World: r4wp

MaxV - that's an old song - Altme will be used by those, who want 
to use it, easy as that, no? Yes, public forum should be available, 
but please let's ppl use what they like or are used to. Some of us 
simply prefer IM nature, so we will either use Altme or IRC. That 
does not mean, that we will not participate in a forum, or mailing 
list. I can bet, that if ML was still active, many of us here would 
contribute. I quite miss ML a bit :-)

I want that people will continue to use what they prefer, but Rebol 
misses all the common tools of open projects:
- public forum
- public wiki

The way to eneter in connection with others is too complicated by 
now. GitHub is making all a little easy, so why closing GitHub wiki? 
Leave it open, people will decide if usinig GitHub Wiki or the old 
complicated way to enter in the rebol community.

I don't say to close the Rebol wiki.

I wrote the page to build Rebol3 with mingw (it's complicated), and 
now it disappered! Someone who has a Mac could write his way to bouild 
that, and nobody heeds to ask to rebol.com, nobody has to prove to 
be an expert about Rebol.

Max, the problem is that most web tools actually suck... not because 
their developpers are bad... but because the web, as a platform sucks... 
in all regards.   its slow, super complex, apps break up every other 
month, and even the basic framework on which the web is layers was 
NEVER meant to be used like it, so even that is corrupted to start 
with.  Also, the apps we use keep changing from under our feet, which 
as a user we have NO control, and it gets very tiresome... it seems 
like every other time I log on to any of the bigger web sites, its 
changed, and I'm lost... again.


I have not seen a single altme-like product which I could chat in 
**real-time** with many people in groups as we do here.   its always 
either super slow, very slugish, insanely complex or insanely dumb. 
 


The only platform which has some appeal so far is the Stack Overflow 
engine, which has a pretty good architecture... but man would it 
be sooo much better if it wasn't built over web technologies...

Is the r3-gui available on the Saphirion site download section the 
most recent version? It's from March this year, and I seem to remember 
some activity on it after that point.

I see now that Robert mentioned last Sunday that they were working 
on getting the automated win32 builds going, so hopefully that will 
happen soon.

r3-gui is available. It's not the latest release but works. We are 
going to update it. I need to fix the web-site project as it's currently 
broken.

The win32 builds are working. We have a single EXE including View. 
Will be published too.

It's that we need to setup some infrastructure to handle it.

Hostile fork recovered the WIKI: https://github.com/hostilefork/r3-hf/wiki
 , so is someone needs isnformations or want to put informations, 
uses that link.

Use thet link https://github.com/hostilefork/r3-hf/wiki

Does anyone know if it would be possible to have Rebol included in 
Ubuntu now that it's open? I don't mean just to make a package available, 
but to have it be installed in the base system.

Maxim, I agree that AltME is a great platform, but it could be much 
better.  For instance, things like the Calendar and Checklists that 
work OK, but are not really polished and feature-rich yet.  But I 
think AltME could be made to look a lot better by borrowing from 
some concepts seen in Facebook and Google+, and maybe even have an 
almost-real-time bi-directional link to a web forum for people who 
need to access the groups from a web browser.


Another thing that I would really prefer would be to allow connection 
to multiple AltME worlds from within a single AltME window.


Hmm...if AltME was also open-sourced, we could start adding these 
features!  I have a more feature-rich calendar I could add right 
away. ;-)

AdrianS: R3 can now certainly get into the package repository. I 
think that having it included in the base install is unlikely, but 
it will only be an `apt-get install rebol3` away.

Bo, there is an OpenME project that is currently in limbo. Have you 
seen it?

Henrik, now that you mention it, I do recall that.  But wouldn't 
it be even better if we could have access to the current AltME source 
code and just work from there?  Unfortunately, OpenME may not be 
the best name because there is a trojan virus with the same name.


It would be great if there were some basic instructions for people 
wanting to try out the current latest version of OpenME in the Readme 
of the OpenME project on github.

Bo, possibly, but as I see it, AltME has some specific design flaws, 
such as dependency on world servers we have no control over. We decided 
not to let a trojan decide whether the name should be used or not.

For me Altme is almost unusable if not used on Windows. I miss a 
way how to customize it. Just 2 font size versions and hardcoded 
font is a big problem.

Andreas, do you know what a scripting language needs to have in order 
to be included by default? Is it just a matter of popularity?

I use Altme on my Macbook. AltMe has some flaws on the Mac but it 
certainly is not unusuable for me. Are you referring to Linux versions 
David? On the Mac it is  possible to zoom in easily if the sight 
is the problem.

