On Sun, 5 Mar 2006 17:15:04 +0100 (CET) Julien Claassen <julien(a)c-lab.de> wrote: I always wondered whether it was possible to do something like a generic/abstract UI thing. You bind yourself to ncurses at the moment, but wouldn't it be cool, if the same code could sit ontop of either ncurses or X/Gtk/Qt, or even be communicated via audio interface and user talking. I doubt though that all user interface aspects can be generalized in this way, but it would be cool already to get a subset as huge as possible. All X gui stuff is basically representable on an ncurses screen as long as there's no real graphical stuff involved (i.e. the typical preferences dialog serves as a good example. Just a bunchof checkboxes, comboboxes and ok and cancel buttons). I even can imagine how this could be presented to the user via a voice interface, though this is more difficult to get right. The most obvious example were this scheme would fail would be i.e. something like the GIMP. Operating on a per RGB pixel basis is very difficult to translate to ncurses or voice. Something like ardour would be almost equally tough as its interface is highly graphical (at least the editor and mixer windows. All the preferences stuff could be again dealt with). Anyone know if such a thing exists yet? Or any thoughts on the matter? Flo -- Palimm Palimm! http://tapas.affenbande.org

Hi! Florian: What can such a lib do?I already have toggle-buttons, progressbars, labels and I'm working on text-entry-fields. Next thing is menus and mutiple-choice-buttons (radio-buttons, lists) and sliders. That is all stuff I can imagine and handle. I'm still thinking about linking objects. You know like in ams, link oscillator to filter. So osc-output goes into filter-input. I have some ideas on the topic though. So ardour wouldn't be such a big problem. Nasty because there's so much, it simply needs to be organised. BUT... BUT, there are things i have to take in account: All objects should be kind of line-based (a braille-display only shows a single line at a time. Objects should look like in other good text-apps, so you know, what they are, intuitively. Same goes for key-action. Apps I considered: lynx (buttons, text-entry, lists and checkboxes), emacs (look of the menubar, not functionality). About generalisation of UI: I'm based on ncurses at the moment. But I'd like to take at least slang into acount. About graphics, I don't think. There are enough GUI-libs, done much better and more elaborate than my work. Besides: I'm not a very good programmer. Ok, but far from expert. Kindest regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net - the Linux TextBased Studio guide

Hi James! This is a nice idea indeed, but for a programming language or a commandline interface. I like both of them, but I want to create an interactive UI with buttons and the like. Mainmotivation behind it: create something users and programmers alike find intuitive. Especially the programmers should be attracted to it, so they would consider building text-UIsa simpler task and just do it. :-) Thanks anyway, perhaps somebody else may take it up for other purposes. Kindest regards Julien -------- Music was my first love and it will be my last (John Miles) ======== FIND MY WEB-PROJECT AT: ======== http://ltsb.sourceforge.net - the Linux TextBased Studio guide

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006 16:34:05 +0100 (CET) Julien Claassen <julien(a)c-lab.de> wrote: Hi Julien, i kinda hijacked your thread. I was wondering about whether such a lib generally existed,because it would make programming apps for all kinds of user groups easier, as one could create different interfaces from the same interface description. I didn't want to imply that you should wirte such a lib. I was just generally interested in the subject and wondered how far many day-to-day typical UI usecases could be abstracted. Regards, Flo -- Palimm Palimm! http://tapas.affenbande.org