in the long way, an OpenGL backend seems more important to me than a Quartz backend (of course both are good, but OpenGL is portable and "de facto standard", Quartz is not...)
On Nov 23, 2012, at 1:07 PM, Igor Stasenko <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23 November 2012 12:11, dimitris chloupis <[email protected]> wrote: >> So after diving in common lisp and take a look at various alternative I >> decided that Pharo is the best place for me to start for my Ephestos >> project. The first thing that got my attention is Athens , it seems to be >> very close to my own goal for Ephestos. So my question is how may I help >> Athens involve by contributing code to it ? >> >> Are there specific features I can work on ? The first part of my Ephestos >> project I call it Morpheas and its basically a GUI API based on morphic >> specialised on customised guis, meaning guis that do not look native . >> Athens seems a good library to base Morpheas on, so I am actually interested >> in expanding it. >> >> In the future I would also like to port Athens to opengl , but if cairo is >> fast enough for me, I may avoid it and instead focus more on porting Morphic >> to Athens. >> >> So my post here is to clarify the way I can contribute to Athens . I want my >> project Ephestos to be a contribution to the existing Pharo image and offer >> more GUI widgets, maybe a gui designer and some more graphic and audio >> tools. I think that Athens can be the base for my project so naturally I >> want to contribute. > > Hi, Dimitris. > yes, you're welcome to contribute. > > There's a lot of areas: > > Documentation > > The most important thing today is documentation and examples. > This will open doors to users and future contributors. Without it, > things will stay a bit arcane, > and behind closed doors. > > Development: > > - delivery of rendered stuff to screen estate. Right now, we do it via > morphic: so first you render on surface, > then you blit results on Display form, and then VM blits bits again on > screen. To improve frame rate, we should certainty think how to avoid > copying things twice and deliver results directly on screen avoiding > transferring/copying big chunks of data. > > - SVG importer: it works for simple SVG documents, but it is not > finished and more work is needed. Some svgs are not imported > correctly, we need to improve that. Of course full SVG coverage is not > a goal (no animaiton nor fancy filter stuff).. > But we should have a robust solution for importing vector graphics > made by artists. > > - integration with morphic: the goal is to be able to render > everything using Athens canvas. The work is already started, but > there's many morphs which has own custom draw methods, and waiting to > be ported for athens. > Apart from it is text layout/rendering.. it is the main hurdle for us, > but we're working on it, by implementing new text model, > and rendering/layout engine for it. > > - implementing more backends. Currently there's only Cairo backend > which is more or less functional. We need more. I am looking forward > to implement quartz backend on mac os. Also, opengl backend would be > good to have. > > Another thing: Amber. If someone interested, i think it will be good > to port it on Amber and make Athens working in web browsers using > HTML5 canvas. > > > If you need details about any of the above, feel free to ask. > > -- > Best regards, > Igor Stasenko. >
