World: r3wp

The "list of widgets" post?

yes, list of widgets ... we should not release without widgets like 
tab, tree-view, basic table (list-view), accelerator keys (needing 
redesign of all relevant styles imo, because rich-text will be needed), 
tabbing support. VID2 show stopper was missing more advanced styles, 
at least above mentioned. Those are needed for basic prototyping. 
Newcomers will not be able to produce them themselves. Most ppl would 
prefer such things instead of fancy color requester etc.

Simple answer: I don't think we are currently talking about finalization 
and the color picker was an example, not a feature.


Longer answer: The new GUI is going to be part of the open source 
portion of R3, and open source projects are never really finished 
until they die. So the question here is not "finalized" but "ready 
for a release to the wider developer community". In order to do that 
we need to put together the core design of the infrastructure and 
enough styles to get the new DevBase GUI up and running. Right now 
we are focussing on styles and features that have the most impact 
on the system as a whole, or the most potential to flush out bugs 
in the underlying runtime.


If it all seems low-level, that is because it is. We will have a 
development release before we have most of the styles you mention 
because we will need the help of the developer community to make 
those styles and more. However, don't expect the styles you list 
to be missing - some of them meet the criteria I lested above, like 
helping flush out design flaws or use in DevBase.

lested -> listed

This is good to know, and imo Carl should update his blog. For many 
ppl over the years, the real show stopper was missing styles. The 
blog article almost sounds like we would be finished ...

The new GUI is going to be extensible with new styles. No list of 
styles will be sufficient for everyone, so we are enabling and encouraging 
developers to make their own. For instance, I would like some styles 
inspired by the Office 2007 UI: ribbons and contextual toolbars. 
I know whole applications that are less complex to implement than 
those styles, so I would not expect them to be included in the core 
release at first.

Nonetheless, some design decisions and features are getting somewhat 
finalized as part of this process, so you weren't off in that.

What is the most difficult design issue nowadays regarding VID (hence 
e.g. not decided)? Is it low level draw changes, or implementation 
of some subsystems?

Probably the first, since it's about Cyphre having time to do them.

Well, first it is upon decision, how draw should evolve at all :-) 
But it seems to me that some of you guys are asking for more flexibility 
at pixel level ....

What happened to the stuff Carl was working on to increasing the 
power of the GUI by making it more webpage-like - by incorporating 
services into the widgets? I have not heard any recent talk of these 
ideas...

Not working on that part yet.

Our internal demo program (as shown in my first video) has slots 
for these parts, but they are not in use yet.

amacleod - services are in rebol in general (rebservices, aka LNS), 
and they will be supported by R3 too. But - as for "rebol browser", 
so far I can once again see only business graphics being a target. 
      More casual design should be possible though.

Pekr, I understand Services will be there in R3 but Carl blogged 
about this concept of a button linking to the www...It was a little 
vague and Henrik did try to clear it up buy the new GUI seeems void 
of this..

I thought it was to be tightly intergrated into the gui and a major 
reason for the delay of vid 3.4. I thought it was a bold new step 
in the concept of GUI's but it does not seem to be a part of what 
we have been privy to.

Henrik, I'll have another look at that video but I do not recall 
what you are refering to.

Is that "Triggers"

It would be "Document"

amacleod - I can see no problem with what you describe and with what 
is currently finished. Look - the concept of top level (VID) "reactors" 
is already there, is extensible imo, and that is all that is needed. 
Rebservices are imo underneath, and are going to be called by reactors 
like 'submit for e.g.

What I can't imagine right now is the browser concept. Well, it is 
a layout window, it can be for e.g. a panel. But when you look at 
various web sites, e.g. news portals, you can see that their design 
is more "free form", or casual, dunno how to express it precisely. 
So - what would you need to mimick for e.g. www.OSNews.com ? Define 
few styles, decide upon the columns design (group, panel), prepare 
styles for particular sections/zones (portlets - IBM, web parts - 
Microsoft, iViews - SAP terminology) and fill them with information 
....

