World: r3wp

Hi Henrik, sure do! I've found that it's easy to step into one of 
the 'deeper' Rebol pools - say 'dialects' and thrash around not getting 
anything done in a disire to understand. This week I'm trying to 
learn just enough to do what I have on the drawing-board.

Hi all, I couldn't resist!  I just had to dip my toe into VID 3. 
It's like waiting for Christmas ;-) All those goodies! 


I've posted a snipet on my blog.     http://swt1962.spaces.live.com

Regards
SteveT

Some notes for your blog post:

'effects' are now 'options'

 - the idea is here to remove the need for face hacking. Options is 
 a clean, self documentable  way to alter the settings for a specific 
 style. But here, the fact that we can alter the appearance of the 
 style is a bit of a fluke, because we wanted a simple way to test 
 options. Originally it was the idea that altering any such effects 
 parameters directly in your layout would be prohibited; The style 
 would take care of this internally and you'd use specific button 
 types that would then use a specific style. You would use buttons 
 defined through its purpose rather than its appearance. You'd have 
 zero control over the appearance of the button, because that is controlled 
 by the style alone.


I know that sounds a little terrifying, but VID3 is meant to lift 
styling to a whole different level; You don't style every single 
face. You focus on the contents of your UI, and the purpose of each 
element, rather than its appearance and VID3 works out how to display 
it. This is for multiple reasons:


- VID3 can display on other devices than bitmapped displays, such 
as text consoles or vectored output.

- Styling becomes the job of one or more dedicated developers rather 
than the application developer, which standardizes styling. It makes 
it much simpler to build very large applications and it becomes possible 
to switch consistently between different styles, where one won't 
look crappy while another one looks great. They'll work equally well. 
Compare it to VID which is just the Wild West of styling. :-)

- Abstraction will make it possible to identify parts of a user interface, 
such as allowing VID3 to, on its own, find the cancel button in a 
window or automatically put key focus on the correct button for great 
consistency.


So when you, in your user interface design say: "I want a button 
that shows importance", you don't try to make a red button. You could 
use the 'warning-button style (just an example, doesn't exist yet). 
Similarly there will be styles for ok-button, cancel-button, etc. 
They are not called red-button, yellow-button, but are purely purpose 
oriented styles.


So while VID3 may look like just a prettier VID with resizing in 
a one-button example, it's actually a whole different beast. :-)

Thanks Henrik, so VID 3 will expect us to prepare our components 
or have some already prepared that we can then use - a bit like creating 
a'skin'. This is much better than 'hacking' each button or box in 
the middle of your layout. Eg, On my main menu example I could have 
my 'reflected image button' already pre-defined in my stylize section? 
Would you like me to post your clarification on my blog?

Steve - but even with VID2 you could pre-construct your styles by 
'stylize and instantiate it by directing VID to your style, or you 
could stylize it even inline within VID, so that you don't need to 
override specific parts of your button each time ...

Hi Pekr,  I understand that, in Visual Studio I would create my own 
'custom' controls for various lookups or effect - that can be re-used 
through-out. If I am planning a full-blown application I would create 
the same tools. As I read thru the VID User Guide - I'm just playing 
with one-liners etc.

yes. I can't wait how VID3 turns out in that regard :-) We should 
get more interactivity out-of-the-box.

Yep, the development  of VID 3 seems right on track IMO, they (RT) 
don't seem to be falling into the trap of making the program design 
too event-driven (Like - Visual Studio etc) Although I've used it 
for years! I think the event-driven design process is bad. You can 
very easily 'knock-up' an application user interface and it will 
look very pretty - but then you spend twice the time getting the 
'back-end' of the application to work with the front-end!!

I wonder if anyone tried looking into Qt? Seems rather complete. 
KDE 4 uses it. And now Nokia owns it ...

Is that the gui they did for tckl ??

I think not. Qt is fro Trolltech, imo pretty advanced. They have 
also Qtopia version for mobile devices. However - for most simple 
apps View will be just fine ... and small :-)

definitely ;-)

I think VID 3 will be useful for an app I will be doing later this 
year where I want to offer access to data in a consistant interface 
for desktop, web and windows mobile.

how will you solve the web part? Plug-in would be usefull here, wouldn't 
it? :-)

Yep, perhaps the paid for /pro /master versions may bring it together??

I think I spotted mention of a 'Windows Mobile'  plug-in the other 
day?

Steve, feel free to post my comment on your blog.

Henrik - any new blog of yours coming? IIRC you planned on something. 
You have very nice and descriptive style - your VID3 blog was very 
explanatory ..

