AltME groups: search

in the mean time, it looks like VID for REBOL/View 2.7.7 might contain 
considerable additions, such as GUI resizing and proper error parsing 
of layouts.

I think I recall Carl saying at one time that he was into PIC controllers 
or something which would lend some possibility that Wildman was an 
embedded type thing.

So, my expectation is that he either refers to VID3.4 (but the info 
about 3.4 was already public at that time), or Reichart needs something 
for Qtask :-) Well, it could be some /Core stuff like threads for 
e.g. (but those need modules). So maybe protocol stuff? We also know, 
that in order for DevBase to be released, Rebservices are needed.

Conceptually I think it's pretty solid.  The implementation may need 
a dusting over, but it has not even been advertised as ready for 
prime time yet.  All good things ...

I don't bother about not having Rebol3 complete. It is an amateur 
project (read this: done in the spare time). The timeline I have 
posted into the ML last year seems the correct one. VID for the end 
of 2008 / start 2009 and the other things complete for the end of 
the year 2009.

There is nothing in this world stopping anyone from becoming a full-time 
rebol.  If not as an employee, as an entrepreneur.  Nothing.

I have used "amateur" to reflect the time that the development group 
actually seems to have available for developing REBOL3 and not its 
quality.

I totally agree with you about the "high quality skilled professional" 
but do you agree about the fact that to not be a amat.... (no, lets 
change the word you don't like) "Part Time project" the development 
team must work 8/12h over 24 and 5/6 days a week exclusively on REBOL 
?

The thing is as follows - I talked to Carl almost on daily basis 
some two months back, for quite some time. And I am glad, that RT 
has some strategy. Those who say otherwise, are not correct. But 
- having some strategy and being able to fulfill it, are two different 
things.

Pekr, I have a clear vision of the development cycle and time: 2010 
is the year we will go out of beta.

I said a long time ago that computer languages don't age like the 
software technologies built upon them. still think I'm right. :-)

So it would seem that we're almost back in business after some time 
in the quiet. Carl has been talking about vast simplification of 
how people can do networking. A bit in the same way as when you send 
data with a webbrowser from a form, you don't mess around with ports, 
but simple HTML code to do that. There will be more information about 
this later.

well, hopefully it will have actual features this time. :-)

Well, I don't see how Carl will have time to write all the widgets

input systems are changing all the time .. we should just write the 
HAL just once

it tracks the strokes in time so it knows what the characters are 
likely to be

I'm not sure it really causes damage. The end outcome of his work 
will be the same and luring people with tidbits might just be a timewaster.I 
get the feeling he does not want to reveal more details before the 
design is more solid. It's one of those things that during the design 
process might turn 180 degrees and become something else, because 
most good ideas don't come to you until some time late in the design 
process.

We see much more activity every time something new happens in the 
community. I don't post in the LIST-VIEW group anymore, but does 
it mean that people stopped using it? I didn't stop.

takes away some time, unless you just ignore all comments (at that 
point, one can just not release at all...), and it is sometimes frustrating 
when the same comment you have answered many times gets made every 
day.

RT was at one time looking for some marketing person. And I know 
it could be eventually me (if I would be natively speaking english 
person), but I would not take the position. And why? Because I need 
some means to do management work. And you can't get any kind of communication, 
when Carl goes to stealth mode in for two months ...

Actually I do it all the time.

Henrik - I am not sure I was causing some major delays! I asked at 
times, when no active development was ongoing, so? Let's be realistic 
here - when is Gabriele available to finish it? I bet it would take 
him some 2 - 3 weeks part-time? And that, my friend, is the problem. 
Guys are busy with things, which do have higher priority. So unless 
someone commercially does not buy them free time to do so, the point 
is moot ...

I get comments all the time.

The design process for LIST-VIEW was very short. It took a few days 
to build the first version. After that it was more an issue of getting 
features put on top of other features and spending time on bug fixing. 
There was very little actual design after the first version.

Graham - it is just leading to filling some eventually free time 
and shorten waiting for the next best thing - GIDI :-)

The tough thing to appreciate is that VID is a general-purpose entry/mid-level 
dialect.  R2/VID has been in the wild for 6yrs(?) now and we have 
certainly gone through periods of isolating key weaknesses, but we 
all have a tendency to have had starry-eyed visions for what VID 
should be.  The practical gets mixed in with the possibility when 
it's time for action.


