World: r3wp
[!RebGUI] A lightweight alternative to VID
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Pekr 31-Dec-2007 [7248x2] | Dunno if something changed for Sheet widget, but cell borders are somehow too bright here, almost invisible. Can that be set? Hmm, in rebdoc it is a bit darker or maybe my eyes are too tired already :-) What color does it use for borders? |
Ashley - will sheet and tree-view support at least keyboard basics? | |
Ashley 31-Dec-2007 [7250] | What color does it use for borders? ... none, it's transparent. will sheet and tree-view support at least keyboard basics? sheet already supports tab, tree at present has no keyboard support. These are on the "things I'd like to improve one day if I have nothing better to do" list. ;) |
Pekr 31-Dec-2007 [7251x3] | none? transparent? Aha, so if I see "grid lines", it means it comes from background color, right? |
You know, Ashley, there are several measures to UI and its usability. I noticed that ppl really warry, some do most of the things using mouse, and then RebGUI is 98% correct (no scroll-wheel support here or there, area not being able to auto-scroll when hiliting). But those used to keyboard, are suffering much more pain. And believe me - although I can understand minimalistic aproach to RebGUI (and it really feels better than VID2 in almost all aspects), in the end, if widget "missbehaves", I really don't care that, if it is 6KB or 12KB - all I care is - does it behave as expected? | |
well, I believe some of the small details can be fixed. I could easily name them, list them here, if it would help to answer us, what is fixable, and what is not (e.g. due to View inefficiency in particular area) | |
Ashley 31-Dec-2007 [7254] | Providing keyboard support for inherently graphical controls (e.g. radio-group, spinner, etc) is IMHO a waste of time. All the main input widgets (field, edit-list, area, sheet, etc) should and do have proper keyboard support. If you're designing an application for fast data entry then you should confine your widgets to those that accept keyboard input (i.e. data entry forms). If you want a rich GUI with a full set of graphical widgets then I don't think it's too much to ask that users have a pointing device. I mean, you don't expect users to use Windows without a mouse? Or Office type applications? But, list away as I'm currently doing major code fixes (better scroll-wheel support for one) anyway; if it's relatively straight-forward to do I'll do it. |
Pekr 31-Dec-2007 [7255x3] | List of some inefficiencies of RebGUI - decide what could be fixed with no significatn effort (e.g. widget redesign or particular subsystem redesign (tabbing)) 1) no keyboard navigation to swith between the tabs (ctrl + tab) 2) no default focus on page? (maybe just not defined in tour.r), but if there is e.g. table, I would expect it being in-focus, so that keyboard immediatelly works without the need to click the table 3) are othere elements tabbable? I noticed that e.g. on tab with sheet demo, buttons are tabbable. IMO there should be also one primary element selected as being "in-focus", it should be reflected in UI, or I regard it being faulty. 4) sheet widget - define ENTER action doing the same as TAB action. Enhancement request (not necessarily needed) - ability to define tab/enter movement direction - vertical vs horizontal. 5) menu - when mouse moves, menu should collapse/expand upon the movement, not needing 2 clicks (to collapse old position menu, and another click to open one - please reduce at least to one click) 6) tree-view - add arrow support 7) area - hilite by mouse or keyboard should auto-scroll area 8) state elements - add tabbing support with visual reflection - imo you are wrongly assuming, that users might not use keyboard here (space selects) |
btw - what is the graphing widget you liked from Robert's distro? Is it any different from what is in tour.r? Is there any screenshot? :-) | |
As to my above requests - those don't add features, but fixing them would greatly enhance usability. Users are imo forgivable to how app looks, but not how app behaves ... | |
Graham 31-Dec-2007 [7258x2] | i would like to be able to use a tab as a tab inside an area widget. |
And not tab to the next widget. | |
Reichart 31-Dec-2007 [7260x2] | Should RebUI do anything that Windows and Mac don't? Seems there are going to be places where a cool widget would save space, or allow for a neat trick, but............it also means something most people won't know or understand. |
