Week 7 - PRJ566

Over the last few weeks I have been looking into Bespin and what makes it function. There is a huge repository of files but I have found that the majority of files for the User Interface lie within the bespinclient/plugins/supported/Editor directory. I had been looking at one file in particular, mainly the text.js file within the subdirectory 'Editor'. It contained all of the code for the user-interface view, excluding scrollbars and the panel that popped up for commands. I found that interesting because we will need to do something similar for our editor once we begin to code it. I thought I would manipulate some code to get a feel for what was going into the editor, so I played around with it for a bit and was able to turn the blinking effect of the cursor on, off, and change the speed of it. It is surprising how much goes into such a small feature. It was a taste of all that will need to be done for our editor. It shocked me how much you need to jump around through all the code to find exactly what you are looking for, as well (such as the colour of the background of the editor, so that the cursor could be turned to that colour, giving it the appearance of 'disappearing').

We also heard from Robert at the end of the week with a new prototype. It is looking pretty good, I can't wait to get working on the real thing and see how nice we can make it, as well as the following it gets.