Hi Mark,

> The image command tests to see if anything is selected
> when it starts up and, if so, asks the user (in some
> intelligible way) if he wants to maintain those selections
> in order to move them along with the background.

I can forsee a lot of confusion with asking that question, because it's very frequent for people to go to the image command without any desire to move images around at all, like for example to just place a brand new image.

So that's going to be a confusing thing to pop up a message in an intelligible way when the question that they now have to answer doesn't have any relation to the task that they're trying to accomplish right then (like add a new image, adjust an opacity setting, hide an image, etc...) .

That's a big problem with popping up a modal question like that - it really has to definitely be relevant to what they are currently doing or else it will be both confusing and annoying to have to answer it as an additional step.


> As for learning to program things for MoI, a "diging in"
> starting point is what I'm looking for right now.

Well probably the first step is to explore the existing scripts - basically every command has a script file that controls how it operates and you can find all of them in the \commands sub-folder underneath MoI's main installation folder.

Similarly the main UI is defined by a bunch of HTML files in the \ui sub-folder inside of MoI's main installation folder.


> One problem I'm going to have with this is that,
> although I have some training in higher level languages,
> my entire career involved real-time assembly language
> programming of microprocessors. What language is MoI written in?

Hmmm, yeah so I guess really a first step would be to learn some JavaScript to start with - it's the language that is used for adding script logic to web pages so there are a lot of online resources that could get you started with some of the basics of JavaScript itself.

MoI is written in a combination of C++ and JavaScript - C++ is for the kind of core heavy lifting pieces and JavaScript is for controlling the overall command flow logic, like controlling the different stages of a command and calling services like point pickers to gather point inputs, and stuff like that.

The UI is done using HTML - if you look through the \commands sub-folder you'll find that each command has both a JavaScript .js file that holds the command logic and also a .htm file that contains the UI for the command.

You can make a new command by creating a new .htm and .js file that start with the command name and putting them in your \commands subfolder. You generally set up a keyboard shortcut to launch your new command. That's how the various plug-ins collected on Petr's site were created, see that scripting wiki link posted previously for a link to Petr's site.


It's going to be a pretty difficult area to dig into currently though, since I'm not ready yet to spend very much time supporting this area.


- Michael