For example, radio buttons are the core of: Radio buttons - O Apple | O Pear | O Banana Tabs - Are just radio buttons where the selection IS the card /Apple\ /Pear\ /Banana\ Combo-box - [_Apple_[^v] Then there was a button on the Amiga which was really cool (spinner?), but never caught on. Every time you clicked on it cycled to the next option in the list. Spinner - [_Apple_[O] This widget is very useful for toggles, and perhaps even up to three states, but after that is loses its value. | |
Gregg 31-Dec-2007 [7262] | ROTARY is the VID equivalent of spinner. view layout [rotary data [a b c]] |
Reichart 31-Dec-2007 [7263] | Gregg, what are your thoughts on this widget even existing? |
Gregg 31-Dec-2007 [7264] | I rarely use it. Because you can't see all the values it's not as user friendly IMO, though it is space efficient. For small displays I can see it being better than a drop-down in some cases. |
Henrik 31-Dec-2007 [7265] | it would be more efficient, if you could use the mouse to drag left and right with mouse button held down to browse between many values. |
Anton 31-Dec-2007 [7266] | If there is a big delay selecting elements then combo-box is better because you don't have to move through all intermediate elements. If there is no delay then the spinner is good too. |
Graham 31-Dec-2007 [7267x3] | Is the original data block for a tree available? I wish to traverse the tree and prevent users from adding duplicate leaves |
there are no accessors to add leaves? Does set-data work? | |
Nope. | |
Ashley 31-Dec-2007 [7270] | Is the original data block for a tree available? yes, as face/data there are no accessors to add leaves? correct, it's a very basic widget at this stage Does set-data work? ... only from within init at present |
Graham 31-Dec-2007 [7271x2] | face/data just gives the currently selected node |
Hmm. Anyway of refreshing the tree to show a new node/leaf?? | |
Ashley 31-Dec-2007 [7273] | Not at present. When I said face/data before I meant widget/data. |
Graham 31-Dec-2007 [7274] | So, I have to recreate the whole layout for tab in order to refresh the tree ? |
Ashley 31-Dec-2007 [7275] | i would like to be able to use a tab as a tab inside an area widget. That would be kind of confusing. Imagine a display with a couple of fields and an area ... I hold down the tab key and suddenly I've navigated to the area *and* inserted a couple of tabs. Wouldn't a "special" key combination suchh as CTRL-Tab be better? |
Graham 31-Dec-2007 [7276x4] | well, I think I would more often use a tab inside an area, then tab thru one. |
So, I would prefer ctrl-tab to exit an area .... | |
I think it's un-natural to use cntrol-tab inside an area to get a tab. | |
what do other gui's do? | |
Anton 31-Dec-2007 [7280x2] | ctrl+tab can work in linux but not in Windows. |
(unless you find some way to capture ctrl+tab in Windows) | |
Graham 31-Dec-2007 [7282] | shift tab? |
Anton 31-Dec-2007 [7283x2] | For edit-panel, I thought ctrl+tab would be ideal for jumping out to other widgets and then can continue to tab as normal. |
but the question is how to capture it on Windows. | |
Graham 31-Dec-2007 [7285] | shift-tab taken for tab backwards |
Anton 31-Dec-2007 [7286] | I would avoid shift tab because it's typically used for ... exactly, tab backwards. |
Ashley 31-Dec-2007 [7287x2] | Uploaded build#112 with extensive changes. 1) scroll-wheel support added to scroll-panel (CTRL+Scroll to scroll the horizontal scroller) 2) set-values and get-values fixed (added support for scroll-panel and fixed a few bugs) 3) Added a new widget, pill, that is basically a box with rounded corners 4) Changed the look of tab-panel so that the current tab is same as page background and remaining tabs have a solid color 5) splash requestor now accepts a file! or image! (so you're not forced to provide a spec block if you already have an image) 6) Experimental new logo 7) Color management is being totally overhauled (I'll post separately on this topic) *** Do not sync this build if you want to retain the "old" look & feel *** |
