World: r3wp

This would deal with Shadwolf's complaint about R2's VID appearance.

That means declarative themes though, no procedural code involved. 
The themes should be able to be made by non-programmer artists working 
with graphical tools (likely also written in REBOL).

BrianH: are you suggesting no more BUTTON RED "OK" code? :-)

yes, you would simply write OK-BUTTON instead.

OR button-RED instead :-)

simply put - it is not that it would not be technically possible 
to pass any such argument to the style during the construction. It 
is about - we don't want to do that for some attributes, color being 
one of them, because it could ruin overall look of the GUI ...

it's not just looks. deep semantics that are used to make the GUI 
function properly relies on functional styles rather than appearance 
of styles. if you have a red button, the GUI won't know of its importance. 
but if you have an OK-BUTTON, you can tell how important it is, when 
it should be focused and what you are allowed to do with it. automating 
this can cut off hundreds of hours of development and testing time, 
because you don't have to pay attention to those details. the UI 
system does that for you.

that is why I utterly hate when a UI system does nothing to offer 
these features and the focus is on how pretty your buttons are or 
if the UI uses hardware acceleration.

I see no difference between OK-BUTTON, and RED-BUTTON. E.g. in some 
embedded apps, RED means STOP. The fact that your OK-BUTTON does 
some other things does not matter, no? I just don't probably understand 
your "automating" argument. Can you give me an example?

sure, have you ever written a very large document in Word and then 
wanted to generate a table of contents using its built in TOC generator?

it can't do that, if you don't specify what exactly the headlines 
are. you can color them as crazy as you want, but it won't understand 
it.

this is _exactly_ the same problem.

I was taught proper document design back at the Lotus AmiPro days 
- much better than Word at that time, and it pushed you to use styles. 
So - I hate inline styling. But - how does it apply to the GUI?

proper usage of styles in the R3 GUI works exactly the same as in 
documents that are properly styled. there is no difference.

and that's why you never see in a word processor a function like: 
"collect all red text for use in TOC". it says: "use headline level 
1 for TOC".

On naming, I think PANEL is too general and doesn't describe the 
layout behavior. I could live with it though. 


I agree that TABLE should be saved as that is the common term for 
the spreadsheet model. GRID was used for that for a long time, and 
still is sometimes, but GRID could also be good when thought of as 
a canonical grid layout. GRID-LAY, CANON-LAY, or TABLET aren't too 
inspiring either.

Gregg, one thing that became clear in discussions of function doc 
strings recently in Curecode is that it is impossible to fully describe 
the behavior of some programming functions and objects using just 
one name, one sentence, whatever. No matter how long you allow the 
description to be, any sufficiently complex thing won't be describable 
in that limit. And you *want* limits because people have to read 
and write these terms, even more so for fundamental stuff that will 
be used a lot. The use of small, preferably non-compound words will 
speed up the process of humans reading and writing layouts. Java 
failed this pop quiz, btw.


This is why we have names for stuff (and people too: Does "Gregg" 
describe you?). A name serves as a placeholder for the knowlege you 
already have about the object in your head (preferably) or in the 
documentation. As long as we have good documentation, any small, 
easily distinguishable name will do. You will never fully describe 
the term, but by reading the documentation, or source, or through 
experience, the programmer will know what is meant.


In this specific case, "panel" is a general term, but many GUIs have 
traditionally used the word "panel" to describe the corresponding 
concept in their systems. That term never fully describes the behavior 
of that object, but it makes a good, easy to remember name for a 
complex concept that the developer is expected to have to learn. 
By using PANEL, at least experienced developers will know that they 
will have to look things up, and inexperienced developers will have 
to look things up no matter what name we choose. You don't get the 
same benefit from the term BOARD, for instance, because while the 
English terms are similar, "board" doesn't have the historical connotations 
that "panel" does in the computing world, so it doesn't gain the 
benefit of them.

Yes, I realize ithe irony in using such a long post to argue for 
short words, but in some ways it illustrates my point :)

LOL. Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful post in any case. As 
I said, I can live with PANEL, which is good since I couldn't come 
up with anything better.

call it jigsaw :)

Mosaic? ;-)

Decoupage ? ;)

Deco ... what? :-)

box, board, mosaic, matrix, sieve, die, wire, netting, tissue ... 
and the winner is - panel :-)

small status update:


Not much happening on the release/testing side. Bolek found a nasty 
bug in MAKE-FACE, causing FACETS to be lost. Cyphre and Ladislav 
continue to work on resizing and Bolek is working on styles. When 
the styles are properly adapted to the new resizng scheme, I can 
test the new dialogs properly.

Of an interesting note, the new Google Images uses exactly the layout 
being discussed above.

And Cyphre is working on the richt-text part to work with the new-hostkit.

I'm going to see, if I can sell an ATTACH reactor to Carl. Maybe 
he has other ideas. :-)

What will ATTACHE do ?

simply attach two fields in two faces, so that when the attacher 
updates that particular field, the attachee updates also.

the R3 GUI does something like that already with a RELAY option, 
but it's cumbersome to use and less flexible.

Ok, that sounds like it could be useful.

view [
	c: color-button
	s: slider attach c 'brightness s 'value
]

or something like that.

Isn't LINK a better word?

And could we LINK to more than on target? That would be nice.

link is already used to fetch "reb content".

I see...

more than one target: you can attach as many as you can. doing it 
in blocks, perhaps can be added.

attach: [

 "Set state of a face to our face's value and performs its main function."
	name [word!] field [word! none!] our-field [word! none!]
] [

 set-face/field get name get-face/field face field our-field ; (none 
 is allowed)
	do-face get name
]

how it looks now.

What is FACE ?

a reference to the face itself

It's not defined in the above function.

Or is it defined at a higher level?

each reactor is converted to a function, where the first argument 
is the face and the remaining arguments are as shown in the argument 
list above

>> source guie/actions/attach
guie/actions/attach: make function! [[face value

    {Set state of a face to our face's value and performs its main function.}
    name [word!] field [word! none!] our-field [word! none!]
    /local
][
    set-face/field get name get-face/field face field our-field
    do-face get name
]]

; also VALUE is in there.

Ok thanks.

I think I would reword the doc string a bit for grammatical consistency.

It looks like it should be either "Set" and "perform", or "Sets" 
and "performs".

yes, sure

Does it actually set the "state" of a face, or is it really the "value" 
of a face ?

I changed the text, as that was inaccurate:


Set a field of a face to a field of this face and perform its main 
function.