Window like control in SketchFlow? - sketchflow

I've been playing around with SketchFlow from Microsoft and one thing that bothers me is that I cannot seem to find a window looking like sketch.
I would like it to have title bar and 3 "buttons" like all normal windows do (minimize, maximize, close buttons).
In Balsamiq Mockups this is very easy, however I don't see any kind of window-like sketches in SketchFlow.
I'm trying to mockup future desktop application.

You are correct that there isn't one built in. In SketchFlow you can easily make "component" screens that can be used multiple times. To create what you are looking for you could combine a sketch rectangle, with a couple of buttons and a textbox. You can select all of this content, right click it and make it into a component screen.

The MockupsLibrary also provides the mockups you are looking for. Once you've installed it, it'll appear in your assets as "ButtonWithIconMockup". You can select the "WindowMinimize", "WindowMaximize", and "WindowClose" for your IconImage attribute to get the desired result.

With Expression Blend 4, you can install the Mockup Controls by following the instructions at How to add mockup controls to your Expression Blend library. In the new Assets | Mockups category you will see a WindowMockup item that does exactly what you wanted.
To play around with the Mockup Controls, try the MockupDemonstration sample from the Help Welcome screen.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a builtin MenuStrip yet (although you can laboriously build one yourself from the non-sketchy SimpleMenu and SimpleMenuItem controls)? Also there doesn't seem to be any support for indicating keyboard accelerators (prefixing the desired letter with & doesn't work).
In general, it seems like Sketchflow really isn't designed to be used to prototype standard desktop applications?

Related

How to draw connections between items in a QTreeView

I wonder how to draw the lines connecting the items in a QTreeView as illustrated in the picture under Tree Model. My program will run on different platforms and thus use different styles. Can I guarantee that the items are drawn as desired?
I feel, using style sheets might be problematic because certain styles do not print such lines and using a delagate might lead me into issues of double drawing.
There's an example in the documentation here showing exactly what you want to achieve using style sheets.
Please note that when you use style sheets QStyleSheetStyle kicks in, irregardless from the QStyle your application is using at the moment. So if you decide to go this way you will override the look and feel of your control the same way, irregardless from the target platform.
If that is a problem, you may consider to use style sheets only for certain platforms. As an example:
#ifdef Q_OS_MAC
myControl->setStyleSheet(":/my_stylesheet_for_mac.qss");
#endif
Back to the example in the documentation, it uses a few images containing all the various lines (vertical, horizontal, branch, etc) and the ::branch subcontrol and its states to determine which image to use.
The result is something like this:
.
Obviously, you must change the code to show the vline picture instead of the arrows.
As a side node, I may suggest to consider why you want to do this if you are using native styles. If your application has a native look and feel, you should not alter it in any way. That is, if the target platform doesn't render lines to connect tree view items, then you shouldn't add those.
However, if your application is not required to look native across all the target platforms, you may consider using the same style (e.g. Fusion) and deliver the same user experience no matter what the platform is.

Draw "red squiggly line" in CHtmlEditCtrl

I am working on building spellchecking functionality into my app which currently uses MFC's CHtmlEditCtrl control.
Is there a way of drawing one of those "red squiggly lines" that you see under spelling errors on the HTML control, underneath the word that I detect to be a spelling error?
The only way I can think of is to use the actual HTML to apply this style, and then strip it out upon the email being sent. This seems rather messy, as if the user starts applying underline styles to the text they could interfere with it.
Is there a way of doing this with drawing?
Thanks in advance.
The interface you want is IHTMLRenderStyle. You pass this, once filled in, to the AddSegment method of the of the IHighlightRenderingServices interface. Here's an example in (gasp) VB. I've done it in C++, years ago now though, and it worked nicely.

Making a fancy looking window with messages stack

I try to make fancy looking messages viewer, where messages divided by formatting, other background of smth. similar. They need to looks like this - http://pastebin.com/GU1Lq087. What I found in wxWidgets to solve this problem, and why I can't use it:
wxHtmlWindow
Supports minimal HTML (a few tags). But big problem with this - html representation doesnt fill parent window. So element with width=100% will have 100% width only on standard window size. And even p tag doesnt have word wrapping (long long paragraph goes in one line with vertical scroolbar).
wxWebWiew
I need to have the ability to set generated HTML to it, but IE must to load some page first and I can rely only on IE background. It has some time to load page, even if I set HTML-string.
wxRichText
Most suitable for me. But I can't draw line like HTML's hr, or change background for the entire message block (to distinguish it from common background)
I need to show messages like this. But i didn't know how and which tool is better.
One way of achieving this would be using wxWebView with WebKit backend but I am afraid that Windows can only use IE's engine. However, there is project which allows you to use Gecko engine. I use WebKit for rendering chat in my application and it works really good (although I am using Qt). (http://www.kirix.com/labs/wxwebconnect.html)
You can always do it regular way - just create separate widget (I think it is called "frame" in wxWidgets) for single message. This way you get almost infinite possibilities. E.g. you can make "AbstractMessage" with virtual methods and then things like "AdministratorMessage", "MOTD" etc. will be a breeze.
wxRichText Most suitable for me. But I can't draw line like HTML's hr
Really? Have you looked at the docs?
( http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/overview_richtextctrl.html )
Here's a couple simple ideas:
a. Write a line of blanks, underlined.
http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_rich_text_ctrl.html#a333b2e675617ed2299cf91e7c0dbd0d8
b. Create an image of a horizontal line, display it using WriteImage
http://docs.wxwidgets.org/trunk/classwx_rich_text_ctrl.html#a1315611c0741d03e852ee26eba3a9d94
The funny thing is that what you want can be done using any of the 3 controls you mention. With wxHtmlWindow you just need to set its size correctly, with wxWebView I don't understand what your problem with it is at all and with wxRichTextCtrl you could just use separate controls for the areas with different backgrounds (you could almost certainly use a single control with different styles but using several controls seems simpler).

Is there a way to get the text and cursor position from the formula bar in Excel?

I'd like to get the current (possibly uncommitted) text out of the formula bar in Excel (from an addin in-process). All "usual" techniques don't work, like GetWindowText(...), etc.
As for cursor position:
GetCaretPos actually works (returns the x,y coords of the caret), but EM_CHARFROMPOS doesn't (always returns 0) so that's a dead end.
Is this functionality exposed through COM or to the XLL API in any way?
EDIT: I'd also like to point out that I think the majority of my issues come from the fact that the formula bar is (at least I'm 99% sure) NOT an edit control, which can be seen by looking at its window class.
The formula bar, and indeed most of the controls in Office are non-standard. Sending standard messages will not yield success.
I imagine the only option will be to reverse-engineer the executable code.
SteveN, which version of Excel ?
The control will be a window. Office 2010 is 'nicer' in this respect, using more standard controls.
You could use Spy to watch all the messages that get sent to that control and try mimicking those to see what you get. Long road though.

MFC toolbox control

I'm totally new to MFC. In fact I haven't even written anything in it yet.
I'm looking for a control similar to the one found here: http://sourceforge.net/dbimage.php?id=48455
"Toolbox", left hand side.
The CMFCOutlookBar is somewhat close but the images are quite large and the text appears beneath the icon, not beside it. Looking at the button adding functions I don't see any way to change that.
So, is there a prebuilt component in the MFC lib that does what I want?
VS2010 - featurepack stuff is included.
BCGSoft has this component:
http://www.bcgsoft.com/featuretour/tour168.htm