I still have some work to do on the basic drawing/HMI engine, but will soon be focusing entirely on what I call “furniture” as in pre-made controls we can use. I will create some fancy, build in controls, but the most important one is a “User Control” enabling us to create custom controls. Now-keep in mind that the entire HMI is specified in XML format and loaded as we start the HMI Browser, so a custom control will need to be loaded as part of this. For the Designer, we would like to have a library that is made available, but only those that are used to be included in the final XML.
The User Control itself needs to be built from other controls and by adding colors, scaling, rotation etc to create a new control. This means our user control will be a list of build-in controls where we create our own, new interface. As input values can transform to position or rotation we should be able to create most controls these ways.
To enhance our customization capabilities, we have Polygon and Plain. I don’t want to dig into the same security problems as ordinary browsers, so the Plain VM will only have access to HMI Browser, not any of the host OS capabilities. If we need the later we will have other options for that.