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Home » Community » Coffee corner » New age of GUI
| New age of GUI [message #39940] |
Tue, 14 May 2013 09:33  |
Mindtraveller
Messages: 917
Registered: August 2007
Location: Russia, Moscow rgn.
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Experienced Contributor |
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As you all may know we are entering post-PC era. This means that good old Windows/X window interface becomes something which is used more and more rarely each day.
Still U++ strong basis of excellent algorithms and compiled well under both PC and ARM, it could make the next step into the future era providing high efficiency on new platforms. Recently I've successfully compiled U++ under ARM and assured its lightness and speed regardless of CPU archicture.
The most interesting thing is that U++ supports Rainbow which means we MAY have interface on any device, even through framebuffer. But U++ DOESN'T have this interface because the only GUI paradigm it supports is good old fashioned windowing.
I think it is time to discuss new approach to user interface which will become a basement of future support for post-PC devices like tablets. As of popular Android, it mostly uses Java calls for GUI, so IMO this still means we have to draw and process GUI in U++ by ourselves.
So what could this approach rely on? First of all let me give you link to the interesting article (sorry, it's in Russian but contains self-explainable pictures).
http://habrahabr.ru/post/179567/
This article concludes near 5 years of expirience under tablet devices, in this case, GUI for games. The main conclusion interesting to us is that picture:
Green is the most usable area, yellow is less usable while red could be used for rare actions. Yes, it is based on physiology of our hands and could be excellent starting point for what could become new age of interface.
That is all for my first post on this topic to start discussion. What do you guys think about that?
[Updated on: Tue, 14 May 2013 09:36] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: New age of GUI [message #39941 is a reply to message #39940] |
Tue, 14 May 2013 10:33  |
jerson
Messages: 202
Registered: June 2010
Location: Bombay, India
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Experienced Member |
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| Quote: |
Recently I've successfully compiled U++ under ARM and assured its lightness and speed regardless of CPU archicture.
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This is interesting to me. I have seen an example of a firmware developed in Visual Studio for ARM hardware and wondered if U++ could be used similarly.
Would you be able to tell how much effort is needed to do the transition to ARM cross compilation using U++?
[Updated on: Tue, 14 May 2013 10:35] Report message to a moderator |
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| Re: New age of GUI [message #39992 is a reply to message #39980] |
Thu, 23 May 2013 12:30 |
piotr5
Messages: 107
Registered: November 2005
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Experienced Member |
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| Quote: |
I think Win8 tablets are dead end.
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So what? every technology eventually goes into a dead end.
win8 is popular now, maybe soon it will be replaced by elementary os, maybe apple will take over. but truth is all the current GUIs are using similar concepts and ideas. even without win8 we still are left with touchscreens and hand-held computers. and don't forget the gesture-driven GUIs where a camera interprets our movements and some complicated software generates commands out of them. maybe sometime commandline will return (as in gnome-shell) because of people favouring spoken commands over mouse-clicks...
as for a border between fun-device and work-device, I just don't see it. work is fun, even more so if 3d-visualization would actually be used for serious applications, with a true and tested improvement of work-flow through a better visualization. similarily communication is something that could use some playful elements otherwise known only from gaming...
the only problem with these ideas is they aren't tested. the usual policy is to transform the users, the customers, into guinea-pigs, history has shown this wont work if you want to sell something to a serious company with experienced management. so I think what we really need is not yet another gui controversy bur we need actual research into gui and into visualization, with actual experimental set-ups investigating how useful some gui is! but for that programmers really need the flexibility to create even the most unusual GUI...
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| Re: New age of GUI [message #40040 is a reply to message #40010] |
Mon, 27 May 2013 22:27 |
piotr5
Messages: 107
Registered: November 2005
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Experienced Member |
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don't get me wrong, I didn't mean the ide would need to move to a new gui before any other ide does. but you are wrong in assuming keyboard and mouse would be a possibility for tablets. when I sit in the park with a tablet, then mouse is quite impossible to use on the grass. also you must keep the tablet in your hand in order to avoid reflections. therefore imho new ideas for gui-styles should be available to programmers who are ready to use them. I mean, what's the sense in cameleon and such when some input-options (mouse-gestures with multitouch, relative position-changes through accelerometer and such, interface to external programs like voice-recognition or hand-gestures and such, geotagging of course, and so on) are not that easy to integrate into ultimate++ software? similarily also the layout designer should imho assist a bit in placement of gui-elements when target-platform is tablet or similar, maybe also warn about button-size when touch-screen is expected...
of course all these suggestions I'm giving informally, doesn't need to be implemented immediately. what we need now is a discussion and an actual list of things we will wish to make use of in future...
