PureBasic Forums - English

Trond wrote:Everything has potential (except custom GUI toolkits).

Thats my reading of it. Did I miss something obvious?

Brice, I appreciate your personal problem with the way EC works, but again, it's something that I am sure talking to the author would fix. I spoke to him earlier on his IRC channel and found him very helpful and open to suggestions, criticism and he even put up with my strange sense of humour. People like that are a rare breed! Hell I even like you... not always, but most of the time. But thats what makes life interesting, diversity

I already addressed that in my prior post. And I paid the price for it already. No need for cheap shots.

Cheap shot? WTF you talking about? You misunderstood. I was NOT, I repeat was NOT referring to Irene, that didn't even cross my mind. And I was not referring to you.

I was making a generalized statement as over the past few years, newcomers are often given a hard time. I am just as guilty of that as anybody especially when it comes to our Chinese pirating friends and certain Russian pirates.

Brice Manuel wrote:Cheap shot? WTF you talking about? You misunderstood. I was NOT, I repeat was NOT referring to Irene, that didn't even cross my mind. And I was not referring to you.

I was making a generalized statement as over the past few years, newcomers are often given a hard time. I am just as guilty of that as anybody especially when it comes to our Chinese pirating friends and certain Russian pirates.

Well, I retract my comment and apologise. Nothing like a bit of textual misunderstanding

OK, thanks for your input guys. I think we should close this discussion now
(remember the 'Aurora Compiler' Thread?)
EC has a lot of potential, I hope jerstlouis will continue to improve it...

---Closed---
@the posters below: Did you even read my message?

Thats my reading of it. Did I miss something obvious?

I think you did, Trond was saying the language had potential, but not the custom GUIs. I really don't think he was referring to ALL custom GUIs. I am not a Trond fan by any stretch of imagination.

Brice, I appreciate your personal problem with the way EC works, but again, it's something that I am sure talking to the author would fix. I spoke to him earlier on his IRC channel and found him very helpful

I tried to join the channel yesterday, but since it was locked to only those with registered nicks, I wasn't allowed in. Not going to go through the hassle of registering a nick since I never use IRC anymore.

LuCiFeR[SD] wrote:I cannot see why EC's custom GUI system would not improve with constructive criticism, rather than a generalised blanket statement of all custom GUI's are crap.

But they are. Not because they are worse than native toolkits, but because they aren't native toolkits. Even if a custom toolkit is 639582 times better than a native toolkit, it's still crap because it isn't native. Why should it be native?
1. Give a uniform look and behavior to all programs.
2. Global preferences are there for a reason: they should be followed, or there's no reason to have them. And the global preferences includes fonts, colours and shapes of the widgets, even some behaviour.
3. Accessibility: Do you think custom toolkits works screen readers? Nope.

Edit: Sorry to spoil the fun, but I really mean do mean it. Even if they're done in a better way than native, they should be thrown out of the window immediately, with absolutely no exceptions.

Edit again: GTk it neither native nor does it pass the "low suckiness factor" test. It's slow (seems slower than EC, kudos to the EC author), it's got a clumsy API (treeview uses a model-view-controller approach, but to get fine control over the view it's actually necessary to change the data stored in the model, which defeats the whole purpose; it uses strings for callback names (!!!); it works with no less than 3 image formats in memory, GdkPixbuf, GdkPixmap, GtkPixmap, and the conversion routines are one-way (!); GTk and friends has lots of deprecated functions, some of which are necessary to most easily use non-deprecated functions, etc, etc...), it lacks automatic accellerator keys for menus, and a lot of keyboard navigation stuff isn't sane.

Well, I did misread him, but I do agree with his reasons. Those are pretty much the same reasons as to why I never use custom GUIs.

Trond wrote:

LuCiFeR[SD] wrote:I cannot see why EC's custom GUI system would not improve with constructive criticism, rather than a generalised blanket statement of all custom GUI's are crap.

But they are. Not because they are worse than native toolkits, but because they aren't native toolkits. Even if a custom toolkit is 639582 times better than a native toolkit, it's still crap because it isn't native. Why should it be native?
1. Give a uniform look and behavior to all programs.
2. Global preferences are there for a reason: they should be followed, or there's no reason to have them. And the global preferences includes fonts, colours and shapes of the widgets, even some behaviour.
3. Accessibility: Do you think custom toolkits works screen readers? Nope.

Now thats more like it, CONSTRUCTIVE critisism. Point those out to the man instead of how it was earlier. Perhaps then he can address said issues, rather than feel like he was being hit over the head with a large mallet

Brice, truly sorry for my program making you sick
I will definitely fix that before next pre-release.

The original reason why Ecere (started as a game SDK) had a custom GUI was to build in game GUIs. The custom GUI runs in any video driver mode, including OpenGL and Direct3D, and even text console mode. The choice for a custom GUI aims for a uniform look and behavior for an application across all platforms, which for me and some others is more important in a truly cross platform application. Better integration to the native GUI, nicer skins and support for things such as adaptability features are ways I will try to improve the drawbacks for this. Even a "native gui" option could be considered (I tried that once, but this has its own problems). And performance on a 1GHz machine, there is certainly place for improvements, but maybe there was a specific reason as to it being felt slow which I would love to hear more about and find a way to resolve it.

EDIT: Brice, FreeNode only requires you to register your nick to private message other users, not to join channels.

But I love mallets!

There are no "native" gadgets under X and since GTK is only one layer higher than X and provides Widgets I would say those are native widgets, in the same way, qt widgets are native on Linux. (even in a Gnome environment they are native and vice versa for GTK under KDE)

And so is Ecere only one level higher than X, and one level higher than Win32 base API Really, in order to have a perfectly smooth API (without platform specific extensions) which will guarantee the way an application will work, I have no regrets for my decision of going with a custom GUI. (Btw, almost 10 years of work went in the development of that custom GUI).

The original reason why Ecere (started as a game SDK) had a custom GUI was to build in game GUIs.

To clarify my earlier post, I was referring to apps. For an app, I would never use a custom GUI. An app really needs to look and function in the same way every other app for an OS does, as this is what the EU will expect.

For games, unless it is GDI based, you are very limited to how much of the native GUI can be implemented. Custom GUIs are a must-have for this. Although I generally make my own GUI, as long as the built-in one is skinnable, it could suffice for my needs.

To reaffirm though, feature-set is awesome for Ecere and I love the syntax. I cannot comment on the stability, as I didn't get that far.

The GUI is highly skinnable ( and working on improving that as well ).
I believe many applications have their custom GUIs, and it really depends on the kind of application. For example if I think about the two apps I'm currently working on, a music/media player and a instant messager; WinAmp, iTunes, MSN Messenger come to mind... And correct me if I'm wrong but they all use a custom GUI, and I think users typically welcome an original well thought out GUI characteristic of an application or a software vendor.

do you think your product beats purebasic because if so you're wrong