System Too Complex

[Matthew]

simple answer? because Orbiter does not have allowances for turning on and off design objects on a screen.

There are plans for a complete rewrite of Orbiter, however.

I hope those plans include style sheets and/or skins so the outermost presentation layer can be most easily restyled (including removing GUI widgets).

Are those plans documented in public anywhere other than the developers mailing list?

[colinjones]

They have been discussed at various times in the forums, but it seems to have gone cold recently - I guess with 0710 coming. From what I gleaned from those discussions, though, it sounds like a huge task because of what the orbiters have to be able to do with things like regens and so on. The discussion moved towards a complete re-write, so that all those things like skins you mention, dynamic content, and as importantly (to me!) the cooler graphical effects.... yes we have alpha blended (sometimes!) but really the rest of the interface is completely static, no transitions, fades, wipes, etc, most of which, ironically, are simpler graphically than alpha blending!

[Matthew]

They have been discussed at various times in the forums, but it seems to have gone cold recently - I guess with 0710 coming. From what I gleaned from those discussions, though, it sounds like a huge task because of what the orbiters have to be able to do with things like regens and so on. The discussion moved towards a complete re-write, so that all those things like skins you mention, dynamic content, and as importantly (to me!) the cooler graphical effects.... yes we have alpha blended (sometimes!) but really the rest of the interface is completely static, no transitions, fades, wipes, etc, most of which, ironically, are simpler graphically than alpha blending!

I'm just catching up with the UI revision discussion (re)started last week in the developers maillist. And with the UI3 proposal started last week in the wiki. There's really so much discussion and development going on in different niche media available to this community that it's ironic how integrated is the final product.

I think the maillist posts should all be automatically posted to a searchable forum, and subscribe the maillist to notifications of posts in that forum. And the mantis wiki link should point to a "bugs/issues" category in the single, unified wiki. And I think LMCE itself should have a link to a single portal page for all that.

[colinjones]

Love the mock ups and wiki article... very exciting

[tkmedia]

Did anyone consider http://www.rebol.com/ from Mr Amiga Himself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

Very light weight internet / Multimedia based. 

[Matthew]

Did anyone consider http://www.rebol.com/ from Mr Amiga Himself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sassenrath

Very light weight internet / Multimedia based. 

Consider it for what, a model for LMCE GUI redesign? I like how LMCE is data-centric, swinging suites of apps into play to support a given use case of consuming data. That's the simplest paradigm, especially for networked (and multiprocessed) multimedia convergence. I'd like to never see "an app" again, just presentations of my data along with unified presentation of control widgets that could represent several simultaneous, but separate (even distributed) processes to manage it. Make the apps go away, and the "computer" itself goes away more, becoming more of a means to an end, and leaving people dealing with just the content (that itself is usually just standing in for another person) that is the point of their using the computer at all.

[tkmedia]

UI mainly - reply to UI3 thoughts.

I only mention it because he has been doing high end graphics for decades on hardware less powerfull than todays calcualtors.

[colinjones]

I don't know.. I think the blitter - copper was pretty state of the art for its time, even now it probably does quite a bit better than the average calculator