AltME groups: search

Imagina navigalbe on-glass systems - signage - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RYMR2LMVmQ

Glass half full, half empty :-)

Yep, that's the glass half empty

Rebol3 is dead, long live to Rebol3Bazaar


I've been quiet for a long while, and this blog is not easy for me 
to write.

I'm sitting here with a glass of 2013 Ferrarelle mineral water of 
the glass bottle... hoping to be inspired on how to write this...
No, bad introduction...

You know that Rebol is a fantastic programming language, but its 
development was discontinued and bad supported. A lot of people when 
encounter Rebol falls in love for its simplicity, a blend of theory, 
experimentation, and invention, the language embodies elegant and 
wonderful concepts and properties. It was and is the most productive 
language I've ever used. I hope your experience has been similar.


Unfortunately a lot of bad events are leading Rebol to a no through 
road:

- no direction of the new Rebol3
- no a central site open for discussion
- no updates on Rebol 3 source (well, just one every month)
- to many sites about Rebol and with no updates from years


These and other reasons forced me to create http://rebol.informe.com/portal.html
a public forum, with a public wiki and a blog, where everybody can 
contribute. The result is just 17 users, this means that Rebol is 
dying; the cathedral way of Rebol 3  development is not working.

So I'm forced by my love for Rebol to create a new GitHub repository: 
Rebol 3 Bazaar, it's a Rebol 3 source, with graphic working (VID, 
but just on windows at the moment); I promise you:


- pull requests and issues discussed and merged in 24 hours (or max 
a week)
- open to add people to its organiziation
- always update!
- link:  https://github.com/angerangel/r3bazaar


If you like to contribute write me, use GitHub or Rebol portal; you 
don't need to be a programmer, think about a new logo, contribute 
the wiki.

If you know REBOLers who might be interested in this discussion, 
please let them know about this blog posting. I look forward to hearing 
from you,
-Max

Then the garbage should be separatedly collected. The paper, the 
glass, the compostable material, heavy metal's and rest-garbage. 
:)

/me pouring a glass of whisky

I don't think we're really out of topic here as the graphics stuff 
pertains to porting to different platforms, but if you wish, we could 
move this to the View/VID group.


When Carl was developing VID, he clearly expected that VID would 
not become the de-facto standard for Rebol graphics.  The face engine 
was the de-facto standard, and VID was simply one of what he expected 
to be several dialects for the face engine.  There were a few others, 
like GLASS, that came about.

Thanks Maxim,

Waiting for your GLass/Liquid stuff to be completed...I would love 
to get a better inface on my app...right now I feel its full of hacks 
to get R2 view to do what I need it to do...


I looked at GLayout (and REBGUI) but I thought pure VID would be 
easier for me to make any needed workarounds to missing needed compoments. 


Once I get a solid version 1 out I will look into porting to R3 (If 
new VID is ready) or your stuff again if you release a new version...

I'll probably be using my holiday free time to finally release R2 
glass and make a preliminary release of Remark which is tightly coupled 
to cheyenne.

I was getting the impression that R2 glass was out and r3 glass dev 
was on....

to get glass for R3 is a big endeavour, but after the holidays, possibly 
starting in february, I will be working on this.  


right now I've got a very stable glass for R2 which just needs to 
get its last touches applied to current skin and refurbishments for 
the tutorial I had already started building which is now a bit out 
of date with current state of glass.

Congratulations Max on releasing !Glass.

Adrian:  GLASS is currently R2 only, but will be ported in a little 
while.


GLASS R3 will make extensive use of extensions inorder to make it 
as fast as possible, at all levels of the framework.  From Liquid 
right up to the styles themselves.

It will seamleslly integrate to my Custom Gob Renderer so the same 
GLASS style will be able to render in any renderer for which a compatible 
style was built.   


this means the same layout and interface for a button will be useable 
in a normal AGG render up to a 3D game representation of that button, 
with no user code change.  just a swap in the skin being used.

btw..... Thanks everyone for all the cheers, it feels good for some 
of my work to finally have a bit of instant gratification  ;-)


I also want to say thanks to everyone who's taking the time to test 
GLASS.

That's curious. If I try to unpack    2.4 MB glass-r003.zip, I get 
a folder with just 1.3 MB and only two files in glass/libs. I tried 
with 7zip and the WinExplorer.

new zip file now online... same path:
http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/glass-r003.zip

the little icon in the top right hand corner...  Magnifine glass...

erm ignore that.. i finally discovered the magnifying glass..