Bo, along with open sourcing AltME, the R3 chat would be good to 
have opened as well. This has been asked of Carl on the blog (more 
than once), but the question keeps being ignored. Almost as if on 
purpose - might be possible that Carl is trying to figure out a way 
to monetize that side of Rebol.

I've had a number of face-to-face conversations with Carl recently, 
and I don't get that feeling at all.  I'm sure it's just a matter 
of time - Carl is highly pressed for time in his current job.  Plus, 
now he is spending a lot of time looking over the R3 code changes 
on git and merging them.

AdrianS: I think scripting languages are only part of the base installation 
if they are needed by some other part of the base installation.

But I'm not sure Ubuntu has a published or defined policy for what's 
included by default in  the base or desktop installations. I think 
it's a decision made by a board.

In case anyone wants R3 builds from most recent source without going 
through the hassle of building itself:

- OSX x86: http://bolka.at/2012/rebol3/r3-2.5-845b60a0
- Win32 x86: http://bolka.at/2012/rebol3/r3-3.1-845b60a0.exe
- Linux x86: http://bolka.at/2012/rebol3/r3-4.4-845b60a0

Core or View?

Thanks Andreas

From Carl's official Git repository, so they are "Core".

Does it make sense to have nightly builds?

I think so, yes. That's why we have them, already :) Preparing it 
for publication.

I can't keep up with all this information, sorry. :-)

No worries, It's the first time I mention it.

And it's only vapour at the moment anyway :)

Robert, is it possible to show JPEG images using your R3 GUI ?

I don't think so, even the JPG source is there in R3. We have added 
PNG support.

JPG support in R3 would be amazing, even though I know it would bloat 
the size of the executable by a significant amount.  Maybe it could 
be available as a plug-in so if you don't need JPG support, you don't 
have to sacrifice the space.

I'm speaking of being able to write JPGs.  I see now that the discussion 
was about reading JPGs.

This was supposed to be supported through media types.

I've got a question about using MakeDoc/MakeDoc Pro vs Markdown/MultiMarkdown. 
Are there significant advantages with MakeDoc that outweigh going 
with Markdown which seems to be the defacto standard for lightweight 
markup? I guess when MakeDoc first came out it was pretty unique, 
but if you were to need this kind of tool today wouldn't it make 
sense to use something with wider adoption?

No.  Better is better.

That's not much of an answer, Scot. I was hoping that someone who 
is familiar with these markups can say something specific to help 
me decide if I'll ever have to make the choice. I could go through 
each and compare the features side by side, but maybe someone has 
already done that (haven't found any comparisons).

Unless you already are invested in tools one way or the other, I'd 
go with Markdown these days.

On a pure feature basis, I think make-doc-pro somewhat surpasses 
plain Markdown. I fear you'll have to decide on your own if you need 
something MDP adds.

Andreas:  Sorry. I wasn't really commenting as much on Make-Doc-Pro 
as the impending realization that we are going to see a ton of forks 
branching off.  Make-Doc and Make-Doc-Pro have been associated in 
my mind with the "official" RT over the years. 


Hopefully the R3 team will be able to keep this thing focused.  Still 
not sure who those people are.  As long as Mark Down is pure Rebol, 
I suppose I don't have much preference.  Rebol has always taken the 
high road, so if MDP is better, I think we should stick with it. 
 Widespread adoption has never been as important as top quality better 
design.


If we continue to adopt whatever is widespread we'll end up losing 
everything that is better.  Amiga OS, Be OS, QNX Nutrino, etc.  All 
far better OS designs than Unix and Windows NT.  What do we end up 
with?  Unix and NT and of course the dreaded DOM (don't try to convince 
me that a flavor of Linux is anything more than a Unix OS).


So better is better.  If MDP is better, then we should adopt it, 
not because it is widespread, but because it is better.

The thing is that MD markup is supported by quite some Wiki engines 
etc.

MDP struggles with markdown syntax. We talked about rewriting it 
with a cleaner implementation.

I write my code in Rebol, because the concepts behind Rebol are the 
most advanced and human centered I've found (I have written code 
in 30 languages and now that I've seen the source I code I can tell 
you it is by far the most elegant thing I've ever seen.

Henrik: So MDP was intended to parse Markdown syntax to a certain 
degree?

Robert:  Do it.  Make MDP cleaner.  Then we make a Wiki that uses 
the cleaner MDP.  Or fix MarkDown so it is better than MDP.