[pygtk] Design / Algorythym Question

[Adam Tauno Williams]

Quoting asomers at gmail.com:
> Of course, I should've noticed the word "layout" in your original email.
> Your problem reminds me of collision detection in 2D video games.  I found
> this tutorial to be helpful:
> http://www.metanetsoftware.com/technique/tutorialA.html .  Basically, if
> two objects are overlapping, you calculate a push vector between their
> centroids to separate them.

Excellent; thanks for the link.  I'd only just thought "Hey! Games  
must do that".

So far I have a widget canvas where I can:
  right-click -
  pop-up menu -
  create widget on layout at that location. -
  grab the frame of the widget and move it around -
  create more widgets

Only as soon as I drag a widget the scroll-bars of the Layout become  
oddly disconnection.
So that is my next issue, then to look at the overlapping.

Also I can't yet resize the layout dynamically if the widget gets  
dragged of the edge.

<https://sourceforge.net/u/whitemice/whitemicehg/ci/f731db465262a4d7751c69700ba3f39f04c28e96/tree/Scraps/Python/Gtk/WidgetCanvas.py>

> On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Adam Tauno Williams
> <awilliam at whitemice.org>wrote:
>> On Tue, 2012-03-06 at 09:05 -0700, asomers at gmail.com wrote:
>> > If you pack your widgets into boxes or tables, then they will never
>> > overlap (unless you're using buggy 3rd party widgets).  Normally, the
>> > only way to make widgets overlap would be to use a Layout or a Fixed
>> > to manually place your widgets.  But that's generally a bad idea.  I
>> > recommend that you read
>> > http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/ch-PackingWidgets.html and pack
>> > your widgets into boxes.
>> I'm very much aware of widget packing.  But having widgets that can be
>> deliberately dragged around on a surface [Layout] is specifically the
>> purpose in this case.
>> > On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 8:14 AM, Adam Tauno Williams
>> > <awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
>> > This isn't specifically related to Gtk / PyGtk, but since I'm using
>> > PyGTK I thought I'd ask it here [it just relates generally to UI
>> > design].
>> > If I have a layout that contains widgets [which are rectangles]
>> > detecting with widgets overlap isn't that hard.  But is there a
>> > generally accepted scheme / algorthym for redistributing the widgets
>> > in such a fashion that they no longer overlap and 'feels' intuitive?
>> > I've seen this behavior in a couple of applications and am curious if
>> > ther is anything like a 'standard' approach to this issue? [relevant
>> > links?]