"PA" == Paolo Amoroso <amoroso@mclink.it> writes:
PA> rpgoldman@real-time.com writes: >> My impression is that there are two challenges to programming with >> McCLIM: PA> [...] >> 2. There seems to be an awful lot of black art to getting a CLIM UI >> to look right and behave in ways that users will perceive as >> normal. PA> Can you provide a few examples? Sure, but not original ones: - one thing that seems odd is the lack of a conventional selection concept, which we see in the now-standard direct manipulation interfaces. I.e., you select an object and that provides the focus of all commands. I'm not sure that providing this is even feasible with CLIM, because of its radically different paradigm. - Examples of use of standard gadgets. E.g., on others' suggestion, I've been meaning to get the file selector factored out of climacs and put into mcclim, for example. Alas, my plate is already overfull right now, so it will probably be at least a small number of weeks before I get to this. - An easier introduction to providing an application frame with a menu bar, since that seems like a central UI paradigm these days. Note that I may simply have missed some good sources. - Earlier I was having a lot of difficulty telling when McCLIM would decide that my input was complete, but I think this was just transient accepting-values problems that seem much better... >> more easily for new CLIM programmers? I'm still fumbling around >> myself, so I find it hard to say what would make things easier, >> since I might just be doing things wrong. PA> Keep asking questions. I personally try to answer all the CLIM PA> questions posted here and in other Lisp forums--well, I am not always PA> successful :) At the expense of inviting flames, in my dreams there's some way to get started with CLIM that's as easy as (or approaches as easy as) getting started with Tcl/Tk. With that, in about 10 lines, one can have a screen with buttons and stuff that happens. OK, admittedly you end up with a dead end not too far down the pike, but that's what I would dream of. Somehow it seemed a lot harder to get over that initial hurdle of defining an application frame, a presentation type, a command, a and command-translator. Perhaps if I mull over some more macrology, that will become clearer. Maybe when there's a bigger palette of built-in gadgets, and more lore about how to use them, this will be easier. As a programmer, relatively familiar with the callback model, I have a very hard time grappling with the paradigm which seems like: define a case where you want to get a particular type of value, define ways of presenting values, and then magic happens and the values you present can be pulled back in. Note that part of this is because I'm lazy, but that's a different way of saying that developing CLIM UIs isn't a main part of what I need to do. I'd like a smoother path from "here's a dead-easy way to do the simpile thing to more and more complex stuff." I realize that we're all volunteers here, and I'm not demanding that this be handed to me on a platter --- to the extent I can help in this project, I'd be happy to do so. I just don't see the way yet. Best, R