Also, technically, a given send box should be directly connected 
to the given group, so you can send, and even if it is in transit 
or waiting you can go on and work on other messages.

We do tag messages this way in Qtask, but we have seen this same 
bug, but don't have proof (as I do in AltME) that it is the program 
and not the operator.  But I'm always on the look out for it since 
it can be a very dangerous bug for some people.


This whole class of issue falls to a perceived form of latency, and 
a series of features are needed to suppress it.  For example, instead 
of graying the out going message area, just make it look like it 
was sent, but also instantly add a “message hour glass” in the “New 
message” bar when on that group, and, also create a new tinted empty 
box in the thread saying something like “Waiting for new message 
to post”.


This frees you up to go elsewhere.  If you come back to the same 
group it is clear what state it is in.  If you want to retrieve the 
sent message just click on the “Message hour glass” and it will bring 
it back into the input box.


Lastly, of course, if you try to leave AltME before it is done sending, 
need to offer people a dialog warning them , and giving them access 
to the messages waiting.

There is more, but yeah, it takes a lot to make this work.

pekr always seing behind smoke and glass  ;-)

glass is a compositing engine, which might grow out of view IF R3 
promises are fullfiled.

but glass also allows your "processors" to be linked to the engine 
dynamically...

I will try to re-introduce the previous block parsing engine I had 
built for glass into the newer code.

Steeve, I think your major contribution to GLASS can be in optimising 
various things.

because of liquid's lazyness, very few things are actually optimised 
(really need to)... but right now I have a problem on initialization 
where there is so much linkeage being done, it does create a nagging 
pause on startup.


I already know a few things that will greatly optimise liquid itself, 
and will implement speed minded plugs specifically for GLASS, but 
your input will be invaluable.


you've spent sooo much time on this specific aspect of REBOL coding 
that it will come naturally to you.

for example, I am thinking of building a !node and !container base 
plugs which cannot mutate into different processing mechanisms.... 
will all the removed overhead, that will make a BIG difference.  


it will require a bit more experience in handling liquid... but within 
controled environments like glass and glob, this can be a non-issue.

why are you working on counters, instead of releasing Glass, which 
was supposed to be out 3 months ago? :-) Is that somehow related?

anton, you'll have sooooo much fun with glass.

Here's an idea coming out of discussion of Maxim's Glass - combining 
facets of different styles together, eg, setting up a button, but 
then dressing it with text styles of the H1 style:

You could express everything that you want but do not have as something 
"taken away" from you. That's the "glass half-empty" way of looking 
at things. Are you a programmer or not ? If you want something, just 
make it !  If it's hard, work hard !  The whole art of programming 
is to make something previously difficult, easy.

I experimented a stream system for glass and it works very well. 
 it changes the way we approach events and can allow plugins to manipulate 
the way events are handled (and adding handlers for those changes) 
without the faces even knowing.

Oldes, do you still have that nice "color picker" code somewhere? 
 I want to embed that into GLASS as a style, I'd put it in the default 
release with your permission.

If you don't mind, I'll make a derived version and include it with 
GLASS.  full credits will be attributed.  :-)

actually I think yours will be easy to convert to glass, since its 
already in AGG

here is how it works..... I had to stumble upon this within GLASS.


when you add a rate to a face, actually, the timer will trigger 30 
times a second, no matter what your rate is.

do event

will filter the events based on what your rates are set up.

you can in glass ;-)

Searching: Click the magnifying glass in the top right corner. If 
you find the message found during search is too old for display, 
click the Home button and Settings and increase the message limit.

I do intend to make glass the standard high-end GUI engine in REBOL 
.

Oh, you were talking about Remark not Glass.  I haven't tried Remark...

my current pending release projects are mainly glass and remark.

This is probably the biggest announcement I've ever done, I've got 
a little tear in my eye  ;-)

GLASS IS HERE!!!


http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/glass-distro-R1.zip

GLASS RELEASE 002
---------------------------

released last week, but posting it here to make it easier to find, 
since the GLASS group has a lot of discussion in it....

http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/glass-r002.zip


-adds the editor style, which is now able to show text and scroll 
in real-time, but still has no keyboard handling yet.
-adds a few new more advanced tutorials

-adds a new demo app which is the basis for a full text-editor in 
REBOL (you can use the load button which allows you to load text 
within the editor, it loads files almost instantaneously... I was 
surprised how quickly it loaded even 1MB files), file size doesn't 
change editor refresh speed..

very extensive history of changes, 
very extensive TO DO list

some improvements to libs here and there.

