Brass Plugins: Mime Developers Guide
Introduction
Before we start you should be absolutely clear that this guide
is for creating criteria plugins and adding Mime gesture support
to applications. If you're looking to create a separate Brass plugin,
please refer to the Brass
developer guide.
Why should you add gesture support to an application? Simple -
it enhances the user's productivity and speed of use. Instead of
forcing the user to click through options, menus and configuration
pages, the user can wave the mouse and instantly produce a result.
Even simple actions like moving to the toolbar and clicking a single
button can be sped up via a single gesture. If you're not convinced
of the power of gestures, try using Mime for a few days. Once you
start using gestures you'll never go back.
Why you should add your own support to Mime
Even though Mime can enable gestures in any application - even
ones without specifically coded gesture plugins - it's definitely
a good idea to add your own specific support to your application.
Mime is able to pick up the standard Windows application functions
such as saving, loading, navigation etc. However if your application
does something different or unusual Mime has no way to know this
feature is available.
By adding Mime gesture support directly into your application users
can access even more functionality with mouse gestures.
Learning the principle behind Mime gesture support will probably
take 10 to 15 minutes; less if you are an experienced developer.
Sample code is provided in this guide so if you prefer to download
and look at the code, go right ahead.
Once you understand how to implement a single gesture, you can
add more extremely quickly. One new gesture added to your application
per minute of coding time isn't an exaggeration!
When you're done, you can send us your gesture plugin and we'll
host it for you here with a link back to your product website. Not
only are you helping your users to get more out of your application,
you're advertising to a whole new user base for free.
How to create a criteria plugin
This guide assumes you understand how Mime works, and how criteria,
functions and gestures work from a user's point of view. As a developer
you'll see a slightly different view of this. It's also assumed
you've got a basic knowledge of C++, and either win32 or MFC coding.
Writing criteria plugins is extremely easy :-)
You can write a criteria plugin in any language as long as it's
capable of creating a DLL and exporting functions from it. This
guide will show you step-by-step how to create a plugin for a fictional
application that we'll write. We'll be using Visual C++ 6. Once
you've seen how to write a criteria plugin for your own application,
you'll see how to write one for any application you want.
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