UI's a thing to improve

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UI's a thing to improve

garduino
Hi Guys:

Lot of microISV'ers as myself develop and sell applications globally using networks as Avangate or Regnow.

In such massive market, focused in software stores, the average buyer find the program, download the trial, test it a few seconds and usually decide or not the purchase very fast.

This means that you, the developer, have only these few seconds when the potential buyer try your product, to impress it with look and feel, behavior, etc, to convince it of pay the price of the registered version.

In such seconds and even before of decide to download the trial, one of the things that more weight have is the UI.

Today we can see awesome UI's. As an example look at the screenshots here: http://www.wisecleaner.com/wiseregistrycleanerfree.html that also have a perfect integration with the operating system where are running.

I think that this is one of the points to improve in Pharo, Squeak, Cuis..... have better (and quick) ways of build UI's that look better.

And windows that look as native applications, better ways of deployment and branding, etc.

Of course, I know that all these topics, are not strictly matter of the language, but still needed to compete in this particular market.

What do you think?

--
Saludos / Regards,
Germán Arduino
www.arduinosoftware.com

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Re: UI's a thing to improve

Martin McClure-2
On 02/28/2014 09:59 AM, Germán Arduino wrote:
> I think that this is one of the points to improve in Pharo, Squeak,
> Cuis..... have better (and quick) ways of build UI's that look better.
>

A while back I started a port of Vassili Bykov's Brazil and Hopscotch
frameworks[1] from Newspeak to Smalltalk, with the idea being to port it
to several Smalltalk dialects (Pharo, VW, and VA), and encourage the
porting of it to other dialects, so great UIs could be built in
Smalltalk and be portable across dialects.

Would this be of interest?
I haven't been able to work on this for a while. I'd like to get back to
it. But it sounds like there might be a new UI framework underway in the
Pharo world? I can't find the message where I thought I saw that...

Regards,

-Martin

[1]

Nice screenshot:
http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html

Technical paper on Hopscotch design:
http://bracha.org/hopscotch-wasdett.pdf

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Re: UI's a thing to improve

Stéphane Ducasse

On 28 Feb 2014, at 20:23, Martin McClure <[hidden email]> wrote:

> On 02/28/2014 09:59 AM, Germán Arduino wrote:
>> I think that this is one of the points to improve in Pharo, Squeak,
>> Cuis..... have better (and quick) ways of build UI's that look better.
>>
>
> A while back I started a port of Vassili Bykov's Brazil and Hopscotch frameworks[1] from Newspeak to Smalltalk, with the idea being to port it to several Smalltalk dialects (Pharo, VW, and VA), and encourage the porting of it to other dialects, so great UIs could be built in Smalltalk and be portable across dialects.
>
> Would this be of interest?
I’m interested by learning about it.

What are the principle behind Hopscotch?
How UI logic is reused?
Is it a set of widgets or a way to build UI?

> I haven't been able to work on this for a while. I'd like to get back to it. But it sounds like there might be a new UI framework underway in the Pharo world? I can't find the message where I thought I saw that...
>
> Regards,
>
> -Martin
>
> [1]
>
> Nice screenshot:
> http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html
>
> Technical paper on Hopscotch design:
> http://bracha.org/hopscotch-wasdett.pdf
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pharo-business mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.pharo.org/mailman/listinfo/pharo-business_lists.pharo.org


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Re: UI's a thing to improve

pharo4Stef@free.fr
In reply to this post by Martin McClure-2



> On 02/28/2014 09:59 AM, Germán Arduino wrote:
>> I think that this is one of the points to improve in Pharo, Squeak,
>> Cuis..... have better (and quick) ways of build UI's that look better.
>>
>
> A while back I started a port of Vassili Bykov's Brazil and Hopscotch frameworks[1] from Newspeak to Smalltalk, with the idea being to port it to several Smalltalk dialects (Pharo, VW, and VA), and encourage the porting of it to other dialects, so great UIs could be built in Smalltalk and be portable across dialects.
>
> Would this be of interest?

I’m interested by learning about it. Where I can I read about the principles and others. I read something long time ago and I forgot
or may be this was not what I was looking for.

What are the principle behind Hopscotch?
How UI logic is reused?
Is it a set of widgets or a way to build UI?



> I haven't been able to work on this for a while. I'd like to get back to it. But it sounds like there might be a new UI framework underway in the Pharo world? I can't find the message where I thought I saw that...
>
> Regards,
>
> -Martin
>
> [1]
>
> Nice screenshot:
> http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html
>
> Technical paper on Hopscotch design:
> http://bracha.org/hopscotch-wasdett.pdf
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pharo-business mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.pharo.org/mailman/listinfo/pharo-business_lists.pharo.org


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Re: UI's a thing to improve

pharo4Stef@free.fr
In reply to this post by Stéphane Ducasse
http://scg.unibe.ch/download/wasdett/wasdett2008-paper03.pdf
but it not enough for me to fully understand.


