[linux-audio-dev] libcui - design-question

Richard Spindler richard.spindler at gmail.com
Thu Sep 15 12:54:50 UTC 2005


2005/9/15, Julien Claassen <julien at c-lab.de>:
> Hi all!
>   I'm trying to design a library, which should provide "graphical objects" for
> the console. Meaning standardised buttons, checkboxes, sliders, etc. The
> purpose of this project is: to bring gui-based audio-software to the console.

Well, I believe there is such a thing, it's called ncurses.

> What I'm wondering now is the following:
>   It would still be a certain amount of work, to program a textbased ui with
> this library. So which way of using this library would be best?
>   Could any of you imagine good ways to communicate objects of your software
> to a kind of server. Something like OSC? So this server can run and you start
> the program on the gui and it tells the server: I have th following objects.
> Could this be a way of designing it? Would this be sensible? Or would it be
> better to only provide a c++ API?

Well, I don't think this'd make a big difference, as long as it's
simple to learn :)
Additionally I think that a program that's designed to run on a
console needs to provide a vastly different UI then a X11 Program.
For example if you have a Canvas you can easily visualize whatever you
want to present into a graphical representation. A Console however is
linebased, therfore you have to break down your information into
smaller pieces, like a table or single lines.
I actually use some some text based applications quite often, and I
really like that the provide some kind of "command language" so I only
type in what I wan't to do and here we go. This however is a totally
different approach than a GUI Application, so I think it won't be easy
to unify these ideas.


-Richard




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