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

[Christopher J Gross <chris.gross@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Eric, 

My responses below...

nebula-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote on 10/08/2006
06:16:37 PM:

> 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 ?
We need the other committers to vote as well.


> 
> > 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.
Sure many application use Date, but it seems strange
to make the primary getters/setters use a deprecated class.  Why not
just have getSelection/setSelection use Calendar and another pair, getDate/setDate,
use Date?


> 
> > - 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.
I think this is ok for now.  We may have to think
about other ways to get this information on CLDC.


> 
> > - 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.
CTRL-click is not something I think most users will
think to try.  Suffice to say that you should explore ways to make
it easier to navigate by years.  All of these issues don't need to
be resolved immediately.

> 
> > - 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.
Understood.  

We just need the other Nebula committers to chime
in and vote up or down on your (and Jeremys) submission.

-Chris