SmartPlan

Challenges







Tools

1. Tools need to be able to interact with a "stage" object as well as the SmartObject manager. Their interactions with the stage will primarily be in the form of mouse events. Changes to the objects on the stage will be done through the object's properties and the SceneObject's display methods (although their may be a notion of a temporary drawing on the stage that happens before object creation or during editing)
   

Groups, Instances & Tags

1. The ability to develop prototypes & place instances of these in a design is very important. It is not clear whether these should be defined in seperate files that get loaded in as symbols, or whether there should just be a central definition in the one file. I can probably look at how SVG or XAML handles this for a better idea how to proceed.
2. Grouping objects is desirable both for editing objects and for analysis purposes. It may be best to approach this using a tagging system as with delicious or picasa. That way groups could be dynamically analysed in a very flexible manner based on the tags selected.
   

Application interaction:

1. "Hollow mode" for overlaying other applications.
2. XAML / WinFX integration (has nothing to do with core, but handy for utilizing best parts of both GUIs)
   

DLL organization:

1. Application needs to be able to be launched either as a default application or by another application in order to allow other programmers to write their own application interfaces (eg for Flash, AutoCAD etc).
2. Alternatively, I need to have some kind of plug-in solution, but I think its easier to have a seperate, compiled application link to the precompiled core.