Re: gEDA-user: Reinventing the wheel

[Eduardo Costa <ecosta.tmp@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 18/05/2011, Russell Shaw <rjshaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>  > On 17/05/2011, John Doty<jpd@xxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
>  >>
>  >> On May 17, 2011, at 9:56 AM, Russell Shaw wrote:
>  >>
>  >>>
>  >>> Most guis hide what they do. I believe in them showing the commands
> they
>  >>> send internally as a script would (or atleast have the option to show
>  >>> that) so the user can paste the commands into an external file if
>  >>> needed.
>  >>
>  >> I've done GUIs that wrap scripts, but it only works in very simple,
>  >> shallow cases. An API that supports GUI well is very different from an
> API
>  >> that supports scripting well.
>  >>
>  >> John Doty              Noqsi Aerospace, Ltd. http://www.noqsi.com/
>  >> jpd@xxxxxxxxx
>
> On 18/05/11 04:57, Eduardo Costa wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> That's not true at all John. Have you ever heard/seen a program called
>> Alias
>> Wavefront Maya? It used to be from Silicon Graphics, but they sold it to
>> Autodesk a couple of years ago.
>>
>> A program for 3D CGI which has quite an innovative popup menu system with
>> something called hotboxes and cardinal menus (the one shown bellow). 200%
>> productive, and much better than anyother existing/deployed nowadays:
>>
>> http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/504/polygonquickmenunothingrx6.jpg/
>>
>> and driven from MEL (sort of an intepreted c languaje they roled for the
>> purpose of scripting such a huge program). Believe me, you wouldn't even
>> think it is scripted because they didn't abuse of it, yet it lets such
>> menu
>> system be 10 times more powerful!
>>
>> I do share many of your points Russell, while I'm happy (still) using
>> geda.
>> It seems to me is going somewhere I don't really want to be in a future.
>>
>> I've got almost done a c-library I wrote implementing this menu systems
>> for
>> my own programs. Haven't looked at it for a time, but it could work with
>> gtk
>> or other toolkits as long as they allow low level event handling.
>>
>> Anyways, if you are really going for it, and are going to use old'good c,
>> I'll be pleased to hear your thoughts and cooperate.
>
> Hi,
> I'm a gtk hater, and am open to new widget toolkit user interface paradigms,
> even if it means writing new widgets or toolkits from scratch (which i've
> done
> before).
>
> I found the useability of a 20yo unix box sch/pcb cad program far better
> in certain ways than current cad packages. It involved the left hand and
> an external multi-button "puck" device in most of the screen-panning
> operations, leading to much less mouse-finger fatigue. It made all the
> current Windows cad packages look like kiddies toys by comparison.
>

Yes, with Maya you also need to have a hand on the keyboard and the
other on the mouse. But Maya is a properly huge and complex sytem
meant for 2D/3D compositing and animation.

The good point on this sytem is that you can have as many menus as
needed. They are extremely ligthweight in terms of memory and cpu
costs, and can show up depending on current context, previous selected
option (resembling a deeper submenu in a hierarchy), etc. There are
many ways they can be employed without even the need for a keyboard at
all, still boosting productivity by a  factor of tens in respect of
current windows-looking menu systems.

As a big plus, they relieve the application from having to use
valuable screen space to draw and maintain stupid toolbars with stupid
icons. All you need is right-click somewhere, move the mouse a bit on
the direction of your preferred option, and release:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeYyKkOOxIo

In either case, I also have experience programming others than xlib
and relevant toolkits. This menus that I propose/like do not have to
be used if other methods are suitable or better.

As long as we can have some good geda software that is not constantly
going to be limited by ancient stuff, yet is not directly going to the
evil hands of svg and similar crap and human/cpu-unfriendly formats
just because windows users want to look at the files with their
browsers, it's fine for me.

In either case, whatever your 20 y/o software does can also be done
nowadays with xlib, motif, opengl, a mixture of all three, or
whatsoever.

So, again, if you are at any time going to get hands on it, I'll be
glad to help.

Regards,

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