[HN Gopher] If one GUI's not enough for your SPARC workstation, ...
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If one GUI's not enough for your SPARC workstation, try four
Author : zdw
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-10-30 20:58 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
| kragen wrote:
| Hey, this is fantastic! I've been looking for one-bit-deep
| screenshots of SunView, OpenWindows, or Open Look for a while --
| I don't remember if I ever used it on a one-bit display, but a
| lot of the graphic design in Open Look seems like it's intended
| to work well on a one-bit display. Unfortunately, all the
| SunView/OpenWindows/OpenLook screenshots I could find were
| 256-color screenshots.
|
| This version of SunView looks pretty different from the Open Look
| I used to use, though. There are no pushpins on menus, no rounded
| ends on menu items, no arrow-buttons on the scrollbar slider, and
| scrollbars on the left (usually) instead of the right. Action
| buttons are beveled instead of having rounded ends. Default
| action buttons are indicated with a thick border instead of a
| double border. Instead of popups being connected to their parent
| window with a tower converging on a vanishing point, they're
| connected with a curvy arrow (though with a little vanishing-
| point action). Instead of picture-frame corners to resize windows
| with, you have a mega thick double line border around the entire
| window. Cascading menu items are indicated with a double-line
| right arrow instead of a right-pointing triangle.
|
| There are clearly some elements in common. The file browser has
| the same ugly folder tree view with awkwardly wrapped filenames.
| The cursor in text fields (including "cmdtool", a name shared
| with Open Look) is a caret shaped like a diamond or triangle,
| instead of a vertical line, a flashing block, or an underline.
| The "file properties" dialog in fileview still has checkboxes for
| permission bits. And the pushpin also shows up in that dialog
| despite its unfortunate absence from menus.
|
| The OpenWindows section following seems to have one-bit-deep
| versions of most of the Open Look stuff I'm familiar with,
| though! You have the picture-frame corners, buttons on the
| scrollbar slider (which is on the right), downward-pointing
| triangles for the titlebar button and menu buttons, a non-shitty
| mouse pointer graphic, circular ends on menu entry highlights and
| action buttons, right-pointing triangles for submenus, pushpins
| on menus (now with lines inside the silhouette), underlined text
| fields, checkboxes with a little more panache, dropshadows on
| buttons by way of thickening the border on the bottom and right,
| rectangular radio buttons (which highlight the selected option
| with a thicker border), the same slider and gauge widget from the
| OLIT sampler demo, double-lined borders for default buttons and
| the goofy perspective tower thing for popup dialogues.
|
| All of this looks perfectly comprehensible despite the one-bit-
| deep display, and not only is it less ugly than SunView and GEOS,
| it's even less ugly than Motif or Windows 3.1, on par with the
| one-bit-deep UIs on the Macintosh and the Palm Pilot.
|
| The highlighting of the hyperlinks in the Help Viewer leaves
| something to be desired.
|
| Does anyone know how these graphical idioms changed so radically
| from this version of SunView to OpenWindows?
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) Are you sure those weren't converted XView clients you
| were using? Those used the SunView API but OPEN LOOK widgets.
| kragen wrote:
| They probably were! Not having written any SunView or Open
| Look code myself, I never realized that was what XView was
| for.
| sprash wrote:
| I find the concept of MGR is very intriguing. Imagine creating
| GUIs simply by writing escape codes to stdout. No need to deal
| with C-libraries, the GUI can be completely language agnostic and
| all applications work instantly over network as well (file
| descriptors for frame buffers of e.g. OpenGL applications running
| locally could simply be exchanged via pidfd_getfd syscall but
| that wouldn't work over the network obviously). Maybe something
| like MGR2 should replace X11 instead of Wayland.
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) I really found it fascinating myself. I really should
| sit down and bang out a proof of concept.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Used to play with MGR on my Atari ST way back in 1991, before I
| got my hands on my first 486 to run Linux.
|
| Definitely an interesting path-not-taken.
| classichasclass wrote:
| (author) I assume this was MiNT. Did it have the same
| limitation this implementation does about no offscreen or
| partially offscreen windows?
| kragen wrote:
| Mostly what has replaced X11 and Wayland is HTML, where you
| create GUIs in a completely language-agnostic way by writing
| angle-bracket-delimited <tags> to stdout, with no need to deal
| with C libraries. The main difference is that the escape codes
| are introduced by '<', ASCII 60, instead of ESC, ASCII 27. Paul
| Graham wrote some essays about the advantages of doing things
| this way late last millennium; they're worth reading if you
| haven't read them. It really took off about 20 years ago.
|
| More recently that's largely been replaced by JS and the DOM
| because you can get lower interaction latency and higher
| bandwidth by running the app on the client, sending mostly just
| database calls and actions to a backend server.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Fun fact. I've been resurrecting MGR against modern DRM
| graphics on an openBSD machine. I have the animated splash
| screen rendering, and the terminal working mostly. There are
| some bugs with some of the programs, and menus, that I haven't
| figured out yet, and some of the programs crash. It's been
| quite an interesting experience. Hopefully when I get it
| working I will post it somewhere. a DRM based graphics stack
| should work on linux as well, which is pretty cool.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Please do post it, that would be sweet to play with:)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > No need to deal with C-libraries, the GUI can be completely
| language agnostic
|
| My understanding is that X11 didn't need to be tied to the C
| libraries either, it's just that nobody actually bothered
| writing the appropriate library in anything else. But it's just
| connecting over a socket and speaking the protocol, so there's
| no reason that it has to be tied to that implementation.
|
| (Although yes, there is something magical about just using
| stdout)
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd love to have more demos of NeWS or details about the
| interpreter. Don..
| csdvrx wrote:
| I love the look it started and that culminated with XViews:
| Check http://www.martin-
| graefe.homepage.t-online.de/xview_en.html
|
| Scrollbars that can carry your mouse around when you click (so
| you don't have to do a gesture), and pin button for menus (so
| you see what can be pinned) are innovation we seem to have lost
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