During the summer, there has been slow but steady progress on Tulip4, and now that vacations are over for half of the team, the development is starting again.
User Interface
Our User Interface specialist likes to draw inspiration from existing software, as the screenshots of the plugin manager showed.
For Tulip4's main interface he drew inspiration from Qt Creator, with a side bar on the left with big icons for the most common actions (such as importing).
This redesign is based on the current plan of moving functionality such as configuration of the interactors aqnd views into the host view, lierating much-needed screen space.
The UI is far from complete, and having a first preview out by september is more than optimistic, so it seems the preview will be out by october (I am calling this a preview and not a beta as the API will probably not be fixed).
Code Cleanup
The old observation system has been mostly removed from Tulip4, and the only class that has not been refactored is the UpdatesRecorder, which takes care of the undo/redo; and will be redesigned more deeply, as the new observation system can simplify its task greatly, while giving it more power.
The old Tulip 3 main interface will be kept as an alternative, as transition from tulip 3 to tulip4 should not prove too much of a hurdle.
Converting Tulip 3 code to Tulip 4
We are keeping a compatibility layer in a new library, called tulip3-compat to ease the transition.
This will contain compatibility for the old observation system, the old perspective system and more as we remove stuff from Tulip trunk.
As soon as the new UI is useable, we will publish it, but in the meantime we will keep you posted, as it is unlikely we will be ready before october.