------------------------------------------
GLASS Release 003 is here:
------------------------------------------
http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/glass-r003.zip

----------------------------------------------------------
everything promised for this release has been done:
----------------------------------------------------------

-Editor style and associated text editor application (Cristoph)

http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/tutorial-image-style.png


-Encap friendly single file version of ALL glass libs, usable just 
like if they where external files. (Graham)

-The encap version of glass is all packaged within its own .zip file 
inside the root of the distro,  to make it easier to get started.

-Image style (jocko)
-it also has a pretty cool image style demo app.

http://www.pointillistic.com/open-REBOL/moa/files/red-text-editor-v0.5.7.png

-quite a few nuts and bolts worked on here and there.

-reworked the folder structure a bit to make it cleaner (it shouldn't 
change much from now on), tell me what you think?

-Added original SVG files used to create icons as part of distribution

-Added a few reference glass-related images for demos and tutorials.

-windows have automatic title handling when you fill their labels. 
(shown in text editor)
-many libs have had their apis improved
-extensive HISTORY AND RELEASE NOTES in docs folder.

can't wait to start shipping glass... ;-)

there is the magnifying glass "L"

I will prep up some logos, and a few alternative treatments.


You can actually simply take anything you like from Quilt.  The art 
is not complete, let alone finished.  Meaning, I have to go clean 
everything up in the next 30 days.  The art is being designed to 
allow several concepts:

-	Faster rendering through HTML.

-	Ability to change the colour theme with nothing more than a few 
simple CSS changes (o art changes).


For example, the Search icon is really a white magnifying glass, 
with a Knock out (alpha channel).  This way, the Search input and 
button are nothing more than a table with a cell with a green outline, 
and a box that is solid green.  Add the small image and presto, custom 
widget.  One can simply change the colour for a new look.

though clear glass doesn't seem to work very well ...

I've got a glass top computer desk ... and I have to be sure I put 
the optical mouse on the non glass surfaces if I want it to move

I have some big books I like, but my favorites tend to be smaller. 
I love Jon Bentley's books, and anything by Robert Glass (almost 
wrote Philip Glass there :-), Kernighan, and DeMarco and Lister are 
other favorites.

yes, you need to hack the event engine a little bit.   


As gregg says, you need to have a memory of the last move event to 
get its position  and store it (you can do this with an event-handler). 
 glayout and GLASS do this for handling scrollwheel events.


what I also do is find the top-level face which is under the mouse-cursor 
and fire off my own events from the scroll-wheel instead of relying 
on a text field.

again, you can trap the scroll-wheel events in the event handler.


if you want to have a ready-made solution, download glayout.r from 
rebol.org  and look at the hacked WAKE-EVENT function.


it already does all of this and wraps it up by adding new function 
you can add to your face/feel  object in order to handle scroll-wheels.

he should be careful with windows that can be flipped over and are 
hinged at the center of the frame. I have those in my livingroom. 
When opened at a certain angle, the reflection in the glass is  directed 
towards the roof. Sometimes a bird would get "caught" in the reflection 
while sitting on the roof and start attacking the window glass repeatedly. 
It looks really funny, but you have to clean up the mess afterwards: 
I suppose repeatedly banging their head against the window glass 
every 2 seconds for 10 minutes makes for a bad stomach...

the vertical glass panel you see at the end of the demo is cool since 
it works in 3d.  depth is as much an indicator of intent as position, 
so if you point at the image at a certain distance, it had different 
effects, like drawing only when your are within a foot !

it seems a cousin to the glass project, of which glob is already 
very effective, and is a node-based lazy engine for rebol, using 
AGG exclusively.

glob? Somethin new? Well, when we will see Glass runnable? I mean 
- some cute demo?

GLASS will wait for R3, and plugins.   its a decision I took last 
year.  GLASS is also a completely new GUI concept.. its totally different 
in the way you relate to a gui.  


There are still a few technological aspects to the concept that I 
wasn't able to resolve in the architecture itself.  This engine should 
allow non Graphical interface to be applied to any application.

like a Voice driven interface to forms, for example.  but the application 
isn't even aware of this... this is part of the skin itself.

actually no, because: 1. the actions are 3 dimensional and you have 
to have a 3-dimensional frame of reference to perform the motion. 
2. you have no force feedback, so you have to observe the screen 
while performing the motion. this is not like pouring a glass of 
water.

Glass was an example of a programmable dialect.

