[Uml-devel] u2 gui design

[Andrew Sutton]

okay... i've been giving the gui for u2 some thought lately and i think i've 
figured out what to do with it.

i'm thinking about 2 main components to the gui: some kind of tab control for 
overall application navigation (various views, view components, etc). and a 
tabbed workspace that actually contains the diagrams or other views in the 
application.

in otherwords, its basically kdevelop for modeling. i'd like to use docking 
windows, and actually started playing around with them yesterday. for 
example, the nav panel (the first tab view) could be detached to increase the 
overall size of the work space or re-attached so it won't occlude the 
workspace when the app is maximized.

the tabbed workspace should probably be configurable just like kdevelops. 
tabbed views should be able to be detached (like in konq) to make more 
top-level windows. detached views should basically re-create the entire 
window (including the nav panel).

each view has an associated toolbox. this would contain various actions that 
could be used to operate on the view. for example, a class diagram view would 
have actions for adding classes, associations, generalizations, etc. maybe i 
"delete object" tool. i don't know. the toolbox could be free floating, but 
it might be nice to anchor it somewhere else (not with the nav panel).

i'm still not quite sure how to manage the dynamicness of the gui - things 
getting added, removed. but then i haven't done a whole lot of gui 
programming with qt. oh well. i guess i'll learn as i go :) it's not going to 
be pretty though!

andy