Mentor

Joe Groff

Skills required

• Familiarity with the Factor UI
• Familiarity with Windows, Mac OS X, and X11 programming

Technical outline

The Factor UI has rudimentary support to report document-based events (such as "New", "Open", "Save", "Cut", "Copy", and "Paste"). There should be a document-based application framework built around these events, similar to the NSDocument framework in the Cocoa API, that manages windows associated with document files.

• Use native dialogs for Open and Save
• Track when an open file is moved so that further saves or reverts reference its new location
• Use OS X's "setRepresentedFilename:" ability to associate document windows with their related files; emulate similar functionality on Windows by looking up and displaying the document icon as the window icon
• Associate deployed document-based apps with their document types in the deployed Info.plist on OS X
• Support drag-and-drop of associated document files onto application icons or windows

Benefit to student

The student learns about the Factor UI and gets to design a significant addition to its API.

Benefit to community

It becomes easier to write document-based applications with the Factor UI.