I have several posts lined up, but still need some research on some 
topics (time consuming) to complete them.

Henrik - to your post. It really sounds a bit terrifying, like old 
Win 3.1 visaul basic style ;-) I am really scared that I will see 
OK-button, Cancel-button and such styles. If I will see a pictogram 
on it, then really - we are going 10 years back - old design imo 
....

Pekr, because you are getting it completely wrong. :-)

Even OSX does it this way.

it has nothing to do with appearance

And I bet that most skinners will get it wrong too ... adding various 
funky pictograms to those buttons :-)

I don't know where you get the idea that VID3's style system will 
require "funky pictograms". The abstraction is made so (and you know 
this) that different purpose buttons can have completely identical 
appearance. In fact, there might be so many button styles that it 
makes no sense to differ their look. Style designers are completely 
free to include or exclude funky pictograms. :-)

you will not stop ppl to add those pictograms. I did not say anything 
about a requirement :-)

I hope nobody stops them. :-)

and we disagree, because we are discussing it on different levels. 
:-)

Thanks Henrik, just got back in from being 'forced' to shop :-)

Hi all, can anyone at RT outline the widget(controls) that WILL be 
available in VID3. Perhaps enter them as outlines in the VID User 
Guide?

hard to say at this point as I'm not done with that part yet.

the best guess is the list that already exists in DocBase somewhere.

Hi Henrik, just wanted a feel for where R3 will end up GUI wise. 
If in twelve months we end up with bells and whistles then cool - 
an app I've been asked to re-write needs to be very 'plush' so I'm 
going to have to use something else.

yes, that's wise for now. I expect also about 12 months before VID3 
is near completion with most styles. It's conservative, however. 
:-)

styles will probably be similar to the ones found in Trolltech's 
QT (not appearance, Pekr, but capability. :-))

Ok, original app was done in Java (for internal use) external front 
end needs to be video quality, might look at Flex for web front end 
(now it's open source).

hehe :-)

SteveT: why wouldn't you use VID3 for the task given? I think in 
12 months VID3 should be pretty mature ...

Hi Petr, It's a background project for me, clients in no mad rush, 
but will expect me to come up with the  goods within twelve months 
- they also want desktop & web. it's an interactive availability/booking 
system for group of hotels.

Jounal of a Newbie - by SteveT

Back on my travels again now (having to do paid work! ;-/  


Have learn't an awful lot about Rebol this month. Managed to get 
a good prototype reasonably functional. Have finsished my little 
licence maker app for internal use. Our client records believe it 
or not were just on Excel!! (Mrs T ) likes Excel! So i've created 
the same data in a simple client app using Henriks List-View and 
RebDB. Perfect for our internal use.


Going to try to learn more about Rebol3 (VID3) during February (Clients 
permiting !)

Steve

Hi all, can Rebol load XML structures straight into a block ?????

You can with my RebXML found here:
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/rebxml/


The script xml2rebxml.r read an XML structure into a block with content 
defined in the spec:
http://home.tiscali.dk/john.niclasen/rebxml/rebxml-spec.html

Kinda ... out of the box XML is not 100% but   load/markup  may do 
what you want for some cases


If that is not sufficient, some rebols have written  extensions. 
  Umm, like John just posted.  :)

That's great thank's guys !

You're welcome!

'parse-xml is a standard REBOL function in 'core that does some basic 
XML processing. It may be enough for you.

I use Gavin's XML-parse functions every day:

http://www.rebol.org/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/rebol/view-script.r?script=xml-parse.r

Not tried John's yet :-)

Thanks Sunanda

REBOL is quite useful for web-applications and handling data and 
technologies born from the internet-boom in the computing world. 
I bet, there are many REBOL-based solutions out there.

PARSE-XML is a built-in func as well. Not as complete as Gavin's, 
but works well for basic things. The biggest mod I've made to it 
is to swap the order of element value and attributes in the resulting 
block. That way you can address the value using path notation or 
SELECT. Working with attributes takes a little more work.

So for anyone new to REBOL or more generally to Forth (being one 
of the inspirations behind REBOL) I'd like to strongly recommend 
reading Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth - free PDF here - http://thinking-forth.sourceforge.net/


I stumbled across this group of programming books http://prog21.dadgum.com/19.html
and it reminded me I had meant to do some reading on Forth.  I'm 
now a third of the way through the Thinking Forth book kicking myself 
for not having dug into this earlier.  Just like learning about the 
functional perspective with Lisp and Erlang this reading is expanding 
my programming perspective with every chapter.  In addition to being 
valuable in the REBOL context it is simply a great book on programming 
in any context.