Beginnings of the customer interface

This week I got the customer interface structure laid out, and did a bit of work getting some of its components up and running. So far, the application loads in the categories dynamically and then loads the products based on the user's choice of category.

I learned about Item Renderers today, which I haven't had to use before. When I was working on Vizzl at Deloitte the Item Renderers had already been done for me. It turns out that they're pretty easy, I did waste a few hours though because I didn't realise that Item Renderers where the thing I needed.

Item Renderers allow me to take a standard component like a TileList (which I have used here to display the products) and display it in a different way. In this case each item in the list has an image and tool-tip as well as the standard label. If I was just loading in static data I could display an image and tool-tip without using an item renderer, but as soon as I start to load data during run-time, it necessitates using one.