user-interface overview

Description

The following screen shot shows an overview of the Hades user interface, when configured to use the Swing GUI and edit mode. Some of the components, notably the menu bar and the simulation control panel, may not be shown when running in the viewer mode. The decision of whether to use edit or view mode is made by the web page designer and (at least at the moment) cannot be changed while the applet is running.

The basic layout of the user interface should be familiar. In consists of the following main components, from top to bottom:

• the window title shows the design name specified in the currently active Hades simulation setup (if any).
• the menu bar at the top of the window, which allows to select almost all commands in the editor. The menu bar will not be shown when in view mode.
• the status panel shows the filename of the currently loaded design (if any) and is used to display editor messages. Please check the status message panel whenever the editor seems to hang or does not react to your mouse and keyboard input. The editor may still be expecting specific input and will say so on the status message panel.
• the main schematics canvas with rulers (ticks are in inches) and scrollbars. This component is also sometimes called the object canvas in the Hades documentation, because the simulation objects are displayed here.
• the popup menu on the object canvas provides access to a variety of editor commands. When executed via the popup menu, many editor commands will interpret the position of the popup menu as their first coordinate. The popup menu will be explained in one of the following applets in more detail.
• context sensitive tool tips about objects on the object canvas. Simple move the mouse to an object on the canvas and wait for the tooltip to appear. For example, the editor will tell you simulation component names, class names, current parameters, etc. (Note that the tool-tips might be disabled by default, because Java tooltip windows sometimes interact less than optimal with the native window system. If in doubt, try to enable or disable tooltips via the menu->layers->enable tooltips menu item (editor) or the popup->view->toggle tooltips menu item (viewer).
• The simulation control panel at the bottom of the window allows to start, pause, resume, or stop the current simulation. It also shows the current simulation time.

In the (near) future, we intend to provide a 'low-fat' version of the applets to reduce the download size and therefore download time. The program size of the hades-applet.jar software archive which includes the simulator, GUI, and gate level simulation models will be about 1 MBytes, while the complete hades.jar application archive is over 5 MBytes.

Run the applet | Run the editor (via Webstart)