Jeffrey Brown <jeffbrown.the@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi!
>
> I want to write a mindmapping app, like Freeplane, which involves drawing
> rectangles containing text and arrows connecting them. For that purpose,
> today I installed reactive-banana, wxWidgets, wxHaskell and
> reactive-banana-wx. (It's the first complex install for which I didn't have
> to write the list for help!)
>
> Am I correct that the question of whether graphics can be superimposed over
> text depends only on wxHaskell, and not reactive-banana? Would you
> recommend first writing code that uses only wxHaskell, to become familiar
> with the library, or jumping right in by using reactive-banana at the same
> time?

Hi Jeffrey,

You might be interested in the work I'm doing on a 2D level editor for a
game I'm building. The game is "hadoom", and it's a clone of Doom
(inventive name, eh?). The level editor is top-down cartography
software, and you can see fairly recent screenshots here:

    http://t.co/LgMRHw2y0Z
    http://t.co/O2DhKZWwcG

There is also an old video here

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfc4QkfAHx4

Anyway, the reason I say this might be interesting, is this is built
using reactive-banana, GTK, and the "diagrams" library. I've found this
a really nice way of building an interactive GUI such as this - GTK
gives me the basic framework of the application, and I use a
GtkDrawingArea for the main canvas. I then model all interaction through
reactive-banana, and finally output a Diagram at the end. I use the
diagrams-cairo backend to render this directly into the GtkDrawingArea.

The source code for this is at

    https://github.com/ocharles/hadoom/tree/master/hadoom-editor

though I should warn you it's somewhat in a state of rapid development,
so things may change wildly. However, the basic approach of using GTK,
reactive-banana & diagrams will not change.

Hope this helps!

-- ocharles