTabFolder shouldn’t E4 allow me to use whatever widget I want to use to present the Tabs, Menus, … . My dream would be e.g to use http://www.hexapixel.com/ribbon/
Dave Carver Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 12:17 pm
Has e4 looked into the use of SVG for rendering the various graphics. SVG support is built into FireFox 3 and other browsers. There is the Apache Batick project which can render SVG into different graphic formats as well.
Eugene Kuleshov Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I was just going to ask about SVG…
Mike Schrag Says:
September 5th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
huzzah!
Philipp Kursawe Says:
September 6th, 2008 at 5:10 am
In Webdev I use ONE image to style tabs. You can do that by describing in the CSS which part of the image to use at various spots. This would reduce the clutter of image files and in case of webapps of course the number of images to download.
Also the idea of using SVG for vector based graphics is great.
Kevin McGuire Says:
September 8th, 2008 at 5:22 am
@Tom: That’s a good point.
@Dave/Eugene/Mike: The SWT might’ve looked at SVG but I’ve not heard any discussions. Its a great idea. Anybody want to start the discussion on the mailing list?
@Philipp: That’s cool. Clearly we have lots to learn from the web.
Nick Edgar Says:
September 15th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Check out border-image: http://ejohn.org/blog/border-image-in-firefox/