I think the community would be better served with a strong VID alternative 
(not as a slight to RebGUI which does very well acheiving its stated 
aims) not bound by Carl's constraints for the entry level language, 
and open (as in open) source with very clear aims.  It has to be 
independent and perhaps needs to span R2 and R3, at least initially. 
 We have the capabilities, resources and talent to do it, but instead 
try to hammer these ideas into VID.


This isn't intended to be a rallying cry -- it's just my assessment 
based on observation and involvement.  Such an undertaking would 
have inevitable difficulty overcoming the differing visions of interested 
parties.  Conversely, it's within us to create an enduring, enviable 
framework...

well the mear problemfor comunication is the monolitic way to think 
.... 1 guy working = stability of the way to work but fluctuant communication. 
And teh problem  can be there is not much to communicate about too 
. several guys working = code harder to stabilise but more easy to 
communicate each time you have a new thing done or a new idea popping

and maybe that would be more fun .... but most of the time we will 
be then discussion about C/C++ code than rebol code ... and maybe 
that's not the topic of our community

there used to be a running joke in my workplace that whatever startup 
company i got excited about was doomed to failure.  Be Inc. with 
BeOS (focus shift), Constellation 3D with their Flourescent Multilayer 
Disks (FMD) (factory bombed in start of Palestinian intifada), and 
now Rebol?


Each of the technologies was/is paradigm shifting in their field 
but through mismanagement, mishaps and miscommunication something 
along the way seems to get lost and the excitement they originally 
engendered fades from the public eye. 


If, in the case of Rebol3, it simply is too much work for one person 
- then perhaps now would be the time to open such areas as View development 
(the underlying system) and advertise to the 'World' "Come, see what 
you can do!".


Personally, I'd love to see Cyphre's work with View taken that one 
step further and translated into OpenGL and all that entails.  Not 
everyone today is looking to use Rebol only on their embedded devices 
;)

The biggest block to finishing DevBase was that my time to work on 
it went away for a few months. That should be changing soon.

I've stopped working on the products built with REBOL I was planning 
to release. The future of REBOL as a standalone programming language, 
has become too uncertain for me. I'm working only on Cheyenne and 
MySQL driver, because I use them daily, but I don't think that I 
will invest more time and energy than that on REBOL. I've already 
started searching for alternative solutions, including resume working 
on a clone or a derivated of REBOL. In the past, I've stopped working 
on a clone because, the release of the plugin interface for REBOL 
was supposed to be imminent. That was 3 years ago.

When I work in other languages, I generate the code using REBOL half 
the time.

I love working in Rebol for GUI apps.  Development is fast and I 
can do most of the things I want with the raw view.  Sure, I could 
go back to grinding out interfaces in C++/C#/VB/<insert lang here> 
but it would lack the simplicity and flexibility I am used to with 
Rebol.  Unfortunately, most of the time i am now using Rebol for 
'what if' and concept work because of many underlying issues with 
the draw subsystem preclude serious development work.

Dockimbel, my theory is that if it was made under a large company 
like Apple or Commodore, Carl may not have been able to take it with 
him due to contractual obligations. He could also be forced to abandon 
it, due to budget cuts or being an uninteresting project to various 
clueless bosses.

RT is not governed by clueless bosses who have no idea what REBOL 
really represents (most people I talk to, don't really know what 
REBOL represents or what it really is) and since it's one man's vision, 
it's a lot harder to kill. Only his own lack of motivation would 
kill REBOL. His motivation from the last time he talked on the r3-alpha 
world, was far from lacking.

BrianH, I agree.  Maybe, Carl needs to do something similiar as he 
did for the 2.7 update but this time task altme worlds to specific 
tasks.

Dock at same time we have rebol as example ... And any way i don't 
pretend to be as clever as Carl but if I can help in anyway in the 
process and at least by doing communication and documentation you 
will find me  that's a fact  ^^

shadwolf, it certainly is frustrating, but I'm sure Gabriele knows 
what other things he can do in the meantime. I have my hands full 
at this time, so I don't have to sit around and wait. It suits me 
fine schedule-wise that VID3.4 is delayed.

