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Photon Micro GUI

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Re: Photon Micro GUI

#111

Post by morganvachon »

asark wrote: post #35
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...

Can confirm. Came in expecting the other Photon MicroGUI ("now there's a name I've not heard in a long time"), was surprised/disappointed. Man QNX+Photon made for a nice GUI operating environment. Rivaled only by BeOS on my "GUI environments/systems I wish had made a bigger splash" scale.

> Rivaled only by BeOS

Those were the days! I had BeOS as my only OS for over a year until it became clear that Palm wasn't going to continue supporting and updating it. It wasn't long after that I got into QNX, initially because of my interest in embedded systems, but after running Photon on a test machine I fell in love with it almost as much as I loved BeOS.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#112

Post by djowel64 »

rbanffy wrote: post #92
djowel64 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All good names are taken

Just a stupid mistake, really. I know QNX, but I haven't used it and I didn't know the QNX Photon name. You guys are right. I should've done a 3 minute Google. My bad.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#113

Post by djowel64 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #99
djowel64 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. And for that matter, all DAWs I know also do not use standard platform widgets. Logic Pro, Reaper, Ableton, Pro Tools, Cubase etc. all use their own custom UI elements.

You're right about the DAWs, though last time I checked, REAPER on Windows uses some standard Win32 controls in its dialogs, which helps. Also, REAPER has rich enough plugin support that a couple of plugins have been written to hack screen reader support into REAPER. In particular, check out the open-source OSARA [1] project. This work-around isn't feasible for making plugins accessible, since those plugins are gener…

You spend a minuscule amount of time with Dialogs. You spend Most of the time in the project window itself, the mixer, transport, and all the plugins. None of those use standard controls. If they did, they would've pleased all blind users (assuming they do implement the accessibility features you mention), but turned off everyone else because of the bland, ugly and difficult to use UI, not to mention that there are only a very limited set of standard controls. I doubt Reaper would be the success it is now, if it were so.

Having said that, hey, this is Open Source! Like Reaper, I am willing to support accessibility if you, or anyone else is willing to do the extra effort.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#114

Post by djowel64 »

mwcampbell wrote: post #104
bsder wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> DAWs often operate much more like a game wherein the screen is animated and has 60fps of stuff going on. This is puzzling to me. Do sighted DAW users really rely on such a high-bandwidth, continuous flow of visual information? What kind of information? Mainly volume meters, or other things as well? FWIW, I'm just starting to dabble with a DAW myself. But I know that blind people have successfully done all stages of…

At least VST allows you to switch to and from using basic controls and the full plugin UI. Actually, if your plugin does not provide a UI, the DAW host will provide a generic one for you, with basic controls like sliders, drop-down menus, etc. that map to the parameters that your plugin use. You should probably just use those if you are blind, again assuming that the host provides all the accessibility features you need (I am not sure if all VST hosts do, you should check).

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#115

Post by bsder »

mwcampbell wrote: post #104
bsder wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> DAWs often operate much more like a game wherein the screen is animated and has 60fps of stuff going on. This is puzzling to me. Do sighted DAW users really rely on such a high-bandwidth, continuous flow of visual information? What kind of information? Mainly volume meters, or other things as well? FWIW, I'm just starting to dabble with a DAW myself. But I know that blind people have successfully done all stages of…

> This is puzzling to me. Do sighted DAW users really rely on such a high-bandwidth, continuous flow of visual information?

Yes. Volume meters, equalizers, beat counters, loop counters, etc. I can go on and on.

There is a reason why people use specific DAWs for specific purposes (Hip-hop guys seem to gravitate to Ableton Live, for example).

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#116

Post by bsder »

mwcampbell wrote: post #98
bsder wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Rather than complaining First of all, I doubt that writing yet another toolkit of my own would be the solution. How could I know that anyone would adopt it? And as for spending time contributing to an existing toolkit, which toolkit? I read about several per year here on HN. That's why I've been pleading with developers to use platform widgets, or cross-platform toolkits that wrap those widgets (like wxWidgets), wh…

> How could I know that anyone would adopt it?

You don't. But if it's better, people will actually use it. This is currently a glaring hole in the software development landscape screaming for a better solution.

I'm currently in a similar boat as the Photon author and I have a much more prosaic application. But I have a lot of interaction with OpenGL and the GUI system, and none of the GUI toolkits like that.

Photon is simply doing the same thing that GTK did originally--GTK was written specifically for the GIMP and only later did it become general purpose.

> And as for spending time contributing to an existing toolkit, which toolkit?

That's your choice to make. And your efforts help make those decisions. The toolkit that attracts motivated people and improves starts gaining momentum and attracts more people. Even a single motivated individual can tip the balance when things are unsettled.

Unfortunately, this is not a well-trod and settled area. Part of being on the bleeding edge is that you get cut.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#117

Post by djowel64 »

amelius wrote: post #48

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 garbag…

I'll do that in a follow up post. To be honest, I wasn’t ready to release this yet, not in this form, so the info is very preliminary, as noted in the introduction: "Let me tell you a bit about Photon… From my previous post about Ascend, some folks noticed its existence and actually found the github repository. The repository is rather underwhelming, I thought to myself, devoid of any documentation of any sort, other than a very terse description: “Photon Micro GUI library”. I figured perhaps it’s good to post preliminary information about it, maybe starting with some history and basic architecture and design principles and code snippets. Just enough to give it a bit of justice that it deserves."

And then one of my Boost (https://www.boost.org/) peers twitted about it, and ended up being posted here.

It seems I have a lot of work to do...

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#118

Post by nineteen999 »

djowel64 wrote: post #85
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.

The closest ones I can think of are not VST or AU, but the Audacity LADSPA plugins. They are not platform native either, but rather GTK+. They are fairly simple with just buttons/sliders. It's the best example I can think of.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#119

Post by nineteen999 »

octetta wrote: post #36
asark wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. Came in expecting the other Photon MicroGUI ("now there's a name I've not heard in a long time"), was surprised/disappointed. Man QNX+Photon made for a nice GUI operating environment. Rivaled only by BeOS on my "GUI environments/systems I wish had made a bigger splash" scale.

Totally agree with you. While I've been away from QNX for a long time, I did enjoy this API and system design. When I saw it go EOL, I made an appeal for them to open source it. Never heard a peep.

QNX is EOL? Really? The last release was only in 2017. I hadn't heard this was happening and I can't seem to find any reference to it.

Re: Photon Micro GUI

#120

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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