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Photon Micro GUI

cycfi.com

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Re: Photon Micro GUI

#41

Post by skybrian »

badsectoracula wrote: post #28
hawski wrote: post #25

No mention of accessibility makes it not enough for more generic applications. That's my main pain point. I would love to have a modern alternative to wxWidgets - something in higher level language than C++. Something that would use GTK+ on GNOME, Qt on KDE, Cocoa on macOS, Cocoa Touch on iOS, Android APIs on Android. Android is the trickiest probably, because I would like it to run without NDK, so compiled down to A…

Out of curiosity, why isn't Free Pascal high level enough? Also FWIW my LIL scripting language, is sort of Tcl-like and has a Free Pascal implementation (and also a C one) with a (optional) Lazarus drag-drop component: http://runtimeterror.com/tech/lil/ I also have a Lazarus component for FPLIL for exposing a Tk-ish (well, not exactly, but on a similar spirit) API: https://i.imgur.com/G8hto0N.gif Though that last one…

At first glance, LIL does look very similar to Tcl. Do you consider it a stripped-down Tcl or are there other language features you added?

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#42

Post by Narishma »

kazinator wrote: post #11
torarnv wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Behold, in all its skeuomorphic glory, the Qt styles example: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwidgets-widgets-styles-example.html

That looks almost exactly like Motif from 1991, but superimposed with a wood grain pattern.

Looks more like Windows 9x than Motif to me.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#43

Post by kazinator »

Narishma wrote: post #42
kazinator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks almost exactly like Motif from 1991, but superimposed with a wood grain pattern.

Looks more like Windows 9x than Motif to me.

1. Motif came first. Among people who knew what Motif is, the look of Windows 95 was widely recognized as being very similar to Motif to the point of being a knock-off.

2. See the diamond-shaped radio buttons in the second example. :)

3. 3D embossed arrows on scroll bars.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#44

Post by FraKtus »

srikz wrote: post #18
FraKtus wrote: post #8

From the author "Photon has its own HTML5 inspired canvas drawing engine using Cairo underneath". That means it should render nicely at any resolution, the author says, "resolution independent and allows for HDPI displays". But using Cairo means it should not have a good performance at high resolutions. I have yet to find a fork of Cairo GPU accelerated that supports all the API. So it may fit the bill if you are cod…

I'm curious if you have come across (and recommend) any framework which lie in between Photon (Cairo) and Dear ImGui. I'm trying to follow all thr efforts in native desktop GUI tools and am currently using Dear ImGui for something which will only be used internally.

For me, nothing is as nice looking as Photon (resolution independent) and GPU friendly to allow 60 FPS cross-platform GUI.

It looks like you still need to roll your own.

I am currently working with Dear ImGui and found a pipeline where I put SVG icons in a true type front and can then render them resolution independent with Dear ImGui.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#45

Post by scottlocklin »

torgoguys wrote: post #2

Name collision--QNX's gui was/is also named "Photon MicroGUI" and that is what I thought this post was going to be about: http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/index.jsp?topic=%2F...

Was just going to say this. Thanks. QNX was/presumably still is amazing in its simplicity and correctness.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#46

Post by amelius »

fasterdom wrote: post #3

Funny how there are a few domains where the same problem is solved over and over again. Probably an indication that a good solution is truly missing. A long time ago I wrote a tiny audio synth. And yep, I wrote my own minimal GUI which had stuff like sliders, and most importantly knobs which general GUIs typically don't provide. Now I'm working on a non-audio webapp, and I have a problem where a knob would be the ide…

> You might say "use a slider then if you want to pull it up/down". True, but a slider takes a lot of UI space which sometimes is very precious. More importantly, the slider resolution is limited to it's height, while a knob could for example use the whole screen height for a full turn.

Perhaps the solution is to make the slider pop up if you press a button?

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#47

Post by pier25 »

joezydeco wrote: post #32
pier25 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone using Skia?

I’ve always been curious why Google didn’t spin out Skia. Maybe because it lacks the UI primitives you really need to make it useful?

What do you mean with "spin out"?

(sorry English is not my first language)

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#48

Post by amelius »

Looks promising. Some things I'd like to see explained:

- How does rendering work? Is it using retained mode or not?

- Does the system prevent unnecessary work, such as repainting of certain elements (even when scrolling, since scrolling can be implemented using a less expensive bitblt)?

- How easy (natural) is it to change the UI hierarchy once it is running?

- Is memory management natural? Is there a form of garbage collection or reference counting for UI elements? How easy is it to accidentally refer to deleted UI elements?

- Does it make use of a GPU if available?

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#50

Post by ktpsns »

srikz wrote: post #21

NanoGUI[1] is another GUI framework which uses NanoVG underneath. Interested to know if the author is familiar with that and what's their take on it. [1]: https://github.com/wjakob/nanogui

This reminds me of the look of Blender's GUI, which is also OpenGL based.
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