Re: [9fans] Evolving rio / GUI development

[Bruce Ellis <bruce.ellis@gmail.com>]

GUI is a term invented by people who sell them.

i was very impressed in the mid 80's that my secretary
at the labs totally embraced the mux/jim jerq that was
put in front of her (maybe it was 56xx).

(mux/mpx -> rio, jim -> sam).

i knew the lads were on to a good thing.  I think seeing
a face when e-mail arrived made the entire building more
efficient.  e-mail was more efficient than a phone call.
i don't think i ever called a co-worker in those days
except for a "I'm really hungry, you said dinner was on".

20 years on i am using programs which i know are
technically very goood and useful (i'll quote adobe audition).

ok, i'll rant on.  HST is gone so someone has to do it.

audtion is quite useable - i've been doing a soundtrack with it,
but open it up and you have half a dozen mysterious windows
and even more click on menus up the top, many options
being sub-menus and so forth.

now if it was written in a different thread of software development
then it would be a small window in rio with a small menu to
open/save/etc.  great, i choose "wave" from the menu and get to
sweep out a wave window.  just what i wanted. it has an
appropriate menu.  etc.  i choose "multitrack" i get something
more complex which will need very specific mouse interaction ...
but plan9 has no problems with that.

such windows need GUIs - dragging a selection on a wave,
but it's kinda different huh?

end of rant.

brucee

On Mon, 21 Feb 2005 11:54:16 +0900, Kenji Okamoto
<okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> > Regarding the UIs,
> > we have what we call omero (another experiment), it's a mixture of
> > a window-toolkit and a file server, that handles all the graphics by
> > its own. The application creates files to build its UI, and the fs takes
> > care of the mouse and everything else. This allows you to replicate
> > and move around UI components without placing the burden in the
> > application.
>
> How do you think that recent GUI programming style is too difficult
> to understand for non-computer science students.   We need GUI
> only for user interface, and it should be very easy to deal with, and
> can be used from all of the languages without special enbedded portion
> of those tools.
>
> Once upon a time, programming was a fan for many scientists because
> it was not so difficult.    They have to just care of the precisenenss of
> their own parts.   Now a days, I think most of them are buying some
> commercial products and students don't know how to make it from
> scratch.   It will soon make this world darker I fear.
>
> Does your Plan B help such?
>
> Kenji
>
>