Brass Developer Guide
We will shortly be publishing an SDK and development
guide so anyone can write their own plugins for Brass. In the meantime,
here's a little how, where and why information for you.
Are you
looking for the Mime developers guide - "Adding Mime gesture
support to your own and other people's applications"?
Why you
should develop a Brass plugin
Perhaps you've got an idea for a great Windows
utility, but haven't got around to coding it yet. Or maybe you've
written the core code, but you don't have the time or inclination
to code a useable interface for it. Maybe you think that your tool
is so small, nobody will want to install yet another application
just to get a feature. Whatever the reason, you've got a cool tool
to share but you haven't done the sharing.
Developing Windows apps is time consuming and quite
often annoying. All the little things have to be addressed, from
coding the basic structure of the app, the message loops, the interface
integration and so on. None of this is getting your cool tool coded,
but it's all essential Windows work.
Brass does all this set-up work for you. All you
need to do is concentrate on developing the juicy bit of your plugin.
Using Brass, you can have a plugin that displays text and responds
to user input (like the Desktop Text or NewsGrinder plugins) created
in a few minutes. Best of all, Brass handles the mundane Windows
stuff for you - no more messageloops and callbacks, just get on
with coding what you want to code.
Developing a Brass plugin gives you access to an
existing userbase. People are more likely to try a new plugin if
all they have to do is click a single button to enable it. Compare
that to finding an application, downloading it, installing it and
learning how to use it.
Best of all, developing a Brass plugin gives you
access to the expertise of the 32Bits team. If you run into problems
or need help implementing a feature you can post in the developer
forum and get an instant response. No more trawling round the web
to find a code snippet that doesn't really do what you want!
How Brass plugins are developed
Plugins can be developed either with straight Win32
or MFC code. All you need is a little C++ and Windows knowledge.
Every plugin begins life as a child of the base plugin class, which
provides a standard interface to the Brass system. All you need
to do is override the methods you need, call the helper functions
as required and you're done. Brass takes care of the rest - the
message handling, on-screen rendering, data updates, window movement/resizing,
menus and more. The Developer Guide will include a tutorial on creating
your first plugin in less than 5 minutes!
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