Re: [nebula-dev] Date submissions - Eric and Jeremy

[Eric Wuillai <eric@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Chris,

Thank you for you response and to take time, you and Carolyn, to study
in detail our propositions.

> +1 for DateChooser and +1 for Eric's commit rights
Should I considerer that my proposition of submission is accepted or do
you wait for other votes of the community ?
If yes, what is the next step ?

> Both:
> Both use on the deprecated Date class.  Calendar is the replacement.
>  Would like to see the primary getters/setters use Calendar and perhaps
> extra methods for Date.  Should also avoid GregorianCalendar as that
> doesn't exist on CLDC.
I am not really convinced that Calendar must be used in priority in
getters/setters. Even if many methods are deprecated, Date class is
always widely used in applications when there is no computations to do.
I think that none of Date and Calendar are fully satisfying, and both
are complementary : Date for display and format, Calendar for computations.
There is no problem to have setters for both types. But it is not so
simple for getters.

> - the little widgets are accessible to screen readers (because they are
> native) but not to keyboard (because they are labels that do not take
> focus)
>         - this needs to be fixed - users will expect to use the keyboard
> when using the Calendar
I added focus and keyboard support. That will be available in the next
release.

> - uses Locale in API - warning that this class does not exist on CLDC
> platforms
All these widgets are largely based on Locale class for localized
strings and formats. If we remove the Locale support, we will have to
replace it by some additionnal setters and localized strings in resource
bundles. I think that will reduce the simplicity of use of the widgets.

> - naming issues, i.e. "forg" = foreground, "back" = background
I don't like long names, but I will do an effort to correct that :-)

> - need a way - other than scrolling - to directly select month and year
> in Calendar (i.e. drop-down for month, text field for year)
Month selection is already available in release 1.1, with a popup menu
on the header.
There is also a basic year navigation with Ctrl-click on navigation
buttons, that allow to change year very quickly. A text field for year
input will break the design and will be really useful only for great
delta of year with the currently displayed one.

> - up and down arrow keys should work when cursor is in the rightmost
> position of a field as well
> - didn't really look at FormattedText too much, but it looks like it
> could be useful in other contexts as well
The general purpose of FormattedText is to propose a consistent way to
add input mask features on the Text widget. Date / time is not the only
possibility and there is also a NumberFormatter and a MaskFormatter.
I have in plan for a future release a CurrencyFormatter (demanded by
users) and a PurcentFormatter. The RegexpFormatter will need much more
work. And you suggested in a previous post other possibilities as a RGB
formatter.
FormattedText is not really a widget, but a decorator on the Text
widget, as TableViewer is a decorator for Table widget.

Regards,
Eric