World: r3wp

Pekr, does it work with the spacebar? There could be a collision 
when using Enter, because it may be used to confirm the default button, 
which may not be the same one as the one in focus. That depends on 
keyboard shortcut layout, though.

Yes, spacebar works, thanks ...

Henrik - I just watched behaviour in Mozilla's Thunderbird, re button. 
There is 'default button in focus on particular page, so that enter 
works for that button. But - when tabbing, and IF the type is button, 
then default button is no more hilighted, and tabbed button is hilighted 
instead. When you tab away from the button, default button goes hilighted 
again. That way, both enter and space-bar works for actually hilighted 
button ...

The same goes for default Windows dialogs, and it is imo good behaviour. 
Simply put -enter stays as a default action for the form's default 
hilighted button, unless another button is tabbed. It unifies enter 
| space-bar behaviour for button types. If we stay with current behaviour, 
users might be confused, as enter will fire action on different button 
than the tabbed one. Of course it depends, and I would like to know, 
what is the functionality on non-Windows platform?

If you are able to move the default button using tab focusing, then 
IMHO, default no longer makes sense, because it overlaps tabbing. 
This is one thing that OSX does quite well and the idea is taken 
from there.


The alternative is to get rid of the default action and simply place 
the focus where default would be, but that means potentially lots 
of tabbing, if you need to activate a specific field.

Hmm, so OS-X behaves differently. Now what we do? Do we simulate 
each platform differently?

Activating a specific field would also occur in validation, when 
focusing an invalid field, so it would disrupt default functionality, 
if they are one and the same.

That is possible, since the behavior model is not very big.

But even under Windows, the different GUI systems may not behave 
identically. I would try things in Control panel and other Windows 
standard dialogs.

I expect it being possible. The question is - do we want rebol app 
to behave in OS native way, or just the same thru all platforms? 
I am for the former ....

yes, I agree on that.

I tried Thunderbird and IT Internet settings (which is Windows native 
dialog)

I aven thought about possibility to link to native widgets, but just 
to mimick skin parameters. I am not sure it is possible, but when 
you e.g. create skin, which looks like OS native one, then users 
will be confused, if you set OS native feel differently. Under windows, 
there's not much of possibilities, except for some Windows bar size/decoration, 
or font size. But under AmigaOS and e.g. MUI, you can change the 
look of widgets quite a lot. The question is, if someone would be 
willing to simulate such a complex system as MUI is, and define all 
the skins. The app would also have to be notified, that user changed 
central setting, to readjust ...

if we do that, there might be a need to define a behavioral model 
as part of the skin, but I'm not sure how much it encompasses. There 
are some little details that I expect to work in a specific way in 
OSX, which don't work in Windows, and vice versa. This means that 
styles may not implement these behaviors directly, but that is probably 
difficult to avoid.

I think we should categorize typical differences, such as:


- whether certain buttons are activated on mouse-down or mouse-up.

- whether a button action is activated when dragging out of a button 
and releasing.
- whether default follows tab focus.
- etc.


Then these could possibly be implemented in styles and abstracted 
away from the style as a behavioral profile for a specific OS.

Mozilla apps are not a good place to observe native system behaviour, 
because they use their own toolkit

Abstracting the things Henrik lists would be very nice

That is why I checked with native Windows dialog box :-)

Small status:


The Internet these days seems to be composed of a series of disk 
crashes (instead of tubes). Both Robert and Rebolek are suffering, 
which slows down communications, so no updates lately.

Maybe you should realy use github, at least for the open part of 
your project.

as we get a better arrangement on how to do that properly, yes. I 
think we can do this by pushing nightly from the server.

OT: Our new server us much more reliably setup. Three RAID systems, 
failover power/ethernet/..., back to the cloud every 6h etc.

If something happens at least we should be back to full steam in 
much less time.

nice! that's the way. just made a similar setup with SSD/PCI-SSD 
and a spacious raid 5 for the data storage.
for ultimate speed I can recommend PCI-SSD Instead SATA SSD.

We have a big project that needs Android TabletPC and Phones to run 
on.

How difficult would it be to have a an R3 GUI for these touch based 
devices ?

R3 would have to be ported ...

one interim solution would be to have at least core plus cheyenne 
and local webserver webapp ... but cheyenne will not be ported to 
R3 soon enough for you  imo ...

At this point it would be easier to use R3 as a preprocessor to generate 
apps that are implemented in Java than it would be to use R3 directly.

then why to use R3 at all? If R3 can't be ported or used, it failed 
...

Ok, I have understood we should talk about REBOL on Android in a 
couple of years from now.

But to break it down, assuming you want R3-only apps, we would need
- A native C compiler for the platform

- A rewritten host for the Android application model to support native-only 
GUI apps (are those possible?)
- An AGG port to the hardware/os
- Some tweaks to the event model to support touch and multi-touch
- Some tweaks to the R3 GUI that deal with the new form factor
- A new set of styles that are designed for touch

It is clear this path is not suitable for our project. We should 
look at Java.

At this point, the only plans I have heard people making for Android 
were to make an R3 host that would act as a plugin for the Android 
native API model, so that R3 would be a native library to supplement 
apps that are primarily written in Java. No talk of AGG yet in those 
plugins though.

hmm, but that sucks then .... I can's see anything special for the 
the touch - it is just different mouse. Multitouch is different beast, 
but I work with touchscreens since 2003 - some of them simply simulate 
mouse ....

Of course that would depend on what native plugins are allowed to 
do on Android. I haven't even heard of a fully native GUI app for 
Android (they might exist but I haven't heard of it), only CLI apps.

and they dare to call it a platform? Without a free GUI?

They do have a free GUI. It's just that it's written in Java.

we will see - unless someone physically starts experimenting with 
at least core ARM port, it is all preliminary ...

maybe we should move groups ....

I bought an Android phone (as opposed to an iPhone or WP7) specifically 
for this purpose.

Yes.

The other chance would be to see REBOL ported to the JavaVM...

It might be easier to port to Dalvik than to the JVM - I haven't 
checked yet.

Brian, my project will start on February. There is no time to wait 
for anything REBOL based.

Right.

We are planning an Order Entry application which needs a tablet/mobile 
phone and a Server counterpart.

The only way to use REBOL in this scenario would be the application 
which retrieves order for the local ERP from the server.

Order entry apps seem like the kind of thing that the existing Android 
GUI would be able to do easily.

I figured that direct use of REBOL wouldn't be something you could 
do now for your project. But it could be useful eventually to someone 
else in your situation, so it is worth discussing :)

The R3 GUI will eventually need multitouch support and support for 
modern touch-screen devices (meaning: not treating touch like a mouse). 
That support would be portable to a variety of devices, some of which 
would be running OSes that the R3 GUI already runs on.