XRT/gear: Widgets and Utilities Collection

XRT/gear's widgets and utilities make applications more visually appealing and easier-to-use. XRT/gear includes an advanced Tree/Outliner, Tab Manager, Progress Meter, Toolbar, and Aligner. Other XRT/gear widgets include improvements to the standard toggle, label and pushbutton widgets and enhancements to several other Motif widgets. XRT/gear also includes 3000 icons and a PostScript print utility. All XRT/gear widgets are based on the Motif open object-oriented architecture so they fit seamlessly into your X Window development environment. XRT/gear is designed to be the most useful and valuable general purpose collection of add-on widgets for Motif.

Tab Manager

Tab Manager is a folder control with many powerful functions. Using tabbed folders, you can use display space efficiently and provide users with an intuitive interface. Tabs can display both text and images, and they can be displayed in multiple layers. Shape, location and tab spacing can be customized. Also, the resizing and stretching behavior can be specified. Multiple tabs can share a single page. Tabs can be defined in real-time using callback routines.

Outliner Widget

The Outliner is an interactive tree widget that displays hierarchical data. Data can be specified as strings, XmStrings or from a file. Nodes and folders can be created, deleted and edited dynamically as the data changes. There are routines for traversing multiple columns and trees and editing/sorting/resizing nodes. End users can select nodes and folders, drag and drop nodes, traverse trees and sort columns. There are many functions and resources to control the outliner widget. For example: margin setting, colors, fonts, clipping, spacing, cursor style, column order, node style, icons, connection line, shortcut button, double buffering and node focus. The outliner widget can also produce Postscript output.

Progress Widget

When users are waiting for an application to complete a task, it is important to inform them of the progress. The XRT/gear Progress widget visualizes the state of the task. The Progress widget supports continuous or discrete bars or icons. For example, you can design a meter which displays a car running from one point to another. You can embed the Progress widget into your application very easily. The timing of updates to the widget can be specified.

Toolbar

XRT/gear's Toolbar make it easy for users to find important functions. Icons can be customized and used as shortcuts for frequently used operations. Items on the Toolbar can be specified as icons (you can pick from XRT/gear's extensive icon collection) or Motif Primitive widgets. Using Widget tips, icon annotations can be made to appear. There are also resources to control the number of items, rows and columns, or spaces on the toolbar.

Aligner

Labels and widgets can easily be aligned using XRT/gear's Aligner. No complicated programming is required. This is much easier than using Motif RowColumn widgets.

Enhanced Toggle

Unlike standard Motif toggles, XRT/gear Enhanced Toggle widgets can have multiple states. Checkmarks, cross marks, solid color or a user-specified pixmap can be used. XRT/gear changes the look of the pixmap when it is not selectable.

Enhanced Label

You can display both a pixmap and text on the labels with XRT/gear Enhanced Label. Borders can be chosen from 10 different styles. The text and pixmap can be rotated to 90, 180 or 270 degrees.

Enhanced Pushbutton

Both pixmaps and text can be displayed with XRT/gear's Enhanced Pushbutton. Rotation and clipping is supported. The pixmap can be specified in resource file or in program code. XRT/gear automatically changes the appearance of the Enhanced Pushbutton when it is not selectable.

Widget Tips

You can now display popup help for any Motif widget using XRT/gear's Widget Tips. Users can view help text by placing their mouse over a widget. The Widget Tips resource enables you to define text for any widget in your application. There are resources provided to set display timing, color, location and fonts.

Widget Snapshot

XRT/gear Widget Snapshot outputs the contents of a Motif widget (including the manager widget) to PostScript. Routines are also provided to retrieve other Motif widgets or pixmaps off screen. You can control parameters such as margin, layout, paper size, scaling and color.

Icon Collection

The XRT/gear Icon Collection includes more than 3000 icons. Icons are grouped into categories and the icon viewer is provided to allow quick searching.

Use with other XRT products

The image on the right shows a spreadsheet application which uses XRT/gear's Toolbar and Tab Manager in combination with XRT/table. Creating an intuitive interface is now easy with XRT.