A little of the history behind this program:

Everybody who have tried to do a program with a nice GUI have almost certainly
come across the problem; how to adjust the program based on the font that user
has selected.  It began as a little test program that should be able to adjust
itself, but I soon realized that it wasn't that easy (as I had thought).

I  was  almost  finished with a working version of the program when I got some
other programs/libraries that did something similar.

The first program I got was MUI (Magical User Interface).  It wasn't that bad,
but it was big (170k) and it was slow.

Another  program  was gadoutline.library, it wasn't exactly like I would want,
and it was quite big (60k).

Then,  I  came  across  the  program that I liked the most:  GadLayout 1.5.  I
changed  one  of  my  programs,  so that it would use GadLayout, but it didn't
work.   I  think  that  the problem was that my assembler didn't work with the
object file for GadLayout (I had never tried that before).

When  GadLayout  didn't  work  for  me  I continued with my own project, but I
changed  it  a bit, because I liked the way GadLayout used tags.  So I changed
my  program , so that it used tags instead of my own gadget structure.  I also
tried  to make the tags work in a similar way as GadLayout's tags, I also used
similar names for the tags (mainly so that I didn't need to change the program
I had adjusted to GadLayout so much.

After  that the first beta version of the program was ready, a friend of mine,
P-O, also started working on the project.  We decided to make the program into
a  shared library, so that all programs could use it without having to include
it in the executable file.  The library was named GadUtil.

After  that  moment  the  library  has  grown  quite a lot, with new tags, new
functions, a lot of enhancements and bugfixes.  Now the library contains about
47  functions, and has quite a lot of tags.  Another feature of the library is
that  it  has some new gadget kinds, like a progress indicator, image gadgets,
drawer  gadgets  etc.  It is also very easy to add hotkeys and localization to
your programs when using gadutil.library.

/Staffan

[Main] [Previous] [Next]

Converted on 19 Jul 1996 with RexxDoesAmigaGuide2HTML by Michael Ranner.