Burton Software Inspired Innovation™

I just uploaded the Tesseract source code to BountySource! Now you can download it, build it, play with it and send back any improvements you may make. There are a few areas in the code that could use some cleaning up, and some parts aren't complete (Control transformations/rotations with mouse input, Edit control etc).

Over the past few days I've added some new features to both Tesseract & TIM, as well as fixed a few bugs & changed a few things around. The result? much cleaner markup. Previous posts have introduced a couple of ways to clean up markup, such as inheritance & include statements, and inheritance in particular has continued to be improved with new enhancements.

The previous post shows how TIM markup handles controls and touches on the basics of setting properties such as a controls path. This post shows a more complex example and introduces some more advanced features of TIM.

Following on from my last post about Tesseract, here's a little more information about TIM. Along with the rest of Tesseract, TIM was rewritten recently and is much more powerful in its latest incarnation. Lets begin with a small example, in C#:

Time for a long overdue update on the status of Tesseract. Since the last blog posts I made about it, Tesseract has been almost completely rewritten to correct some fundamental flaws in its design. The new version is vastly improved, and moves platform dependant code away from everything else, meaning it will be easy to write (for example), a Qt or Windows backend later (currently the only backend is for Gtk).

The site has been relocated & rebuilt (again). The site is now build atop the Drupal CMS system, and should meet all needs for the foreseeable future. Accounts from the previous site have been lost, so please register again if you would like to post in the forums or comment.

News concerning Tesseract will be posted soon, along with an initial release for you to toy with and try out.

Tesseract has undergone some internal changes to fix a few problems and to allow for new features to be added. The most notable changes are:

To ensure that Tesseract works on a variety of platforms, I decided I should use more than just openSuSE to develop on, I should test on the linux platform that will be used the most, so due to its recent rise in popularity I thought of Ubuntu, or more specifically Kubuntu (a personal preference). So I installed Kubuntu on another machine and ran the translucency test GUI. The result?

Moving on from the simple GUI example I used to demonstrate TIM, here is a screenshot (attached) of a slightly more complex GUI, showing some of todays enhancements in Tesseract, such as parent/child relationships between controls and translucency.

The Tesseract GUI library is a C# assembly allowing the easy creation of GUIs which support theme engines, a variety of different controls and cross platform capabilities. Written in C#, the assembly can be used from any CLR-based language (eg. VB.net, Managed C++, IronPython etc).