World: r3wp

We'll see Brian.

Buf it hat is true that you believe Silverlight will overtake Flex 
then I'm not sure how you have a problem with the word "never" when 
comparing the momentum behind Flex to that of REBOL.

It's just  that I can see the end of Flash/Flex's path - it's right 
there in the system architecture. There isn't much potential left 
there, just a lot of actual. Flash isn't going to lose much of its 
installed base, not while what's there still works, but it's reaching 
the end of its potential capabilities. One federally mandated accessibility 
law and it's obsolete.


Silverlight is still advancing rapidly, and Moonlight is part of 
why. Some of the Silverlight 3 beta features are already in the Moonlight 
2 preview. By the time S3 comes out, Moonlight may be caught up. 
And Silverlight is much faster for RIAs.

I'm not saying REBOL will never catch Flex, I'm just saying there's 
a lot to admire there.

Large portions of Silvelight are open source - more than R3 at least 
until the host code is released. I think Silverlight is the one to 
compare R3 to, not Flash. Flash is barely usable outside of multimedia 
players.

(and I'm talking Air, not Flex)

I believe that Air is currently lacks USB and Printer support.

To reiterate, from a user perspective, it was painless to install, 
painless to add further apps, the apps 'look and feel' well-designed 
(top to bottom design has never been easy with View) including native 
menus.  For each, it seems that the designer/developer has been able 
to realise their concept (that's subjective, I suppose, and app-dependent).

ah, native menus - poison some REBOL users are tempted by too :-)

Including yourself?

no, I was always against it. I do understand why ppl wanted it, but 
it is only because we are lacking our own widget. Becase - where 
do we stop? Some ppl wanted View linking to all native widgets ... 
and it is not View anymore then.

I'd stop at menus.  I don't see the slippery slope...

Menus appear to be the only standard UI feature of these Air applications, 
it seems to helo them fit (and I tried both Win and Mac versions)

On the Mac in particular, custom menus echo cheapness - note how 
alien an otherwise accomplished cross-platform app such  as Inkscape 
looks...

then such a menu, which is completly off the look of the rest of 
your app, should be more of a config menu, even better if it can 
hide/slide (but that depend on the system), but not be menu for my 
app.

Of course, even Cyphre's menu has bad metrics and looks "cheap". 
But is it really a problem to design it correctly?

How do they solve context menus? Native too? I don't understand this 
obsession to have menu native, while the rest of the app might look 
as a painted fairy tale.

But - our GUI is far from being usable, so native menu or not is 
still preliminary question for R3.

Take a look at the Air apps - you can see how it works - doesn't 
detract at all from the custom UIs.

http://www.ross-gill.com/images/GrabAir.jpg(I'm in orange, btw)

I hope such an app is 1-3 pages max in VID 3.4 :-)

Brian, the entire Flex SDK is open source.  I'm not sure where you 
get that it is coming to its end.  If anything Flex has been positions 
to expand and evolve.

Paul - what he means is probably the architecture of the language, 
which might be limiting here. Flex is open source? Doesn't it cost 
some money? Come on :-)

Well, maybe I mix two things - being an open-sourced product and 
product costing a money ...

Petr, functionally you can do the same with VID in a relatively small 
amount of code - even with R2 - but what good is that when the experience 
is second or third rate?

Deployment-Design-Integration

Pekr: The Flex SDK is free open source software. It's a command line 
compiler with a few command line tools. The FlexBuilder IDE is a 
pay for extension to Ecilpse.

Ah, ok, but we are surely talking IDE here, because that is the main 
reason why some ppl look elsewhere - because the lack of REBOL IDE 
environment ....

Chris - what do you mean by deployment-design-integration? I can 
understand design, maybe even a bit of deployment reasoning, but 
what about integration?

Pekr, I'm glad flex costs money.  It means that  people will actively 
be working on it for a long time to come.

Yeah, I echo Chris' observations regarding VID.  What good is it 
if it is third rate.

What does it mean third rate?

IOW - there is Flash/Flex/Air, Silverlight ... and then? What other 
RIA is so small and contained? Revolution? Curl? Big ... There is 
new player going to appear - REBOL 3.

Pekr, to say something is third rate is to mean it is inferior - 
not up to the standard established by what is first rate.

REBOL3 when?

What will its capabilities be?

See from what I have seen stated, I have no reason to believe it 
gives an advantage (other than parse).

For example, I don't see it giving me the ability to produce GUI's 
faster or better.

Paul, what kinds of functions would you like to see in the R3 GUI 
to produce GUIs faster or better?

Henrik, the lack of an IDE guarantees that I wont be able to produce 
a GUI faster than flex.

The IDE allows you to layout way faster than you can by hand.

You mean, because you can produce UIs visually?

For BETTER, REBOL needs to add all the extra features - for example, 
Flex offers classes for validation of form data that are very robust.

Yes Henrik.

I want to see REBOL beat the pants off of everyone but I'm just being 
realistic here.

well, I hope the new guides system will allow creating an interactive 
editor in a few kbs. I haven't seen anything other than the specs 
yet, though.

Another important thing is components.  REBOL needs to offer much 
more advanced components and maybe some new functionality into existing 
ones.

To do this probably requires some extra style modes. Given the design 
of the R3 GUI, you can add special abilities globally to styles, 
such as the current debug red rectangle. You can probably add some 
actors to alter the behavior of styles to be suitable for a GUI editor.

Describe "components".

A component for example is things like, textinput, textarea, list, 
combobox, etc..