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BrandonWhats important in a GUI?
I know GUI Awards are a log time away, but I want to be prepared, and obviously Trolly looks to be the main competition. So what is important in a GUI? -Eye Candy -Speed -Simplicity -Ease of making your own apps -Applications -File Management -Desktop Environment -Multi-scripting/tasking -Internet Support -Active Development What should I as a GUI developer, make my GUI have, and as a judge, judge GUIs on?		2009-05-0911:09 AM
ksrRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Of course all of these things are important in a large GUI. For me, I think the most important things are simplicity, both in terms of appearance and usage, a fully-featured language with which I can create my own applications, and multitasking. I hate to say it with all of these monotasking GUIs around at the moment, but I find multitasking GUIs infinitely more usable.		2009-05-094:41 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
As i know, there is no Multitasking gui in QB that can do the same things than a full featured Monotasking gui like asgard		2009-05-095:16 PM
BrandonRe:Whats important in a GUI?
I agree fully about the usability, but for all the better it is, its harder to make.		2009-05-095:34 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Well, what about XGUI. It was pretty advanced,		2009-05-095:42 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
was xgui's apps capable to render formated text? , was xgui's apps capable to fetch web contents? ... i guess "no! without any modify the kernel". it's the main problem with multitasking in qb, if an app need a specific functionality, you must add it to the kernel. and the kernel become bigger and bigger until it's to huge to fit in the memory,.... it's not flexible enought for me. in a monotasking system, if an app need a functionality, it can be build into the app code. if this new item need to be used by some other apps, you can consider to put it into the gui library, or make a shared source file,... thats is flexible for me for example in asgard or qstep, all widget are on separate .bas and .bi files. if you need a widget (for example a button) you could add button.bas to your project (with the ide, "add file" , not "merge"). so the app are tiny as possible.		2009-05-096:43 PM
ksrRe:Whats important in a GUI?
You're right that with the programs-as-EXEs model, multitasking isn't feasible. I was thinking more about scripting languages.		2009-05-097:21 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
even with scripting language, you cant do anythink until it isn't implemented in the kernel ... good multitasking in qbasic is an utopy		2009-05-097:25 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
[quote] was xgui's apps [sic] capable to [sic] render formated text? , was xgui's apps [sic] capable to [sic] fetch web contents? ... i guess "no! without any modify [sic] the kernel". [/quote] I believe XGUI apps were able to do these things: Think about this: - How do you render formatted text in XGUI? You plot it pixel by pixel. - How do you render formatted text in QB? You plot it pixel by pixel. - How do you fetch web data in XGUI? You use an external program. - How do you fetch web data in QB? You use an external program. Scripting langauges simply have to give programs access to certain primitives. Apart from being turning complete, they need bitmap graphics functions, input, string parsing, etc... The kernel doesn't need to (and shouldn't) provide every possible widget. In fact, it's possible to have a "microkernel" scripter that provides almost nothing but a bytecode interpreter system.		2009-05-097:28 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Meant to edit this in, but WTF is an "utopy"? (This forum needs a delete button)		2009-05-097:31 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
i'm sure that ploting every pixel from a script is more slow than in qb, because every pixel plotting instruction should be interpreted by the kernel before		2009-05-097:33 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Yeah, but you're changing your argument. First it was "scripters can't do these things without adding the specific functionality to the kernel". Now it's "scripting is slower". Nobody will contest that, and yet interpreted languages (think Perl, PHP, Python) still have their place and remain popular.		2009-05-097:35 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
you can not compare perl, php and python with a scripting language written in qb ,... they run on a real multitask (maybe also multithreaded) environment ... i'm not changing my argument, i reply only to your last one about the pixel plotting, else you provide function to make big thing in the kernel, and it become huge, else you provide only primitives, and the system become to slow. .... maybe multitask's fan should consider the task switching instead of a real multitask system, it's the best balance (i'll consider it likely)		2009-05-097:58 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Well, if you're going to assert that a QB based script interpreter will be slower than Per, I agree with you. Then again, if you wanted speed, you would be using C or at least FreeBasic, which can take advantage of the features of modern processors. Clearly, using compiler written for 16-bit DOS over 20 years ago isn't going to produce the best speed on today's hardware. Honestly, I don't see what problem you have with scripting. The GUI community has been content to have BOTH kinds of GUIs for many. many years now, and neither has emerged as a clear "winner". What you have to remember is that this is a hobby written for practice. In addition, writing a scripter allows one to learn something about programming language design and the challenges of sharing resources among concurrently running applucations.		2009-05-098:02 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
i've no problem with scripting, at the begining of this thead, i've only written a reaction to: "I hate to say it with all of these monotasking GUIs around at the moment, but I find multitasking GUIs infinitely more usable." (from ksr) i agree that, if i want speed , C beat qbasic, but whe are on a Qbasic Gui blog, not C Gui...		2009-05-098:07 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
I'd say that's because, for whatever reason, people tend to write buggy scripters. On the other hand, from what I've seen of KSR's system it's a bit of a departure from QB scripting history in that it actually works well, has usable syntax, and doesn't handle like a steaming piece of crap (yes, XGUI was buggy, GIMI was buggy, don't get me started on Fun500 GUI 4). BUT, you forget that you have also told me on Google Talk, with little or no prompting, how little you thought of multi-scripting. I think you need to be more open minded to the concept, and evaluate its merits on a GUI by GUI basis.		2009-05-098:09 PM
BrandonRe:Whats important in a GUI?
WHAT!!!? Fun500 was solid as an ice sculpture in Hell, um bad example, an ice cream cone on a hot day....damn I give up.		2009-05-098:11 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Fun500 4 looked nice, but honestly the widgets were all screwy and the language was not stack ba.... (ehm) it was too limited.		2009-05-098:12 PM
agumaRe:Whats important in a GUI?
XGUI wasn't that buggy, just a bit slow.		2009-05-098:13 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
As I remember, trying to resize a window caused it to crash every time (and you really needed to resize to test the image viewer).		2009-05-098:14 PM
BrandonRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Scripters if applied correctly have more use, they can do more than one thing at a time, but in practice, it seems that speed and stability is lost in the process.		2009-05-098:17 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
i'm not close minded to the concept, i'm only realist		2009-05-098:17 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
ic.		2009-05-098:21 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
what mean "ic"?		2009-05-098:24 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
I was finishing your sentence for you :).		2009-05-098:31 PM
trollyRe:Whats important in a GUI?
ok sentence closed :p		2009-05-098:39 PM
pharoahRe:Whats important in a GUI?
Really the only worthwhile scripting language is Brainfuck. BF is where it's at.		2009-05-098:41 PM
ksrRe:Whats important in a GUI?
[b]Pharoah wrote:[/b] [quote]Really the only worthwhile scripting language is Brainfuck. BF is where it's at.[/quote] QFT		2009-05-105:46 AM

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