Re: Fwd: Cocoa IDE v1 project

On Feb 16, 2009, at 2:05 PM, Toomas Altosaar wrote:
> On the same theme: the ability to cut and paste graphical output of
> evaluated forms, e.g., graphs, charts, simulations, animations, etc.
> in some jpg/pdf/mov/etc format into and out of the editor would add
> much value to experimental and developmental work.
>
> For example, something similar to what Mathematica has been doing
> with their "notebook" editor for 20+ years already, but perhaps not
> in such an integrated manner (their output appears in the editor
> immediately below the evaluated form).
>
> Just the ability to copy and paste things other than text could be
> very useful, e.g., results of intricate/large tests that cannot be
> repeated without much (loading) time and (cpu) effort. It would be
> good to see the results right in the editor. What happens now is that
> a separate "report" needs to be written/remembered/referred to using
> some word processing software to save results.
>
> Would it be difficult to generalize the editor to handle things other
> than text, e.g., image, movies, etc.?

As far as I remember from my own Fred customization efforts, the  
underlying data- and display model is very much constrained to text  
and characters. Display and click-handling with non-text data is well  
beyond the scope of the current implementation. A first step up would  
be to allow non-character objects in the data, while still displaying  
these as text. These could then be displayed as hypermedia links in  
the text. Next step could be to let same objects display inline with  
text flowing around, but that's a larger upgrade.

My general wish for the Cocoa IDE effort is that there are well  
planned hooks for us developers to extend and customize the  
functionality. For example, it would be great if the Fred datamodel  
supported arbitrary non-character objects in the text, with a defined  
interface for how these integrate and display, but without their  
implementation having to be part of the initial IDE project.

-- Terje Norderhaug
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