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| Re: New age of GUI [message #40041 is a reply to message #40040] |
Tue, 28 May 2013 07:46 |
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mirek
Messages: 14255
Registered: November 2005
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Ultimate Member |
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| piotr5 wrote on Mon, 27 May 2013 16:27 |
don't get me wrong, I didn't mean the ide would need to move to a new gui before any other ide does. but you are wrong in assuming keyboard and mouse would be a possibility for tablets. when I sit in the park with a tablet, then mouse is quite impossible to use on the grass. also you must keep the tablet in your hand in order to avoid reflections. therefore imho new ideas for gui-styles should be available to programmers who are ready to use them. I mean, what's the sense in cameleon and such when some input-options (mouse-gestures with multitouch, relative position-changes through accelerometer and such, interface to external programs like voice-recognition or hand-gestures and such, geotagging of course, and so on) are not that easy to integrate into ultimate++ software? similarily also the layout designer should imho assist a bit in placement of gui-elements when target-platform is tablet or similar, maybe also warn about button-size when touch-screen is expected...
of course all these suggestions I'm giving informally, doesn't need to be implemented immediately. what we need now is a discussion and an actual list of things we will wish to make use of in future...
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I guess we are discussing two different topics here. You are arguing that tablets need altered GUI. Well, there is no disagreement on my side.
What I was trying to say is that Android is likely to move to desktop and start replacing Windows there - which is one more reason to support it, is not it?
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| Re: New age of GUI [message #40106 is a reply to message #39940] |
Tue, 11 June 2013 22:34 |
piotr5
Messages: 107
Registered: November 2005
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Experienced Member |
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well, I did the mistake of speaking too abstractly. let's look at two examples:
suppose you want to create a slideshow-program. once upon a time these were programs where you press space or any key in order to move on to the next picture or animation. now with tablets however keyboard is no option. if a person has to put the screen-keyboard onto the display in order to press the key for showing next slide, s/he'll likely buy an ipad instead. similarily I have seen slideshow programs that used mouse-buttons for going forward and backward in the pictures. right mousebutton was go right and left button was for going back -- matching our western habit of reading from left to right. with tablets however users might prefer other input methods. a touchscreen doesn't have right button. some tablets have accelerometer though, so the user can knock on the device to move to the next pic. or maybe there's a remote control when the computer is attached to the tv set.
another program I have seen is a bit difficult to describe. its a sound-edit program. it is a modified version of a big sound-editing suite with many filters and such. of course a big sound-editing software is rather something for desktop. but this program is different, it's for improving sound-quality of some recorded speech. now port that to a tablet! having a menu in the usual way is not a good idea, better show some nice icons. icons however usually come with tooltips. however a touchscreen does not have the option to "hover" over it for some time, touching translates into a click on that icon. better would be if eye-movement would trigger the tooltips. or maybe use accelerometer to move around some additional cursor for that purpose. of course the user could plug in a trackball or something (although I have never seen any trackball specifically made for mobile devices). but using a mobile device means a friend gave you a recording he made, you receive it in the middle of the street and want to plug in the headphones and listen while you walk. if it's bad quality, maybe let this program run over it on autopilot. maybe some part of the recording was too silent, select it and turn up the volume of the selected section before you give the file to another person. now in that situation, the last thing you want to do is to pull out the mouse/trackball! if the program is not easy to control with the tablet without external devices, people will just try to concentrate a bit more deeply while listening, instead of using that program, maybe even turn up volume to a deafening level. maybe a user-interface alike to the one depicted in the first message of the thread would be better than reusing the gui of that desktop only program?
as for java and python, those offer the possibility to sort of compress the sources, remove comments and such, since text files take up too much space. this is what I call "compile into javacode". (a similar way of using the word "compile" are the various programming languages which get compiled into actual c-sources.) what I want is to use such things like metaprogramming with templates (boost) inside of java programs. one would assume translating from c++ to java should be quite easy, why are there no such programming-environments? of course you can write libs in c++ and compile them for the native architecture. however, if you distribute a program, and this program is using a c++ lib that wasn't installed in the os, you have a problem with maintaining a huge set of binaries, one for each platform that will appear in future. especially the testing is a nightmare. so unless the lib needs hardware access, make it so that lib is actually distributed as java even though it's written in c++. it's related here because especially a java-port of u++ libs would be nice...
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