More Tabs for Typica

Currently there are some places in Typica where tabs are used to present a multi-page interface, but all of these are windows defined on the C++ side of the code base. If you wanted to use the configuration files to define custom interfaces that used tabs you were out of luck. Recently one of Typica's feature branches extended the processing of those configuration files to allow the creation of tab bars anywhere you want.

Here we can see a screenshot of an early draft of the manual log entry feature that will be in the next release of Typica. The exact details will change as I continue to work on getting this right. I quickly realized that a page based design with tabs made a lot of sense here.

The idea behind this window is that you can create entries in the roasting log without having actually logged the data in Typica. This can be useful for things like historical data entry, entering important details from sample roasts when using a sample roaster where you just can't get useful temperature data, or better failure recovery.

The first page allows entering the details of the green coffee (either creating a new green coffee item for sample roasts or working off of existing inventory for production roasts) and the roasted coffee. If that's all the information that you have or all the information that you care to enter, you don't even need to see the other pages. There's enough information available to create an appropriate log entry.

Alternately, if you have roasting data, you can move on to the next tab to put that in. That might mean transcribing the data from a hand written roasting log or pulling the data from a file. Trying to get all of the features visible at the same time means things would need to be smaller, the interface would be far more cluttered, making it difficult to figure out what to do with this, and it would also make it challenging to use on some of the smaller screens that I know some people are still using.

I'm not going to go around putting tabs everywhere now, but I'll use them where I think it makes sense.

I expect to have a new build of Typica out before the end of the year.