dpjudas/uicore

User interface library for C++ applications

UICore SDK

UICore is a C++ toolkit library focusing on user interfaces and graphics:

• Features a Model/View/Controller (MVC) design for building cross platform UI applications
• Uses modern CSS principles for layout such as flex-box and CSS properties for styling
• No javascript. No UI worker processes, as needed when using WebKit 2 or Chromium. No binding code. No HTML legacy.
• Hi-DPI support built in. Rendering and layout are done using device independent pixels
• Fast hardware accelerated 2D canvas
• Low-level cross platform OpenGL/Direct3D abstraction for custom 3D or specialized 2D operations
• Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4 support
• Designed for modern C++ (C++11, C++14)
• Many useful matrix, vector and other graphics related math classes
• Various commonly useful utility classes such as network, XML, JSON, file and zip (deflate) classes
• Supports Windows, Linux, BSD and macOS

Building and Installing UICore

UICore uses a configure application which generates project templates for the various platforms supported. Basically same principle as CMake, except the solutions/workspaces generated for Visual Studio and Xcode are less terrible (from our point of view!).

The build instructions for each platform are as follows:

• Windows: Run configure.exe, select the configuration types you're interested in and enter the correct header/lib search and install paths. If you're not fully comfortable with opening configure.exe, you can build it yourself by opening Setup.sln first in Setup/Win32.
• Linux: Run ./configure. Make sure you have GCC installed first. This will generate a CMakeLists.txt file and a KDevelop project. You can either then use CMake from the command line to build and install, or you can use the KDevelop project it generated.
• macOS: Run ./configure. Make sure you have Xcode and the command line tools installed first. This will generate a Xcode project that you can use to build from the command line or from within Xcode. It will output the include and library files into the Build directory after a successful build.

Only the Linux build has external dependencies at the moment. CMake should detect those and complain if they aren't installed. If you find any bugs in our build scripts, please help out by sending a pull request.

Documentation

The latest build of the documentation can be found at https://dpjudas.github.io/UICore

You can also build it manually by running doxygen from the Documentation folder.

uicore's Issues

View render border_box rounding

In https://github.com/dpjudas/UICore/blob/master/Sources/UICore/UI/View/view.cpp
In Function: void ViewImpl::render(View *self, const CanvasPtr &canvas)
At Line 1061:
contains:
Rect border_box = view->geometry().border_box();
Is this a typo, should we use Rectf instead of rect ?
Rectf border_box = view->geometry().border_box();

Optimisation of StyleCascade

I have been experimenting in optimisation StyleCascade.

In my opinion, this is not required at the moment, unless like me, you have over 200 views which is unusual.

Simplified explanation:
I changed the StyleCascade property names to contain a hash value.
This has a nice side effect when obtaining properties that have index values: we can incorporate the index directly into the hash without requiring using the "integer to string" function overhead.

In my application, FPS increased from 138 to 192.

In addition, if I force the background renderer to use canvas.fill_rectangle() instead of using path draw when an exact rectangle is drawn, then FPS increases to 273

How to load css file?

Message Dispatching Keyboard Accelerators

I am trying to implement a custom view that has a keyboard accelerator. So when 'A' is pressed, this event is procesed even though the view does not have focus.

There appears to be 3 options:

1. I could hook directly into the display window slot to do this, however the view may be hidden or disabled (i.e. not part of the view tree).

2. Fire off the event on the root view in the ViewTree to cascade. However View::dispatch_event() dispatches messages at the target (and parent), not the child

3. Add a keyboard event slot on the ViewTree. The problem with this is when should the custom view connect the slot or disconnect the slot. i.e. If the View is unlinked from the ViewTree, the slot shouldn't be called. Then again, does all events have this same problem?

Any thoughts?