More info on development

Published on August 11, 2005 By BillW In DesktopX Development

I'm interested in creating some widgets for DesktopX, however I find that the "Developers Guide" is somewhat lacking in how to go about doing this. Something simple like using an image as my "window" for the app, and then writing text to the widget is not explained in any clear manner. I finally did figure out part of it, but I haven't been able to figure out how to make it scroll (the text is too long for the window).

Are there any books out there, any sites with tutorials that actually get into the meat of DesktopX? I've tried pulling apart things like the Stickies widget, but I can't figure out where they got the images or how they packed them all in together to make a usefull app.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks.

Comments

CerebroJD

on Aug 11, 2005

If you go the the DesktopX library here, you'll see a list of tutorials on the RIGHT hand side of the page, including 2 by me.

BillW

on Aug 11, 2005

I have read both of your articles and they were a big help in understanding how to get started. But now I'm looking to get a little deeper into the product, but find the included documentation a little short of what I need.

For instance, how do I create a "form" object? I think this is what I need to put a scrolling text region on my object, but I'll be darned if I can reverse engineer another component to figure it out.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

roidboy

on Aug 11, 2005

Stupid question #, where can I find the DesktopX Library? Is it a section called "Library"?

Thanx

MountainDragon

on Aug 11, 2005

Bill - If you look in the documentation under "Tutorials" you will find an article on Scrolling Content, with a sample object. To really get the most out of DX, you will have to really dive into scripting.

Another object to take a look at is my example on Auto-hide/docking: Link

Take a look at the script, the comments will help you to understand.

Martin also has a lot of objects with good examples of how to script for various functions.

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