On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 03:05:26PM +0300, Tuomo Valkonen wrote: > Not much code has been committed to the Ion repository lately. That's > because I've been working on something else remotely related to Ion.
How long did it take you to come up with the acronym VIS that fits perfectly with ION, as in VISION? :) The first thing I thought of was the GIMP example and how it was wrong. I actually find it very easy to use GIMP in Ion. Just put the different toolbars in smaller frames and the drawing canvas(es) in bigger. This is exactly how I want to layout windows, when working on photoshop on a Mac anyway, and here Ion helps me. Then I remembered it _does_ have a big problem that I have just learned to work around. Popups. If you are in a smaller frame and it popups a big colour selector or file selector, you have to move it to the big canvas frame before you can use it. And there it hides the entire picture that you might want to preview, so you end up having to split. I like the idea of VIS and I understand that it would be very hard to create good gtk/qt-bindings but it would be nice to see a smaller ui-cstream/ui-tty/ui-ion implementation. The analogy with html and stylesheets is good. Using a method like VIS makes it much easier to build interface that can have different input and output methods, but you could still build really cluttered interfaces, just as there are many websites out there that use valid XHTML and CSS but still look like crap and are hard to navigate/read. While Gnome has locked themselves into the WIMP model (maybe on purpose, or maybe that some didn't know of any other) they seem to be rather focused on making nice and uncluttered interfaces, that try to be accessible. What is more important? To make a good interface for one model or to make it really accessible for everyone? Accessible for everyone seems like a winner, but is it worth the effort? Is it really possible to abstract the interface so much? Will some models suffer? The advantage for an application programmer is easy to see, but how will it be for the users? I would like to see a usage example of how some existing programs (like a picture viewer and a general purpose text editor for instance) converted to the VIS model will benefit. -- Jon �slund