Opengl is too big for using 98% of the time 2D things

buzzwords aside - it will be interesting to see what Carl comes up 
with next time he surfaces :)

Brian: sure, user defined types are interesting features, but do 
you seriously think that such low-level feature would be implemented 
(and finished) before 2010 if high-level features like VID take precedence 
? What would be the next priority, View's Desktop ? Looking at how 
R3 has evolved since the first alpha in june 2007, I see that only 
very few core vital features have been finished, like ports, and 
the rest of the time has been spent on less important things like 
unicode support (which is a *very* valuable addition, but not vital, 
because anyone can implement it at mezz level if required). Features 
that nobody, except Carl, can add to the language (because it's closed) 
like modules, threading, rebcode, user-types,... are still pending.

that's lot of code for less efficiency but that's my point of view 
i prefere spend little time on the GUI and more time on what does 
the GUI ...

I get the feeling that Carl wants VID3.4 to be just right, so it 
takes a little time to do.


The point in the webbrowser form factor is to provide a more recognizable 
launcher. I don't think the idea is to compete with existing webbrowsers 
at all. We don't even know if it will be capable of displaying HTML 
webpages.

VID was already simple  in comparasion to what are the other libraries 
I don't know if you ever tryed to deal with transparencies with raw 
X llibrary that pain in the head number 1  ^^.   Well i'm not against 
simplifying the system but first how does the industry shape their 
GUI 99.9 percent of the time the GUI  is build using a GUI designer 
and the only thing you have to do is set thru the GUI designer interface 
the settings for the widgets you graphically picked and organised 
then you have to write the call back code... Then to take your example 
back with the hyperlink people then don't code they only format text 
en even then most of now in days forum like PHP BB  use javascripted/pugined 
rich text area  to format their  text you push a button it insert 
the text the way you want. and some of them on the php engine level 
are able to recognize http:// footage to build on the fly the hyperlink 
without requiering any tag adding by the user .... I'm not sure separating 
the way you organise the widget to the way you configure them will 
lead us to more easy way

I have no intention at this time, thats for sure.

Sw: I guess you see an IDE as having some built-in collaboration 
tools (as per #4)?  #3 -- Rebollers, for some reason, have a very 
hard time using someone else's code -- that's part of why it's difficult 
to establish a repository.  Perhaps an IDE would bridge this as it 
would allow developers to bring in 'modules' seemlessly?  #1 -- look 
at Ruby and Rails for a language/framework that is successful in 
spite of IDE availability.  They use that language as a strength 
and rely on the quality of 3rd party editors (TextMate?) to make 
it accessible.  Not to mention immediate availability within all 
but Windows OS (sigh)

Carl "Yes, I have had the GUI running for some time..."

well for the momment that's not the time for optimisation  ....

It's funny though. When I think of something like a name directory, 
I wouldn't build such a complex system that fits everyone and everything, 
which makes it hard to support. I guess it comes with being used 
to working with REBOL for a long time, where I usually cook up custom 
solutions for each problem.

You talk SQL until the end of time, then

But as my free time is very reduced, I'll just release my lib with 
the scheme wrapper and let the community add layers upon that.

once again load/DLL  exists for a long time but we can't says that's 
a widely used feature. Most because doing a bridge .R is painfull

There's no way Windows can figure out what's in View windows. If 
WSR needs really just a native text field, a solution could be to 
make a true, but not visible, native text field (CreateWindow( ) 
API), give it the focus each time a VID field has the focus, then 
get the input data on events received from the system:// port.

Take that with a grain of salt though - I use REBOL for server-side 
stuff most of the time.

In general, languages like Erlang handle unreliable networks with 
redundancy, and it can do that because it is a functional language 
with no assignment. The state needed to answer a question is passed 
with the question. That way you can ask the same question multiple 
times and get the same answer every time.

Qtask could probably stand to adopt Google's 20% time. I'll ask them.

All google employees are asked to work on a personal project 20% 
of the time they work there. That means 1 day a week.

At the same time I do worry that a grand plan such as a REBOL browser 
is putting the cart before the horse, R3 as the base needs to be 
done and delivering on its functionality promises first.

Face it, a language with no community is no language

 I wouldn't judge REBOL's adoption rate purely by the number of people 
 who regularly post in this world. I receive a lot of email from folks 
 using stuff I've written in their day-to-day jobs and they don't 
 post here or to the mail list ... I've even spoken to a few startups 
 who are going into business primarily on the strength of REBOL and 
 "time to market". Whether a "killer app" will ever be REBOL-based 
 is the big question ...

Critical mass is a challenge for sure.  I've been bouncing around 
all the "popular" technologies for some time while earning my keep 
with old fashioned database applications.  Some are very interesting 
and have good strengths, none are making creating solutions easier 
or even better in most cases.