RebGUI color management. The "old" RebGUI color management system evolved by adding new colors to ctx-rebgui/colors as and when a new color was selected. Many of these colors (e.g. button, tooltip*, btn*) were widget specific. In all, 15 colors were defined. In addition to this, a number of hard-coded colors such as white, black, coal, red and blue were scattered throughout the system. The effect of all this was to provide a means whereby *most* colors could be changed, but the design of a "theme" other than the default WinXP scheme was problematic. The new color management system rationalizes these colors down to a base set of 8, being: page text theme-light theme-dark state-light state-dark outline-light outline-dark with all existing "old" color references being converted to the "new" ones. page and text will usually be white and black (high contrast), with outlines being grey, and theme and state being variations on the same color. The updated request-ui shows how these themes can more easily be chosen (there is a drop-list beneath each of the theme and state groups that sets both light and dark to a similar color). This is still a work in progress, and I am basing the model (and color selections) largely on those described in the "Quilt design style guide"; and colors / ideas from: http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/unstable/gtk-Resource-Files.html (styles section) A number of things have to come together to make this work: 1) Conceptual model: do we have the right tokens to reflect all color configurable aspects of the UI (e.g. is there a color word appropriate for a highlight selection, a heading, etc) 2) Are they named appropriately (e.g. is selected better than state-light?) 3) What colors should be used in what context? This last one is very tough. As a general rule I've followed the Quilt model and used outline-light for non-edit edges, theme-dark for edit edges and heading backgrounds, etc (you can find a crude list of usage cases under the new "Colors" tab of RebDOC). But what about a widget like button? It potentially has the following color states: Unselected theme-dark Focus theme-light Button-down ? and widgets such as sheet which might have: Headings theme-dark with page font/color text Cells page Edges outline-light Selected cell theme-light Forumla cell theme-light Cell that cursor is currently over and there are a number of ways of denoting this with color: as a background color change as a font color change as an edge color change as a combination of the above In short, there are a lot of ways of implementing this. What I want needs to be simple and consistent with as few colors as possible. Any suggestions (including links to good color management techniques / approaches) greatly appreciated. | |
Anton 1-Jan-2008 [7289x2] | That's a very positive development. A nice set of global named colours, which can be used by every widget. |
I think each widget should have its own named colours for its different parts, like "edge-unselected", "edge-selected". These can be set directly to the global named colours, like colour-themes/light/outline-unselected or to a function of that, eg: button/named-colour/edge-selected: does [desaturate 0.9 colour-themes/light/outline-selected] then button just redraws itself using its own named-colours. | |
Pekr 1-Jan-2008 [7291x2] | why is there any need to make it Quilt or web-anything like? Changes are fine, if those don't ruin overall design. I can't see anything what happened to button positively - it is now flat, one color box with not difference to box widget itself. |
Also - why the change to coloring all tabs? | |
Graham 1-Jan-2008 [7293] | latest checkout >> display "" [ sp: scroll-panel data [ field 10 "Hello" ] button "get values" [ probe get-values sp ]] do-events ** Script Error: foreach expected data argument of type: series ** Where: get-values ** Near: foreach widget face/pane [ if find [ area check check-group drop-list edit-list field group-box password rad... >> |
Ashley 1-Jan-2008 [7294x2] | Tab coloring - see Luis's comments from Thursday 25th above. |
get-values expects a grouping widget; so: scroll-panel data [field field] scroll-panel data [tab-panel data ...] work. For scroll-panel with a single non-grouping widget use: s: scroll-panel data [field] button [print s/pane/1/text A pain I know, but using scroll-panel for a single non-grouping widget would be pretty rare I'd think. | |
Graham 1-Jan-2008 [7296x2] | OK. |
I didn't actually have one widget in the scroll-panel - this was just a test :) | |
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