Hello everyone. Mirror Worlds Technologies, Inc. has recently released
beta 2 of our product, Scopeware Vision
(http://www.scopeware.com/products/prod_v.html). This product is an
information management application for Windows 2000/XP with full-text
search capabilities. This version introduces a new “view” of the search
results that was built using SDL.
There are several interesting things that we are doing with SDL that
may be unique to some degree. First, we initialize and use SDL as a
sub-window, rather than either fullscreen or as its own window. This
allows us to use the standard GDI controls for the toolbar and menu, as
well as share these elements between our two “views.” In addition, we
have successfully mixed various Windows components in with the SDL
interface, including tool tips, pop-up context menus, and Windows fonts.
We are actually using off-screen GDI bitmaps to render text, which we
then process and turn into SDL_Surface?s.
We decided to use SDL for this project for several reasons. First, I
was charged with the task of creating the “view” and I’m not much of a
Windows developer. I am, however, somewhat familiar with SDL. Second,
there were several things we wanted to do with the interface that would
be quite difficult to implement using the GDI. Last, we wanted some
degree of speed, or rather responsiveness, to the interface.
I have created two screen shots of this interface ? the first shows the
use of alpha transparency while mousing through the interface. The
second shows the use of a Windows tool tip within the SDL interface.
Note that we are not using SDL_ttf, but rather standard Windows GDI fonts.
Screenshots:
http://www.scopeware.com/SDL/vstream1.jpg
http://www.scopeware.com/SDL/vstream2.jpg
Eric Wittmann
Senior Software Engineer
Mirror Worlds Technologies, Inc.
@Eric_Wittmann_______________________________________________
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