I have been giving this a lot of thought over the years, but have 
started coming up with real strategies for doing this for real in 
the last few weeks. I would like to discuss this kind of thing with 
you some time later.

By the way, I would like to ask you that 20% time question for real.

Reading this discussion since Terry's first post 8 hours ago (the 
"be serious" one), shows to me how hard it gets to think outside 
the box and that's another challenge when it comes to marketing the 
REBOL browser. When we think of browser, we automatically refer to 
a whole range of technologies and languages. It's something so ingrained, 
we never notice it. Partially you can say it's the same for a PC, 
as it's very likely to run Windows and that if you want to read an 
electronic document mailed to you from an average person, it's very 
likely to be written in MS Word. That's not how we want it to be. 
That's how people think. They think in axioms and familiarity, because 
they don't know any better.


I think the marketing should play strongly on familiarity, such as 
with the aforementioned GMail clone, where it's easy to tell the 
difference in speed between the two technologies. Keep duplicating 
existing stuff. I disagree that the average person can't tell the 
difference. I've observed average people praising that GMail now 
runs faster in FF3 than it did in FF2.


The REBOL browser is disruptive technology. It will be able to do 
things that normal webbrowsers won't be able to do for the next 5 
years at least, if ever. But only if it's done right, by playing 
on familiarity. If it's done right, dumping the traditional web can 
happen faster than we think and I would do it in a heartbeat.

I imagine that if Reichart was ever to do QTask for the REBOL browser, 
he could probably build it alone at 1/3 or 1/4 the time that it takes 
to build it for a traditional browser and the final product would 
run faster.

You are talking to the wrong part of the community. I have a full-time 
job solving problems with REBOL.

The main reason that Carl's UI is so small is that he simplified 
the implementation to the point where something like make-gobs wasn't 
required to make the UI fast. The resize model is so easy to use 
that most of the time you don't need to specify sizes at all.

the transitions right now are simply each element you see in the 
right side sliding into view one at a time. I've not yet studied 
how that works.

I think there are two levels to it at this time (on/off), but I think 
Cyphre has said that the gamma can be adjusted. Carl also once said 
that he hates antialiased text, which is probably why the smaller 
text is non-antialiased.

Henrik - as I can see you are playing with buttons and its possible 
design - here's some comparisons from the time of View 1.3 project

 - http://www.xidys.com/rebol-screenshots/btn-comparison.jpg


I liked version of buttons from Chris, as it was kind of mild, not 
so much pastel .... just for inspiration, as I bet you have your 
own ideas :-)

Nice second video, Henrik :-) Is there being an 'over effect? If 
so, it is very mild, first time watching the video I did not notice 
anything ....

My free time is not proportional to Carl's posts. :-\

Pekr, yes... but the point is that it's default and I set up new 
AltMEs all the time. I hate it.

I have no idea yet as I'm only scratching the surface of this system. 
I'm 100% busy with skinning, so I have not had time to get too much 
into its features. But creating styles is very easy.

Henrik - I reread you list of things which are being worked on. Just 
wanted to ask, if so called "skinning" is not overrated? I still 
can see mainly aplication development aproach with VID 3.4 so far. 
Because - when you think more about browser aproach - what is there 
to skin? Each page usually might mean totally different graphics. 
Buttons, fields, etc. -  the forms, are just little subset of what 
is usually a "website". So - the button will always be the button, 
field will always be just the field. What users might be more interested 
in, is animations, transitions, and that can't be covered by just 
changing the skin. Dunno - tried WindowBlinds (http://www.stardock.com
) once in the past, and imo skinning is overrated - still the same 
thing expressed many times, while web = different aproach each time 
....

Which is kind of appropriate, because every time I edit Carl's code, 
it makes me feel like I'm painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. 
:-)

My opinion on skinning in general: I think skinning is something 
that has been gravely abused over the years. The last time I enjoyed 
skinning was with MUI on the Amiga because MUI was made for skinning. 
It was simple to get a good looking user interface without compromising 
usability or functionality. Nowadays we try to skin OSX and Windows 
in ways they were never meant to, and you feel it when using it. 
There are slowdowns or functionality is sacrificed. When you flip 
through a skin catalog, 99,9% of them are terrible junk and it's 
difficult to come up with your own.

I plan on trying a very different skin after this one.

you could store such information centrally, since you usually only 
drag one item at a time. the on-drop handler for a style would then 
read the information on what was dropped here.

