2 Designing A Simple DUIM Application
2.2 Design of the application
For the purposes of this example, the application developed is a simple task list manager. The design of the application attempts to achieve the following goals:
- The design is simple enough that the principles of the programming model should not be obscured by the code itself.
- The design attempts to use the most common elements of the various DUIM libraries.
- The design is extensible, so that you can customize it to your own needs.
A task list manager was chosen because it is representative of the sort of GUI application that you will probably want to develop. Although the overall design is quite simple, it demonstrates several commonly used elements and techniques, and is easily extensible beyond the scope of this manual, should you wish to experiment with the code. The concept of a task list manager is familiar to the majority of readers, so you can study the code and the programming model, without having to spend time figuring out what the application itself is supposed to do.
The final task list manager is shown in Figure 2.1. To load the code for the final design into the environment, choose Tools > Open Example Project from any window in the environment, and load the Task List 1 project from the Documentation category of the Open Example Project dialog.
The task list manager is very simple to use. You create a list of things that you need to do, assigning a priority to each task as you create it. The application can display the tasks in your list sorted in a variety of ways. You can save your task list to a file on disk, and open files of the same type.
The task list manager demonstrates the use of menus and a variety of button, list, and text controls.