Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [OT] Architectural renovation

[Bruce Stephens]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Sorry to tell you but, no, nothing so lofty.  The canonical
> view-tree-architecture input processing was designed, in essense, this
> way:
>
>       "Uh....I dunno.   I guess this'd work.  Here, I'll bet I can
>          get something working in a day or two."
>
> and after that, it was elaborated.   "Hey, look -- nifty -- I can
> squeeze such and such feature into this...."
>
> (There's also an element of (unpricipled) generalization of the more
> reasonable concept of top-level window keyboard focus .... mixed in
> with the idea that UI components are either windows or
> kinda-like-windows.)

There seem to be other ideas already implemented, similar in broad
outline to the ideas in the "Don't Fidget with Widgets, Draw!" paper
you referenced.  

I know of a couple of widget sets that include a canvas widget---a
rectangular region in which the application can draw things (lines,
rectangles, circles, text, etc.), and cause them to respond to events.
One can also stick widgets on the canvas.  One such widget set is Tk
(indeed, the paper mentions John Ousterhout).  Another is gtk (or it
might be in GNOME, I forget), which is basically a copy of the idea in
Tk, but significantly improved in a number of ways.  I believe the
major part of Gnumeric is actually things stuck in a gtk/GNOME canvas.
I imagine Qt or KDE has something similar, too.

There's even a Scheme (other than Guile) binding onto gtk,
<http://kaolin.unice.fr/STklos/>.

I must admit, my impression is that, for the most part, widgets in
trees work sufficiently well that there's little need to look for
something better.  And for structured diagrams (or whatever), one of
these canvas widgets works well.

My experience of applications which obviously use non-standard
toolkits is almost entirely negative: xmms, xine, and mplayer, for
example, suck, IMHO.  They're acceptable to me because I can remember
the keys I normally use to operate them---the interfaces are awful.
That's not to say it can't be done well---just that it's safer to
provide widgets that show text, and scrollbars, and things, rather
than expecting random programmers to do something sensible, because
you can bet they won't bother to provide (for example) normal text
selection (I can't seem to copy the name of an MP3 from XMMS to paste
into an email message, for example).

[...]