(the old glass, from 5 years ago)

hence the !GLASS group. :-)

gobs in the noses pressed against the glass in front of the gobs

btw, I'm really sorry if I'm not participating in the R3 GUI effort... 
I'm just elsewhere in the GUI world... what you guys are doing, I've 
done so many times, on too many platforms, for it to be still *fun*.


a lot of people don't get that I use (and occasionally abuse) rebol 
for my own long-term goals.  its just the fastest prototyper out 
there.  Now that GLASS has officially started, the (eventual) end 
goals for it are sort of beyond current desktop/window/button/menu 
 concepts of GUI, even if that is what I am starting with, cause 
I need the bricks before building the wall.

I didn't say I did object stuff many times, only the gui part of 
things.  I've been implementing gui apis for like 15 years, at various 
levels... all with the end goal of getting to GLASS.

my prototypes encourage me to continue, since, I am always amazed 
at how it behaves in the end, but I have still to merge all of the 
solution into one bundle.  and no, its not simple, and yes it takes 
more code than what Carl will build in R3.  but in the end, I'll 
be able to interconnect a field directly to a web-servers' cgi-like 
page online, without actually needing to code anything.   one litlte 
line of code will allow both to interact with each other.


once all is done it will be easy to grasp, but currently, even I 
have some "challenges".  good thing is that in keeping with dataflow's 
programmatic simplicity, porting GLASS to R3 will be dead easy.  

so long as liquid works on R3. the most work will be adapting liquid 
globs to R3's gob! type, and even there, it could be pretty simple, 
if R3 has draw and its similar...

There is no reason, GLASS and R3 VID can't co-exist, in any case. 
 Choice is always good.

no I have so litle time to play with R3... I barely have time to 
chat here...  life, work, kids, music, glass, et al... life is full 
enough withough R3 yet  ' :-/

now you see... I'm all fired up on R3 and I've stoped working for 
the past hour.... ;-)  glass is now an hour behind schedule ;-)

If R3 has VID3 working, I'll probably use it for some projects... 
but when GLass will start to work (using OpenGL) then I'll probably 
never need VID anymore.  simply cause it'll do 5000 frames a second 
for my interfaces, including very advanced looks and next gen functionality 
like run-time interface manipulation by end-users.

and I'm ironing out some details as I try to use it for GLASS.

If I decided to go ahead with OpenGL and Elixir, using GLASS as the 
design... what is left of REBOL but the syntax and the interpreter 
anyways?  I'd rather have the tool running on steroids without being 
tied to a chain.

so one (actually several)  machines can be a controler and synchronise 
to others which can also locally change their states... and whatever 
they data can generate can be sent to any other machine, including 
the controlers... so you have ONE kernel to handle all aspects of 
your systems.  and its dead easy... and would interface directly 
within any other liquified systems like liquid GL, elixir, globs, 
or eventually GLASS.

the first real GLASS gui prototype is implemented within elixir... 
the whole field widget is about 30 lines of code IIRC and data is 
bound to input type without any coding needed within the actual widget.

I have the ground-work for in if you want to try it out, its ready 
to use, I even built some interactive glass prototypes with it.

btw, the work being done for liquid-vid's layout, is now the official 
prototype for the inital layout engine for GLASS

although GLASS will use the data within AGG instead of view/faces.

so after 15 years of analysis, design and countless prototypes of 
all shapes and sizes , I am now finally working on the first true 
code that will find itself into some layer of the GLASS engine. 

=oD

liquid state of affairs:

-GLASS v1 is going through intense development.

-GLUE - foundation plugs,  although not yet released is getting packed 
with fully documented plugs weekly.  there is more documentation 
text than actual code in the lib!

   *currently working on highly optimised finite state machine systems. 
   (optimised in how they prevent useless processing and messaging).

also, liquid-vid project has been dropped, officialy, in favor of 
putting time on GLASS and GLOB v2 instead.

ummm.... see the magnifying glass top right?  It's called a search 
tool :)

It doesn't really matter if you get a 133% increase in the speed 
of glass if it has been abandoned for Rebol! lol

A big glass room is a nightmare for sound.