The questions is probably whether you would want to accurately mimic 
websites. I think that misses the point of the rebol browser. It 
doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to mimic websites, however.

What I hate about many websites is that they have very inefficient 
layouts. This is particularly so for forums and certain newssites, 
where perhaps 10 or 20% of the information on the page is relevant 
to you. Now imagine AltME's GUI inside a webpage. It's very efficient.

One of the saddest tricks nowadays is to divide a small 2-300 word 
article on a news site into several pages, so they get more ad-visits.

yes, you describe some bad aspects of web trend. But the layout is 
there. The problem with my understanding of what will be needed to 
be done in VID is, that nowadays web is not only about laying out 
some images, links, texts, but e.g. even simple menu is JS nowadays, 
not to mention AJAX junk ....

Other differences are - content is separate from presentation with 
html/css combo. Loading of website content is async, whereas VID 
(at least VID2) displays page only once all stuff is downloaded. 
It has to change ....

Pekr, you are still thinking in terms of ordinary webpages. That's 
shortsighted. :-)

OK, so what concept do you actually envision for so called REBOL 
browser? :-)

Kind of Flash, Silverlight? Rich, media apps?

Pekr, let's say you want to read a blog post on a "rebpage". Would 
you want to download a rebpage, formatted as a webpage from that 
location or would you want to get a custom fullscreen reader that 
downloads only the compressed plaintext as makedoc format, compiles 
it on the fly and displays it?

and updated through services???

of course

You can work like this now already with R2. Just 'do a script from 
some webserver. Works the same way.

Doc style now exists:

http://rebol.hmkdesign.dk/files/r3/gui/083.png

so, it's a form of make-doc?

ie. not wisiwyg?

Well it says at the top "Simple document markup mehtod that uses 
MakeDoc format." Hardly what I was expecting for "RichText".

Me neither.

But - rich-text is in there. It is all about making an icon to change 
parameters of text. But - imo rich-text is not designed to be 100% 
functioning ...

It's a nicely ironic touch to have a document widget in a system 
without built-in printing though.

We can go with layout-to-pdf or layout-to-html translators at first 
run. Well guys, I wonder what you will say, once sources are released? 
Then it will be fully upon us. Printing is imo not a priority - it 
first needs to be studies, then implemented - how to do it in cross-platform 
manner?

Hardly what I was expecting for 
RichText"."


The style is not meant to be used for directly editing rich text. 
It is a method to just display rich text efficiently using an existing 
document format.

I think Cyphre already has demonstrated editable rich text back in 
2005, before Carl began working on R3.

The parser for this is 54 lines of code including empty lines and 
comments. The style itself is 20 lines including empty lines and 
comments.

It's a nicely ironic touch to have a document widget in a system 
without built-in printing though.


You already know that printing is much harder to get done than it 
is to render for screen. How would the community react if Carl decided 
to focus on printing right now?

Source code for the style:

doc: text-area [


 about: "A tiny document markup method for embedded docs, notes, messages."

	options: [
		text-edit: [string! block!]
	]

	actors: [
		on-make: [
			; See text-area style for details.

   face/state/value: face/facets/text-edit: parse-doc face/facets/text-edit
			init-text-caret face ; (call before make-text)

   append face/gob gob: make-text-gob face face/facets/size - 2 "empty"
			face/gob/size: gob/size ; estimate to start (may get resized)
			do-style face 'on-update none
		]
	]
]

Cyphre's editable what? If we want to call that a rich-text attempt, 
we are really doomed. It was not really usable for real work.

You have a block of strings and words which represents the rich text, 
a caret position, some caret movement handling code, and a style 
that displays rich text. The biggest amount of work sounds to me 
like the code to set/get the caret position as well as movement. 
Manipulating the rich text block itself is trivial.

(Which makes me ask whether you have seen the rich text dialect. 
at all..)

Then we are not referring to the same thing. All I remember was attempt 
of several ppl to rich-text using R2, and it really was not something 
you would like to use as your editor.

I tried to find Carl' doc about text markup, but I only found REBOL 
TMD blog, where he announced such doc, but it was not probably released?