On 28 Feb 2014, at 22:32, Stéphane Ducasse <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> On 28 Feb 2014, at 20:23, Martin McClure <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> On 02/28/2014 09:59 AM, Germán Arduino wrote:
>>> I think that this is one of the points to improve in Pharo, Squeak,
>>> Cuis..... have better (and quick) ways of build UI's that look better.
>>>
>>
>> A while back I started a port of Vassili Bykov's Brazil and Hopscotch frameworks[1] from Newspeak to Smalltalk, with the idea being to port it to several Smalltalk dialects (Pharo, VW, and VA), and encourage the porting of it to other dialects, so great UIs could be built in Smalltalk and be portable across dialects.
>>
>> Would this be of interest?
> I’m interested by learning about it.
>
> What are the principle behind Hopscotch?
> How UI logic is reused?
> Is it a set of widgets or a way to build UI?
>
>> I haven't been able to work on this for a while. I'd like to get back to it. But it sounds like there might be a new UI framework underway in the Pharo world? I can't find the message where I thought I saw that...
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> -Martin
>>
>> [1]
>>
>> Nice screenshot:
>> http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html
>>
>> Technical paper on Hopscotch design:
>> http://bracha.org/hopscotch-wasdett.pdf
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pharo-business mailing list
>> [hidden email]
>> http://lists.pharo.org/mailman/listinfo/pharo-business_lists.pharo.org
>


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Re: UI's a thing to improve

garduino
Hi Martin, Stef:

I also need to understand and read about your comment Martin (BTW, the url do not show any screenshot, I would like to see some examples).

I will try to read about Hopscotch, but I think that the sense of my comment was understood, right?

Thanks!

 



2014-02-28 18:38 GMT-03:00 Pharo4Stef <[hidden email]>:
http://scg.unibe.ch/download/wasdett/wasdett2008-paper03.pdf
but it not enough for me to fully understand.


On 28 Feb 2014, at 22:32, Stéphane Ducasse <[hidden email]> wrote:

>
> On 28 Feb 2014, at 20:23, Martin McClure <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>> On 02/28/2014 09:59 AM, Germán Arduino wrote:
>>> I think that this is one of the points to improve in Pharo, Squeak,
>>> Cuis..... have better (and quick) ways of build UI's that look better.
>>>
>>
>> A while back I started a port of Vassili Bykov's Brazil and Hopscotch frameworks[1] from Newspeak to Smalltalk, with the idea being to port it to several Smalltalk dialects (Pharo, VW, and VA), and encourage the porting of it to other dialects, so great UIs could be built in Smalltalk and be portable across dialects.
>>
>> Would this be of interest?
> I’m interested by learning about it.
>
> What are the principle behind Hopscotch?
> How UI logic is reused?
> Is it a set of widgets or a way to build UI?
>
>> I haven't been able to work on this for a while. I'd like to get back to it. But it sounds like there might be a new UI framework underway in the Pharo world? I can't find the message where I thought I saw that...
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> -Martin
>>
>> [1]
>>
>> Nice screenshot:
>> http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html
>>
>> Technical paper on Hopscotch design:
>> http://bracha.org/hopscotch-wasdett.pdf
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Pharo-business mailing list
>> [hidden email]
>> http://lists.pharo.org/mailman/listinfo/pharo-business_lists.pharo.org
>




--
Saludos / Regards,
Germán Arduino
www.arduinosoftware.com

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Re: UI's a thing to improve

Martin McClure-2
On 02/28/2014 02:20 PM, Germán Arduino wrote:
> Hi Martin, Stef:
>
> I also need to understand and read about your comment Martin (BTW, the
> url do not show any screenshot, I would like to see some examples).

Only one example, for now, but the first URL I posted,
http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html, has several
screenshots, the first of which is of the Hopscotch debugger.

>
> I will try to read about Hopscotch, but I think that the sense of my
> comment was understood, right?

I think so. You want to be able to easily make very attractive UIs,
which is a very good goal.

Regards,

-Martin



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Re: UI's a thing to improve

Martin McClure-2
In reply to this post by pharo4Stef@free.fr
On 02/28/2014 01:38 PM, Pharo4Stef wrote:
> http://scg.unibe.ch/download/wasdett/wasdett2008-paper03.pdf
> but it not enough for me to fully understand.

I haven't found a huge amount of information available on
Hopscotch/Brazil. After the above paper, the next thing may be a
30-minute video of a talk that Gilad Bracha gave at Microsoft in 2009:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/F/0/BF0DAE51-F096-4DB4-8707-ACBDB7680BC0/08-GiladBracha-Hopscotch.wmv

This gives a bit more about the how UI elements are combined, and shows
the Newspeak Hopscotch development tools in action.

The terminology is a bit confusing.

Brazil is the widget framework. It has a pluggable back end for
cross-platform compatibility. Currently running back ends in Newspeak
are Morphic and native MS Windows. Its design for cross-platform, IIUC,
is not "least common denominator", but uses native widgets where there
are native widgets, and constructs its own widgets if there is not a
corresponding native widget.

Hopscotch is what combines Brazil widgets to form a UI. The Newspeak
development tools, written with Hopscotch, seem to be also called
Hopscotch, which is the confusing part.

Why did I pick Hopscotch / Brazil to port?

* It existed, and was being used to do some things that looked cool.

* It is open-source, so I can use it.

* It is a new and clean framework, not too large, which I am afraid
Morphic is not. Since I haven't really studied the internals yet, I'm
actually taking the "clean and small" thing on faith, based on my past
experience with Vasilli's designs.

* It has demonstrated cross-platform pluggability.

* It is not quite written in Smalltalk, but Newspeak is close enough
that I hoped it would not be too much work to port. I asked Vasilli, and
he thought it would be pretty easy.


The first target to port to is Pharo, since Brazil already has a Morphic
back-end. For me, the next step would be to develop an X Window back-end
from within Pharo (since all my machines are Linux), then port to VW.
Porting to VA on MS Windows would come in there somewhere.

I'm not too far along. I have a PetitParser grammar for Newspeak that is
complete enough to recognize the Brazil source code file. Next is to
parse Brazil into structures that can be written out in Filetree format.
Then get it to run.

This may be getting too technical for the "business" list. Any deeper
discussion we might want to take elsewhere?

Regards,

-Martin


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