I guess you can't focus a camera on Glass

This is my colour palette:

	; 7 primary colors
	bn-green: 		0.102.76
	green-field: 	51.133.110
	reed-green:		102.163.146
	patina-green:	153.194.183
	glass-green:	204.224.219
	light-green:	232.241.239
	ash-gray:			209.209.209

	; 7 secondary colors
	midnight: 			0.29.43
	foggy-morning: 	31.93.154
	hazy-day: 			102.154.204
	light-mint:			154.204.205
	terra-cotta: 		205.153.103
	desert-sand:		229.201.115
	sunflower:			254.191.0

REBOL []


colors: [
; 7 primary colors
	bn-green 		0.102.76
	green-field 	51.133.110
	reed-green		102.163.146
	patina-green	153.194.183
	glass-green	204.224.219
	light-green	232.241.239
	ash-gray			209.209.209

	; 7 secondary colors
	midnight 			0.29.43
	foggy-morning 	31.93.154
	hazy-day 			102.154.204
	light-mint			154.204.205
	terra-cotta 		205.153.103
	desert-sand		229.201.115
	sunflower			254.191.0
]

change-colors: func [val /local h hsv][
	forskip colors 2 [
		hsv: rgb-to-hsv colors/2
		h: hsv/1 + val // 255
		hsv/1: h
		colors/2: hsv-to-rgb hsv
	]
	~b1/color: colors/bn-green
	~b2/color: colors/green-field
	~b3/color: colors/reed-green
	~b4/color: colors/patina-green
	~b5/color: colors/glass-green
	~b6/color: colors/light-green
	~b7/color: colors/ash-gray
	~b11/color: colors/midnight
	~b12/color: colors/foggy-morning
	~b13/color: colors/hazy-day
	~b14/color: colors/light-mint
	~b15/color: colors/terra-cotta
	~b16/color: colors/desert-sand
	~b17/color: colors/sunflower	
]

lay: layout [
	across
	~b1: box colors/bn-green
	~b2: box colors/green-field
	~b3: box colors/reed-green
	~b4: box colors/patina-green
	~b5: box colors/glass-green
	~b6: box colors/light-green
	~b7: box colors/ash-gray
	return
	~b11: box colors/midnight
	~b12: box colors/foggy-morning
	~b13: box colors/hazy-day
	~b14: box colors/light-mint
	~b15: box colors/terra-cotta
	~b16: box colors/desert-sand
	~b17: box colors/sunflower
	return
	button "change color" [change-colors 64 show lay]
]
view lay

Better break the license than some glass.

Even if an official GUI is released tomorrow it will not be all things 
to all people and some will develop other gui's (rebgui, maxim's 
glass etc) why not start now as opposed to later. It need not be 
considered a folk of the offical vid...just an alternative choice. 
the official when released will be adopted if it works well enough 
so you won't be stepping on carl's toes.

Oops, that was supposed to go in the glass channel :)

in GLASS I had to take AA off in some text sizes for the font I am 
using.   some letters looked bold and some didn't.  On some letters 
with round corders (like S, g, D) the AA changes the width of the 
line so much its annoying to read.

liquid and by extension glass use function accessors exclusively. 
 but i would like the syntax within the language... it would allow 
one to use many liquids as ordinary objects and make lazy dataflow 
much more palatable for the casual user.

still, 

my-face/text: "this"

is more transparent and reusable than

set-face  my-face 'text "this"
or
set-face my-face [text "this"]


ironically glass supports both of the above (using its own set of 
accessors)

set-aspect/get-aspect  and specify

and glass even uses the liquid (trans)mutation feature where you 
swap classes on the fly based on oranisation of GUI

hehehe, Don't I love GLASS and its GLOBs.... they actually do know 
 ;-)

I can't wait for A98, so I can start hitting the metal with GLASS.

(the font is so small i don't see what i'm writing and my glass are 
just renewed ... the Font 6px SUX ....

after a little bit more work on translating to R3... it seems to 
be much less work than it started out to be   :-D


I've got the basics of my dataflow canvas engine working in R3 (which 
is the basis for GLASS and many other tools of mine).


most of the time spent was in fiddling around with learning the changes 
in R3 view engine itself.   this is a 40kb lib running over another 
50kb lib... and its working as-is (once I removed references to the 
word 'FACE and system/words, mostly).

(i have rebgui, cheyenne, vid-ext, rebdb, host-kit, musiclessonz, 
power-mezz, glass, r3 gui in this folder. ~500 files)

seeing the glass of water half empty or half full don't changes the 
core truth of it's nature ... the glass only contains half of it 
of the liquid it could contain as maximum :).

the same engine is used for glass.

Very nice. Had you tested glass and liquid with the web plugin from 
several years ago? Just curious.

- GLASS, a Data Flow Driven GUI Engine