Users complain boring user interface of my apps

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Lord
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Lord »

Sorry guys, but shouldn't the functionality of a program be the the argument to us it and not the "look"?
"Modern look" is just a thumb argument.
Changes music when played with an "App" with "modern look" instead with an "old fashioned" program?
Will the results of a complicated calculation differ between these two "looks"?
Image
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Kukulkan »

Hello Lord,

I fully agree. And still I get to hear that more and more often. I can't change how people are and how they think. I believe that, if Skype would look like 2003 software, people would not like it that much. And XML GUI of PureBasic is not only old fashion. It is not well aligned and does not allow you to go further by easily integrating owner drawn canvas based gadgets (see my complete first post).
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captain_skank
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by captain_skank »

yeah but users want bling.

I've been using the canvas gadget and the svg library to create my own gadgets and windows style to good effect but it can be frustrating without transparancies ( certainly for creating windows ) and the text never seem to look crisp.

Course that could be my eyesight :)
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Fred »

Interesting to see on sciter forum a post about PureBasic integration ! I think he got something nearly working (didn't tested), may be someone of this forum as well ? TBH, I'm very curious of the result, as it seems to be a very good idea to build modern portable GUI without bothering of underlying API
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Kiffi »

Fred wrote:TBH, I'm very curious of the result, as it seems to be a very good idea to build modern portable GUI without bothering of underlying API
that sounds very promising! Image

Greetings ... Peter
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Kukulkan »

With Sciter, something similar to my feature request from May 2018 would be possible:

HTML GUI Renderer
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=70755

:wink:
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Shardik
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Shardik »

Fred wrote:Interesting to see on sciter forum a post about PureBasic integration ! I think he got something nearly working (didn't tested), may be someone of this forum as well ? TBH, I'm very curious of the result, as it seems to be a very good idea to build modern portable GUI without bothering of underlying API
privetamerica posted already a working example in PureBasic's Windows subforum. You just have to download the sciter library for your OS from Github. I downloaded and successfully tested the 32 bit version of sciter.dll on Windows 8.1 x64 with PB 5.62 x86. You also have to download test-inputs.html from HanPBF's first posting in that thread and rename it to test.html.
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Kuron »

Fred wrote:I'm very curious of the result, as it seems to be a very good idea to build modern portable GUI without bothering of underlying API
They certainly have an impressive list of clientele.
Best wishes to the PB community. Thank you for the memories. ♥️
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Trond »

Kuron wrote:
Kukulkan wrote:Is the only solution to write my own GUI engine?
I started to go down that road back when the canvas gadget first was first introduced, but quickly ran head first into the lack of 32-bit support for the canvas gadget.
Sprites should be ideal for this, especially with the need for modern animations. Unfortunately, there are some roadblocks:
- The mouse gets locked to the window.
- Lack of mouse events means short clicks get overlooked.
- Lack of keyboard events means that short keypresses are overlooked.
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the.weavster
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by the.weavster »

Shardik wrote:privetamerica posted already a working example in PureBasic's Windows subforum.
But that example doesn't demonstrate how to expose PureBasic procedures to sciter's tiscript. What I'd really like to be able to do is pass some JSON and a callback from tiscript and have the PB procedure create a JSON response that it fires into the callback. I've been experimenting with it this morning but I made very little progress. This is pretty much all I've found demonstrating the use of the plain C api.
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Kuron »

Trond wrote:Sprites should be ideal for this, especially with the need for modern animations. Unfortunately, there are some roadblocks:
- The mouse gets locked to the window.
- Lack of mouse events means short clicks get overlooked.
- Lack of keyboard events means that short keypresses are overlooked.
I did consider sprites. However, I really wanted to avoid DX/GL so it would run on any system.
Best wishes to the PB community. Thank you for the memories. ♥️
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the.weavster
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by the.weavster »

Another alternative might be making GTK3 a target on every platform.

It supports themes (including flat ones):

Image


Then we could use Glade as the visual UI designer and have a grid with cell level styling and events.

There's lots of good stuff in the Gnome libraries, like libsoup for http clients and servers which is another weak point for PB. As long as deployment is as simple as having the required *.dll files in a libs subfolder I don't really see it as a break from PB's ethos of being self contained.
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Fred »

GTK3 subsystem is a mess due to layout constraint. We won't spend much time on it and we hope to have QT matured enough to replace it soon as default.
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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by infratec »

But Qt is not freeware.
We decided to drop it, because the license fee for development and customers are very high if you want to sell your products.

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Re: Users complain boring user interface of my apps

Post by Fred »

On Linux, you can sell a QT software as long you don't ship the QT binary, or i missed something ?
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