>Alain: My ignorance of "real" programming gave me the
>impression that graphics, particularly stuff that has
>to be updated in real-time (like in a GUI for
>example), had an impact on the low-level programming.
>In the case of Apple, for example, EVERYTHING that is
>displayed on the screen is drawn with QuickDraw. How
>wonderful it is to learn that despite the fact that
>almost everything calls on the graphics, it is
>sufficiently modular that the graphics have NO impact
>on the underlying programming. I guess that previous
>generation of programmers didn't get everything wrong!
>;-)
Alain,
actually, it's a bit different: To output to the screen of a computer, you
have to use the operating system's native image format. That is, you have
to "convert" all your graphics to Quickdraw when you want to display them
on a Mac's screen, you have to convert them to Windows GDI when you want to
display on a PC's screen etc. Since we will have to do this conversion
anyway, it doesn't matter what format we actually use on disk, because on
all platforms we'll need to convert it.
As we have already outlined, we will create "wrapper" code that
automatically and transparently handles this conversion for us, but what
format we use on-disk can be selected arbitrarily.
>Alain: Is this a one-shot deal? Or does this encoding
>have to happen every time, in real-time?
Encoding happens every time a graphic is created or modified. It's part of
the "conversion" process I mentioned above.
>Anthony: Agreed. We'd want a standard font for UI.
>
>Alain: Does anyone disagree with this?
It is a necissity so far, if we don't want to introduce some very
complicated behaviours to accomodate automatically re-arranging objects
when their font changes.
>Alain: Hummm.. That's not really where a selection of
>fonts is particularly interesting. A monospaced font
>is just fine here. I was suggesting instead that we
>have a choice of fonts inside the interface ( menus,
>windows, GUI components, etc ) like we have now with
>the MacOS. I must admit that I am a little bit
>bewildered. I thought that this was a gimme.
I have to admit, being able to select the font used in the script editor
is very useful. I prefer Monaco 9, but on very large screens I'm in favor
of Courier 12, while for AppleScript I prefer Geneva 10 with decent tab
stops. Finally, people who don't have good eyes might even prefer Times 24
(I know someone who set his Finder font to this). It's a useful feature,
but it's very easy to implement as it'd just involve a "set textFont of fld
x to..." call, speaking in HyperTalk.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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