Ashley - I am not the one who agrees to everything designed by Guru. 
If you are like that, well then. But - we were promissed, that this 
time, the system is going to be done the right way. I really don't 
understand your position, as you surely do understand, what we are 
talking about here. It is not about rounded buttons and such details! 
"all possible arguments" is just one single thing - OS compatible 
behaviour. And if you suggest we should wait 10 years here - well, 
time to move away from VID then ...

I'm experienting until the skin is done. Anything can change at any 
time if I find that a particular element is not working or if I get 
a better idea along the way.

Probably the first, since it's about Cyphre having time to do them.

The reason the octagon and triangle are inkscape based are also because 
scaling a rounded corner is very hard to do unless you to it correctly. 
It even took some time to get right in Inkscape.

Re-did scrollbar for the third time. It gets easier every time. :-)

Pekr, I'm pretty sure it's possible, just a little time consuming 
to build them.

pity AGG is no more developed. There is no other option currently. 
Everybody else uses Cairo, but this is crap with more than 1MB size. 
Amanith seems interesting too, but commercial. Hopefully Maxim updates 
AGG at least to keep the trends. But so far - AGG is very high quality, 
so nothing to worry about for quite some time....

If anyone is interested in testing (lack of time here), but I've 
found that VID3.4 hangs when I want to use a .fon font, such as "Modern" 
or "Roman" in WinXP. Perhaps it's the same in the R3 public release?

Henrik, I for some reason (unemployed) have time to test if needed.

Don't have time to dig into it.

That is unknown at this time.

I think we have moved into a time dilation field

- No time table given, so I can't say when there will be a release. 
I can only say that we're moving forward all the time, fixing bugs, 
adding new styles.

- No DRAW fixes yet. I haven't seen Cyphre since 5th November. We 
can work around most DRAW bugs for now.

- Skin lacked a CONTAINER style to put things in. Lining up scrollers 
with text fields, lists, etc. proved to be problematic. When one 
looked OK, the other would look terrible. We had TIGHT, GROUP and 
PANEL, but none of those are useful as decorative containers. CONTAINER 
works llike the frame of a painting, and now all styles that use 
CONTAINER look almost identical and pixel perfect. It also allows 
me to build complex field styles, like a search field with icons 
or numeric field with arrows.

- MAX-SIZE: It's a combination of weighting and maximum size of a 
face. When you set MAX-SIZE, it will affect the layout of the face 
in code, even if you are nowhere near maximum size, something I would 
never expect such an attribute to do. Setting MAX-SIZE correctly 
is an annoying process of trial and error, can't be predicted and 
depends on the MAX-SIZE of other faces in the panel, which requires 
debugging and studying other styles or setting them manually with 
a lot of typing. There are also magic numbers, so sometimes you use 
a size of 4000 and other times 100000 to achieve similar results. 
This is really the only part of VID3.4 that I don't like. However: 
There are still bugs, so intended behavior may turn out to be much 
better than I think. I can't remember what VID3 uses, but I would 
guess it's a more traditional weighting model.

I don't understand how group and panel could be usefull, if it can't 
precisely align elements? Why not use container all the time then?

Already asked for both a long time ago, but neither one reacted. 
:-)

There are probably about half the concepts in place at this time. 
I still don't know if Carl gets a good idea and decides to do some 
changes.

Unfortunately I am beginning to see Carl as the weakest link in this 
whole process.   The last time this happened ...  Jaime went to his 
house to persuade him to release something, and he did.  Now Jaime 
is gone ....

Perhaps all the R3 contributors need to get together to formulate 
a strategy/plan .... and present it to Carl.  Otherwise we're all 
wasting our time here.

Because people are overestimating the time it will take to bring 
up a small BBS

That's the misinterpretation that bothers me. It is clear to me that 
distance is being traveled all the time

Because they know they are wasting their time ... they are not being 
heard.

Carl has evaluated the alternatives and has seen that using them 
would cost him at least as much time, spent on competing products 
instead of REBOL

The point has been settled - that doesn't mean that the software 
needs to be in place ahead of time.

I have already had to skip a night of sleep because of the holiday 
overhead, and even then haven't had time to do any REBOL work. You 
are picking the wrong time of year to get impatient.

It will be an exciting time. You won't be able to assume that your 
code will continue to run unchanged on future builds, but your code 
will influence the changes made in the future, and any bugs you run 
into will get fixed. It should be fun :)