[Fresco-devel] picogui

Heh, that's neat... There's even an entry in the PicoGUI faq about Fresco:

From http://picogui.org/wiki/view/Main/FAQ:
"How does PicoGUI compare to Fresco?
Fresco is another GUI (http://fresco.org) that has some similarities to
PicoGUI. Fresco has been around for quite a while longer than PicoGUI, but
when PicoGUI was started MicahDowty didn't know about Fresco. 

Similarities between PicoGUI and Fresco 
-Standard widgets on the server side 
-Separation between applications and device coordinates 
-Server keeps a scene graph 
-New GUI architecture, with no backward compatibility 
-Language-independent client/server protocol 

Differences between PicoGUI and Fresco 
-PicoGUI takes a lot of shortcuts compared to Fresco, to make it more
suitable for embedded systems 
-Fresco uses device independent coordinates everywhere, while PicoGUI's
themes and layout engine still use pixels 
-Fresco uses CORBA, while PicoGUI has its own network protocol 
-There's nothing like PicoGUI's theme interpreter in Fresco 
-Fresco handles overlapping, and uses a homogeneous scene graph making it
more suitable for generic drawing apps and desktop window management 
-PicoGUI has features taylored for embedded systems, such as support for
low-end display hardware, and keyboard-only navigation 
-Fresco does real transparency, while PicoGUI usually cheats :) 
-Fresco relies heavily on floating point math, PicoGUI's core is 100%
integer. Of course this means that picogui's layout engine has to operate
in integer pixel units. (See below)"

They make it sound like, except for the PDA-friendly nature of PicoGUI,
the only thing that they have superior to Fresco (thinking along the lines
of Fresco's goals) is their "theme interpreter". It looks like some sort
of XML description of a UI, which tastes like an MVC paradigm enforced on
the application developers.  Sounds neat.  I wonder if the UIML I
mentioned a few months back could substitute for this feature...

From http://picogui.org/wiki/view/Main/PicoGUI:
"PicoGUI's theme engine isn't there just to look pretty, it's there to
enforce a separation of content and presentation. This way the application
only specifies high-level commands, and it's completely up to the theme to
specify which pixel goes where. This allows the same application binary to
run on a true color display, 160x16 grayscale LCD, or an ASCII device."

Now, if only I had time to look through some code and do more than
speculate... ;)


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           Sean Rae / es9
        cool and calculating
       www.birdnest.org/raes1
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