[screenweaver] on the GUI

[Martijn de Visser]

Hi all,

Yesterday, I had a talk with Edwin concerning the SWOS GUI. We both 
agreed that completely revamping the current interface for the current 
version (3.x) is not a good idea. It would involve too much work and 
would also definitely slowdown progress on coming to a stable 3.x release.

So, I think the best course of action is to make sure we have a stable 
release to "ship" as soon as possible. That build would use the old, AS1 
based GUI. It's not pretty under the hood, but I think that for now it 
suffices and, more importantly, we wont introduce any new bugs or 
problems for the current version.

That means that most of the work for this release will be focused on the 
internal workings of SWOS. The engine, EI and LC stuff, QA etc. The GUI 
can be used as is.

Once we have a stable open source release available, we can start 
rebuilding the GUI.

The GUI layout would ideally be based on XML to make sure we can easily 
update it whenever we add new features that need to be accessible 
through the GUI.

Technically, I'm thinking along these lines:

http://www.martijndevisser.com/download/fform/ (older code)

and:

http://www.martijndevisser.com/flickr/flickr.html (updated version of FForm)

This is a rather simple and straightforward XML based form layout engine 
I wrote some time ago . Perhaps we won't need any of the fancy 
elasticity effects it currently uses, we could make that a setting in 
the SW GUI preferences.

Furthermore, I don't think we should make Screenweaver skinnable per-se. 
I don't see the need for that as of now and I also think it would make 
things a lot more complicated than necessary. The engine I wrote comes 
with a number of simple and very lightwieght components, which can be 
easily extended and improved upon.

On a last note, we should also consider setting up the GUI for multiple 
languages.

For now, I'm very curiuos about the Builder API Thomas is developing. 
The new GUI would, of course, use that API to communicate with the 
engine and to start and monitor the build process.

Let me know what you guys think of the current and future GUI for SW. Do 
you think a skinnable version of SW would be a winner? If so, why? Do 
you think multi language support is important? Should we reuse the 
current graphic style of SW, or should we try and find a "real" designer 
(I've done my best with the current version, but I'm not really  graphic 
designer) to create a new look-and-feel?

Cheers, Martijn.