On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 7:47 PM, Ian Ward <[email protected]> wrote: > The twisted-conch work Ali Afshar started (serve lots of ssh users with > one app) is very promising, very cool. I hope to pull that in to Urwid > some time soon. > > Also, the work to support Twisted and Glib by just changing a parameter > on the MainLoop class is extremely handy for apps that need it.
I'll make sure I at least briefly touch on those. Would it be fair to say that the main benefit of a GLib event loop is that it makes it much easier to pull in the glib bindings and do things like listen for d-bus events? What's a good example of a theoretical but practical application you would use to get people excited about using a GLib main loop? > And maybe something about Urwid not trying to be TurboVision (for those > old enough to remember that) UI concepts that work well on the console > are often different than ones that work for GUIs. The most popular > console apps are space-efficient and keyboard-focused. I've tried to > write Urwid for that kind of app. That's good to know. I'm going to have to think about delivering that message in a way that doesn't conflict with the message I've been thinking about. I'll definitely make it clear that you aren't trying to make this into TurboVision, but part of what interested me in giving this talk is to encourage people to write applications that are more immediately intuitive than many of the console apps that are popular today. I don't think what I'm saying is at odds with your point, but let me see if what I'm thinking about here rubs you the wrong way. I think up until recently, the payoff for investing in console apps has been pretty low (i.e. 8 hours of ncurses programming doesn't get you much of a user interface, and there's little that you get "for free"). Now that it's not that hard to knock out a reasonably looking user interface, there's no reason why the distros shouldn't make console usability part of their general usability push, especially since good console apps would probably be most useful to the big distros highest paying customers (Linux servers account for *way* more revenue than Linux desktops, and "the cloud" is shaping up as the next big battleground). Usable console apps are much easier to create now, so why not actually try to make more of them, and make the ones we have more usable? As I think you're saying here, though, "usable" doesn't necessarily mean ASCII-art borders, drop shadows, and a mouse-centric UI. People using SSH may very easily still be constrained by what's possible over vt102, so making a lot of assumptions about I/O devices and screen real estate may easily result in something less usable. Is that compatible with what you see as the vision for the urwid project? > Finally: pretty colours. Urwid supports lots of them. :-) Ah yes, the colors! I'll make sure that's obvious. > BTW, Are there going to be videos of either of the talks available? I'm not sure. The last time I was at LFNW (in 2008), there were some rooms that had video equipment, and some that didn't, so it depended on where you were. OSCON seems to typically only put videos up of the keynotes, so I don't think that one is going to be available, but now that video is getting so cheap and easy to shoot, maybe this year they'll expand out. Rob _______________________________________________ Urwid mailing list [email protected] http://lists.excess.org/mailman/listinfo/urwid
