Then I thought i'd tackle undo - just for the image edits. Turned out to be very simple and pretty easy (in hindsight perhaps not so surprising - it isn't like editing a tree where you have complex data-structures to manipulate, it's just a rectangle of bits). I just made a new version of the tool layer composition routine and had it calculate a delta as it went - and that delta is just stored in another sparse layer. Because the compositor is not sparse-aware I added a check in the sparse layer setLine() call to see if a non-existent tile was being written with a row of zeros and it does nothing if it was ... yeah it's not terribly efficient! The delta along with some pointers to the relevant objects is then just pushed onto a stack. Undoing or redoing the delta is a simple matter of applying an addition or subtraction to the target region. Again it isn't sparse-aware but it could be made thusly without a lot of work. I'm just doing the edit undo globally for the application (which isn't right!) but that is easy to change. Lastly I just tested to see how well the deltas compress. I added a step to compress (and discard) the sparse layer delta every time it is saved to the undo stack. For very small edits it's very good - from 5% or so, for lager single-colour paints up to about 20% of the original size. A full-sized (1024x700) wide-radius gaussian blur was more like 70% ... but it's probably still worth it. I'll have to find a way to lazily do it in the background from the undo manager though as it can start to take a while to run as the data size gets bigger.
I got a bit sidetracked trying to fit a colour selector and layer list into the paint pox ... the Java one is quite large. And so now the window is getting a bit big (maybe not too big though). I started working on my own version but i'm not sure i'ts a path I really want to go down. I'm also not sure what to do with the layer list - it's sort of something you need handy from every tool but I want to avoid having a separate window for it that is always around. Might be a job for an iframe ... maybe. Having one central layer list is a little clumsy if you use focus-follows-mouse like I do so it might make sense to have it per image somehow.
But I've already found the pox idea works a lot better on my laptop (only 1024x768 screen) than having a separate toolbox which is too easily lost or hidden.
I do need to rethink the way the tools track the current document. Right now there is a central model which tracks the application state. When the mouse enters a window it notifies the model of the change - but this is really broken (e.g. drag a paintbrush outside the current window over another ... nasty things happen). I did have it based on focus but that didn't seem very reliable either. I probably need to manually re-route window messages to the current tool rather than having the tool listen to the current window (which is clumsy as hell anyway). Menu items are still a bit of a pain since i'm using a single menu across all windows and the actions have no direct context to go by when they fire (although now i think about it, since i'm manually popping them up I already know where they came from).
Now i've pretty much got the 'guts' I need as a baseline it's probably time to fix these niggling issues and bed it down a bit more solidly. Which probably means things will shift into low-gear for a while since that stuff can get tedious. Not a huge amount to fix though.
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