27 Sep
2010
27 Sep
'10
4:58 p.m.
On 09/27/2010 04:23 PM, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
I was only talking about drawing with code here, no SVG. I was talking about a
more graphical knob, entirely drawn with Cairo such as the one in ardour3 (see
screenshot in the recent thread about knobs).
The widget performing these drawing operations could expose specific/advanced
style properties to customize gradients. Existing themes would then have to be
patched to support these new properties.
I know.
Agreed. IMO,
for proper scaling and theme support, the only solution is to
draw
everything in code, with Cairo for instance.
Thus, the most obvious possibility is simplified knobs as those designed
by
Thorwil, which use very few colors.
Another solution, for more graphical knobs, would be to expose specific
GTK
style properties, which themes would have to explicitly support. That
could
allow for all sort pretty rendering, with theme-specific gradients and so
on.
Yes it does allow for some more advanced control but if you want to get
really flash and support scaling without all the hassle of integrating an
svg handler then afaik with gtk you only have that one option of drawing
the widgets with code. Doing things like 1px borders is with the internals
scaled is entirely
possible.
Yes, actually, that was my point.
One thing
though, as you seem to be into gtk engine development, is that
IIUC,
the whole Cairo idea defeats the general principle of engines which seem
to rely
on the fact that widgets are drawn with gtk_paint_*() functions. Is this
correct?
IIUC, gtk_paint_*() functions are not needed if you use cairo directly. I'm not sure what you are meaning with the engines
in this context though.
My point was that widgets drawn directly with Cairo bypass the gtk_paint_*()
drawing abstraction layer, which would forbid engine to provide their own knob
drawing implementation, as it's done for buttons, etc...
Therefore, such Cairo-based knobs wouldn't support the full GTK theming
capabilities.
Sorry if it has already been discussed I have just
started following this
discussion.
No, this problem with engines hasn't been discussed yet. It has come to my mind
when thinking about strict GTK compliance. I was asking myself if a such knob
could be candidate for inclusion in mainstream GTK.
I have become more interested in the possibilities
available with drawing
widgets in cairo though. 3d layering ala blender becomes completely
possible. With enough time one could even go so far as to have a
completely 3d or even poly dimensional ui. With buttons and layers all
over the place responding to different actions. Add in multi touch support
and things become very interesting for the user. Especially in the context
of musical performance.
You are really only limited by your imagination and ability to visualise
and translate those ideas to the dimensional space.
The more research I do on how to work quickly with blender and inkscape
the more possibilities open up in front of me for really impressive ui
design. I highly recommend taking the time to figure out cairo if you are
interested in taking ui's to another level. There are many online video
tutorials for how to use the image tools and they are very enlightening
from a ui design perspective too. Watching professionals build 3d models
for example shows me how to recreate the same effect in code.
Of course there is also opengl for the 3d space too and I feel if enough
time is spent working with both options there will be some very amazing
interfaces designed over the next decade now that multi touch is available
to us all.
Agreed, 3D UIs are interesting. What you're saying makes me think about Clutter
http://www.clutter-project.org/
Clutter renders with OpenGL, provides Cairo, Pango, and supports multi-touch
IIRC. I think it was primarily meant for mobiles devices but this is not
restrictive.
--
Olivier