Visual Communication

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I random watched a lecture & Q & A with Susan Kare last night (not Carolyne whatsername, lol) where she talks a bit about simplifying in communicating with pictures while still effectively communicating ideas. When it comes to simplifying pixel images that reduction of a thing to its core essence can really accelerate everything. Remember there was no GPU in those early Macs computers, no color, or grey-scale even, and yet she did recognizable portraits within that B&W 32 pixel grid constraint. Interesting thought on the benefits of having constraints (it certainly makes freelance work easier when you know exactly the parameters for the job), She raves about what a great resource the Letter Form Archive is for graphic designers, stating "there's nothing new under the sun" as far as design ideas). Good stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lx9Wtd ... eRefresh=1
Then I watched another interview she did during the Lisa/release of Mac era and the early design principles that guided them, like always providing constant visual feedback to the user, making visual metaphors and graphics so easy to understand that a manual is not needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmWOtf4Ziso

Anyway I found this really simple thing for doing GUIs from terminal stuff using simple JSON files, and it claims to work on just about any OS (even the BeOS-Haiku thing). I tested on MX Linux: https://github.com/matyalatte/Tuw

[tperry2x]

So are you thinking of combining OpenXion with Tuw, to give you a unified cross-platform GUI? Seems like these disparate pieces 'just' need stitching together.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

So are you thinking of combining OpenXion with Tuw, to give you a unified cross-platform GUI? Seems like these disparate pieces 'just' need stitching together.

The thought has certainly crossed my mind more than once, not necessarily using Tuw but something like that. Although using JSON markup for UI with Tuw seems as simple as can be.

There's plenty that can be done with an xTalk with a minimal GUI (or even no GUI at all). OpenXION can read & write bytes of data to/from a file just fine!

[tperry2x]

There's plenty that can be done with an xTalk with a minimal GUI (or even no GUI at all). OpenXION can read & write bytes of data to/from a file just fine!

True, but not having a GUI would be a deal-breaker for many people.
I'm more thinking of a combination of OpenXION and TUW together, to create a new "engine" - or a new IDE at the very least.

[richmond62]

Personally NOT having a GUI, while, possibly, being useful for "computer programmer types" would almost completely defeat the original HC "for the rest of us" vision.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Personally NOT having a GUI, while, possibly, being useful for "computer programmer types" would almost completely defeat the original HC "for the rest of us" vision.

No more than AppleScript did "computer programmer types" weren't the ones who were using HC to tag up some text with HTML or using HC as an easy 'CGI' back-end for early Mac web-servers while also doing all the typing and graphics editing in between actual paying work that came in (circa 1993, or 4?). If anything the computer programmer types were telling me that HyperTalk isn't a real programming language (as if I cared). I guess that may have made me into "computer programmer type". Tandy BASIC in middle-school in the 1980s certainly hadn't done it.

I used HC extensively as a UI front end for AppleScripts, I could NOT have done that in 'Think C' (or whatever was the big C IDE at the time) or Apple PASCAL or whatever, and I had no desire to look at those languages (OK PASCAL isn't quite as ugly as ANSI C). In my mind I was 'The Rest of Us". those who are repulsed by cryptic looking programming languages or the notion of having to handle 'manual memory management" just to make a computer to do a few things that I wanted (or needed) it to do.

There is no AppleScript in Linux world, so xTalk could be the perfect stand in for that for easy task automation. AppleScript has always come with a standard library that gives it the ability to do very basic GUI things while not actually having a full-blown GUI toolkit. That is basically the equivalent of Ask/Answer Dialog boxes without the Stack/Card metaphor. That's all you need for doing a lot of things, just a few dialog boxes for common items (Answer File, Answer Color. Answer Record, etc.).

For example batch processing images, your would just need to "Answer Folder" to selecta directory where the images to process are, and then another to ask where to put the post processing images (and maybe to ask to over write existing files). So do you think 'The Rest of Us" would want to use 'Ask Folder" OR code thier own with Rust or C++ or whatever while targeting multiple platforms and multiple UI toolkits?