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Photon Micro GUI

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Re: Photon Micro GUI

#81

Post by prewett »

mwcampbell wrote: post #70

Please, please, please don’t use a GUI toolkit like this, that draws its own widgets rather than using platform standard ones, when developing a plugin for a digital audio workstation (e.g. VST or Audio Unit), as this author is apparently doing. Unless someone puts in all the extra effort to implement platform-specific accessibility APIs for said toolkit. Inaccessible DAW plugins are a problem for blind musicians and…

I'm pretty sure that there is enough incompatible design between the platforms to make a cross-platform UI using native widgets infeasible. Between Windows, macOS, and X Windows, I'll guess that one of them picks a different meaning of (x,y)--is it the center of the pixel or the upper left? I'm guessing that Cocoa/UIKit's constraints are incompatible with Android's gravity, and what do you do on Windows, which has nothing at all (at least for Win32). Do you re-implement Apple's constraints for Android? Vice-versa? What do you do if you have limited space and you can't fit Windows' large edit boxes but macOS's svelte edit boxes fit snugly? Windows' control expand into their frame, but macOS's controls frequently have padding, which means that for Windows you need to add padding between the controls, but on macOS you put the controls next to each other and the internal padding does it all for you. And for some platforms, it's not even clear what the native widgets are: is Win32, WinForms, WPF, or UWP the native widget set for Windows? Is Gtk or Qt/KDE the native widget set for Linux?

> but really, what’s more important, code aesthetics or usability?

Well, if you want software developers to write using it, code aesthetics is pretty important. Code aesthetics is usability to software developers. End-user usability does tend to trump code aesthetics if you want to get money out of the software you write, but even then, code aesthetics is still a consideration.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#82

Post by Razengan »

pjmlp wrote: post #78
Razengan wrote: post #65

My current fantasy is that Apple would open-source SwiftUI and the industry converges around that for native UIs, adding support for custom third-party skins/themes later. If they can already do it for such distinct devices as Mac, iPhone, iPad, TV and Watch, there's no reason it can' be adapted for Windows, Linux and Android as well. This is something that should have happened 5 years ago, before Electron etc. had a…

It certainly did catch on Windows, served as influence to JavaFX and QML design, and the WPF grid layout landed on the Web as the initial CSS Grid proposal.

Are most Windows apps currently designed with WPF or something else?

I have always looked to things like the Calculator and Notepad as a signal of confidence; I know there’s little reason to rewrite them, but the proof of the pudding would be if Microsoft updated something as “simple” as those applets to their championed UI framework.

I know Visual Studio (and their abandoned Expression Studio) is/was built with WPF, but what’s the score in the “wild”?

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#83

Post by royjacobs »

mirimir wrote: post #74
mastry wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of DAWs use these. With the ones I have used you click the knob and then drag (up to turn the knob left, down for right). It's really horrible actually.

Ah, so a slider, posing as a knob.

Yes, except taking up much less space.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#84

Post by bsder »

mwcampbell wrote: post #70

Please, please, please don’t use a GUI toolkit like this, that draws its own widgets rather than using platform standard ones, when developing a plugin for a digital audio workstation (e.g. VST or Audio Unit), as this author is apparently doing. Unless someone puts in all the extra effort to implement platform-specific accessibility APIs for said toolkit. Inaccessible DAW plugins are a problem for blind musicians and…

> Please, please, please don’t use a GUI toolkit like this, that draws its own widgets rather than using platform standard ones, when developing a plugin for a digital audio workstation (e.g. VST or Audio Unit), as this author is apparently doing.

Um, I have normal but aging sight, and I still can't get a DAW that actually scales its widget to something other than 200% (or 150% if I'm reaaaaally lucky).

I have no GUI that renders at useful speeds using OpenGL or Vulkan.

The Photon author didn't just create this to be contrary. Modern OS GUIs don't work very well for things like DAWs because DAWs often operate much more like a game wherein the screen is animated and has 60fps of stuff going on.

Rather than complaining, write us all an open source GUI that doesn't suck and people will happily use that and then people will write the accessibility hooks for it.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#85

Post by djowel64 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #70

Please, please, please don’t use a GUI toolkit like this, that draws its own widgets rather than using platform standard ones, when developing a plugin for a digital audio workstation (e.g. VST or Audio Unit), as this author is apparently doing. Unless someone puts in all the extra effort to implement platform-specific accessibility APIs for said toolkit. Inaccessible DAW plugins are a problem for blind musicians and…

Hi I'm Joel, the the author of Photon. Just wondering, do you know any significant (or perhaps even insignificant) VST or AU plugin that uses standard platform widgets? I wonder how that would look like.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#86

Post by djowel64 »

rbanffy wrote: post #54
tyingq wrote: post #49

Was confused for a moment because the Photon UI for QNX is also called a "Micro GUI". http://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/6.5.0/index.jsp?topic=%2F...

Same here. Such a shame I need to go into my car to run QNX...

Hi I'm Joel, the the author of Photon. It seems I have to change the name. Bummer :-) Anyway, I didn't know. Thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#87

Post by djowel64 »

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…

Hi I'm Joel, the the author of Photon. The "canvas" part is encapsulated and can re-target another vector engine. I'm considering Skia, but it was too unstable when I first tried. Maybe I'll try again.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#88

Post by djowel64 »

ktpsns wrote: post #50
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.

Hi I'm Joel, the the author of Photon. Yes, I know NanoGUI. I actually started with NanoVG. I had problems embedding in a plugin, IIRC. GLFW is not embeddable, IIRC.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#89

Post by djowel64 »

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...

Hi I'm Joel, the the author of Photon. Thanks for noting. I honestly did not know. Oh well... It seems I have to change the name.
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