World: r3wp

Henrik - I reread you list of things which are being worked on. Just 
wanted to ask, if so called "skinning" is not overrated? I still 
can see mainly aplication development aproach with VID 3.4 so far. 
Because - when you think more about browser aproach - what is there 
to skin? Each page usually might mean totally different graphics. 
Buttons, fields, etc. -  the forms, are just little subset of what 
is usually a "website". So - the button will always be the button, 
field will always be just the field. What users might be more interested 
in, is animations, transitions, and that can't be covered by just 
changing the skin. Dunno - tried WindowBlinds (http://www.stardock.com
) once in the past, and imo skinning is overrated - still the same 
thing expressed many times, while web = different aproach each time 
....

Skinning is the only way we'll get apps that look and act like the 
platform they are running on. It is how every major cross-platform 
application manages to look and feel fairly normal.

Every major platform uses parametric UI layout and coloring. Even 
it we want to use the system metrics we need to have a way to apply 
them. That means that we require a skinning-capable design just to 
be able to fit in. Plus, if we do it right it's good marketing.

I mean "every major cross-platform application" being made nowadays 
that doesn't have codebases more than 10 years old.

This includes the new MS apps as well, like Office 2007.

By the way, animations and transitions are a separate issue from 
skinning, and can be implemented independently.

Brian - we were never supposed to get exact OS look. The target was 
its own, decent cross platform look. If someone wants his app to 
look like native one, well then, but it is death for REBOL. And skinning 
is imo not going to solve the "act" part of the it?

There are a lot of features that have to work together to make skinning 
work, and those features are also useful for other reasons, especially 
when they work together well. Skinning is just a bonus ability. Personally, 
I want the ability to skin my apps, especially given my preference 
for dark interfaces - Henrik's stuff is great, but a little too grey 
for my tastes.

However, I am aware that my taste in interfaces is not shared by 
the community in general, and I would not it on others.

not it -> not impose it

Henrik told us in the past (VID3), that his skin looks grey, as he 
starts with 4 basic colors to prove the concept that "it works" and 
that later it can be done more colorful. I am against the grey interface 
overall. It is an old desing. Nowadays look at iphone, flash, Fedora, 
Vista - blue, black, colorfull is the trend :-)

btw - new debug featurs look interesting ...

it seems that Carl is trying to build really strong foundation to 
make development, debugging/testing and using the gui an easy enough 
task ...

Most major UI frameworks have theming support nowadays, mostly to 
support system theming - it's a checklist item when comparing frameworks. 
Not as much of a deal killer as a lack of Unicode support, but still 
what people expect. A clean, unified cross-platform look is a necessity 
to include, but making it the only look would reduce the uptake of 
REBOL. Many business apps need a platform integrated look, and many 
other apps want to establish their own identity (look at WinAmp, 
Chrome or the Apple apps).

Henrik has said in the past that his basic design aesthetic is to 
start with shades of grey and then add color as needed. This tends 
to make elegant, business-like interfaces. My aesthetic is more shades 
of black and white with color accents, avoiding blue as much as I 
can in user interface elements - more of a night person look. To 
each their own.

I see a middle ground - a strong foundation theme can transcend platform.

The middle ground is infrastructure - on that ground you would grow 
the UI you want, but you won't look at the ground :)

We will definitely be including a nice looking default theme though 
(we're still hammering out the concept naming).

My hope is that we can have generic themes that can be used by many 
apps, and made by a theme editor with minimal code. I would love 
to see R3 themes on the many theming sites out there already - good 
advertising :)

Brian - how one can add something like e.g. icon animation (as can 
be seen on an iPhone)? Can I still stay at styles level, not needing 
to rewrite/adapt low level? Hopefully so ....

In answer to your questions:
- I don't know yet, but that would be cool so I'll look into it.

- That is the intention. So far I have been only working at the mid-level: 
Low-level REBOL code, not native. Henrik has been styling :)

Henrik is the stylizer ?

Graham, I channel Da Vinci.

Carl did his standard candy color theme. Henrik is doing something 
more elegant.

Which is kind of appropriate, because every time I edit Carl's code, 
it makes me feel like I'm painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. 
:-)

Henrik ... it was a joke ... at all these *ize words

Graham, mine was a joke too :-)

That's funny, I feel like I'm turning his artwork into an engineering 
blueprint :)

I've been working at the infrastructure level. One of the main goals 
for the code I have been writing is to make sure that most REBOL 
programmers won't need to ever touch code at that level, or even 
think about it much. That would be ideal :)

My opinion on skinning in general: I think skinning is something 
that has been gravely abused over the years. The last time I enjoyed 
skinning was with MUI on the Amiga because MUI was made for skinning. 
It was simple to get a good looking user interface without compromising 
usability or functionality. Nowadays we try to skin OSX and Windows 
in ways they were never meant to, and you feel it when using it. 
There are slowdowns or functionality is sacrificed. When you flip 
through a skin catalog, 99,9% of them are terrible junk and it's 
difficult to come up with your own.

I plan on trying a very different skin after this one.

The more different the better - shake any bugs or design flaws out 
of the system.

BrianH: "I've been working at the infrastructure level ..." - are 
you saying you are now part of the implementation team? So you and 
Carl are doing VID3.4 development now?

Henrik - with your experience of OS level skinning - we should be 
sure, that our system is done the right way then. What I am not sure 
about is, if ppl are interested in skinning at all. Sometimes we 
can see only thin-skins (as per Carl's blog terms), but those are 
boring, mainly some color and rounding changes. What we should aim 
for is the ability to medium to thick skins, to simply mimick various 
needs (e.g. producing iPhone like animated UI for the mobile market, 
while business decent one, for corporate ...)

Yes I am. So far I've been doing code auditing and cleanup while 
I get a feel for the overall system. The design is really cool, though 
some parts are still under construction. Not modularized yet, nor 
should it be until it is more finalized. Most of the core design 
is pretty stable.

Part of the fun is when code patterns in the UI suggest possible 
improvements to the core REBOL semantics. Carl's GUI work is coming 
with lots of goodies for the rest of us, whether you are doing GUIs 
or not.

Pekr, I don't know what it will look like, when handling thick-skins. 
I would personally like to see some that are downloadable from RT 
(official skins) and then provide simple tools for letting you create 
skins to inspire people to create their own. This will be important 
for pages, where people want to get their own look.

BrianH: that is cool! You already did good job for DevBase. Now it 
would be interesting, if you would thought about DevBase VID3.4 :-) 
Maybe a good testing app to start with :-)

needs LNS working first

I thought Gabriele made it to work?

with R3?  I don't believe so ...

but I don't know.

I think he did make some parts work, but not the whole thing.

BrianH: are you suggesting, that because of VID3.4 work, we will 
see some changes to core? There was supposed to be one - context 
lookup, which was not added though, as Carl solved it by binding?

Graham - there is now Rebservices-R3 source code group in DevBase. 
It was submitted there on 11th of June, 2008 by Gabriele. I don't 
know, how feature complete the release is, or if it is usable ...

A new DevBase is still intended to be a testbed for REBOL technologies, 
including the new GUI and LNS.

A more modern GUI for devbase would be nice

sliding screens ... :)

translucency

skinnable

there has to be a few exemplars for the rest of us :)