On 8/25/07, tim Rowledge tim@rowledge.org wrote:
As it happens I was one of the reviewers of the original CUA documents waaaaaay back. It was certainly comprehensive - in my opinion far too comprehensive.
Isn't it always with IBM? :)
Morphic is a reasonable implementation technology but many of the current widgets built with Morphic are nasty. It would be nice to see a better bottom layer (under morphic unless anyone wants to rewrite everything) that can take advantage of OS facilities for accelerated graphics; Sophie has been using a binding to the Cairo libraries for example. Tweak has many interesting points but the version Sophie has been using (and I have no idea how out of date it might be) has been the cause of much gnashing of teeth when trying to debug or work out wtf is happening when.
tim
Yes, with my MVP suggestion I don't mean Morphic couldn't be used. In Dolphin (sorry to harp on it, but it's the best I've ever seen) the view part really feels like a black box, at least to me. I never understood how to create a new widget, and based on how some of the "goodies" widgets looked I don't know if there even was a clean way.
So if we had the mechanisms set up for the Model and Presenter objects to communicate to the View space then Morphic or anything else would work as the view.
Then we could have a tabbed "chooser" view for selecting Morphs for your GUI you're building. If you create a new Morph you can select what kind of Morph it is and it shows up in the GUI builder after that.
I think Tim's idea of cataloging what is there is good. And when we catagorize we would also need to look at implementations so we can document which ones are good to go, and which ones are good in concept only but need a rewrite.