Igor wanted to ask you but kept forgetting. I wanted to make my own GUI api for project "Ephestos" which is visual coding for pharo and 3d app Blender. At first NBOpenGL was a candidate , but now I also consider Athens , especially if you say you want to port morphic to it.
I am certainly interested in vector based GUIs but another thing that interest me is GUIs with loads of animations like the ones you see in games. You think Athens is fast enough to be used for such busy interfaces ? I would prefer to make my own widgets / morphs and move away from the standard look of windows and buttons and more make it look like GUIs you see in games and Sci Fi movies since the fun factor is a big goal in my project. Since you are experienced in this than me , what you think ? The problem with NBOpenGL is that I fear I will have a lot more work to do, but that is debatable. Of course you implementing morphic in Athens even partially makes my life a lot easier. Another question I have is do I need Cairo installed to use Athens ? I would rather use something that does not require installations from the user. If yes is it possible to package Cairo with Pharo and Athens ? If anyone else want to jump and advice me, I am more than welcome it. ________________________________ From: Igor Stasenko <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, 23 October 2012, 18:49 Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Topics for a term project in CG On 23 October 2012 17:09, Dennis Schetinin <[email protected]> wrote: > Ok, it took more than a month to decide, but the result is that we selected > the "Athens direction". Now we need more details about some of the tasks you > mentioned to select one: > > + integrating Athens with Morphic > > I'm possibly mistaken, but I thought you are already working on this? What > is the state of art here? What are the final objective, and what are the > recent tasks? Where to start? Right, this is not 'start from scratch', but more 'join and help' working style. The goal is integrate Athens into Morphic ecosystem, and make everything rendered via Athens, at the end, replacing completely balloon graphics engine. The state of art is: many Morphs are now can render themselves to athens canvas. Many of them still not there (but easy to implement). But most hard one is text morph, which doing layout etc.. i am currently working on it.. I implemented a text layout/rendering (by creating a new TextMorph subclass), but it means that all tools should use this morph.. which is not very good. Also, recently we started working on new text model. With the goal to replace an clean Text, text editing and text layout in our system (and sure thing , rendering). This is also requires a lot of work. > > + zoomable interface using Athens > > This sounds cool, but could you please explain the idea, how do you see > possible results? > This kind of work is rethinking the Pharo UI has in a way to employ zoomable (vector-based) capabilities of graphics engine. How you laying out windows on desktop to prevent clutter? How you design zoom in/out / pan etc. Just google for 'zooming UI' to see many related works. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/05/zoomable-interfaces.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ZP23QsRd0&feature=gv > + Animation framework > > The question is almost the same: what kind of animation framework this could > be? Any prototypes and/or new ideas for it? > So, the idea is to look for animation in frameworks like SVG and Apple Animation Framework and design a framework with similar capabilities for Pharo. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreAnimation_guide/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40004514 http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/ The goal is to enable developers to easily express animations, and implement different visual effects like zoon-in/out, fade in/out, flip, sliding and mophing transitions etc -- Best regards, Igor Stasenko.
