Comments on: Paintable User Interfaces http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2009/11/30/paintable-user-interfaces/ A blog of fleshlings and robots. Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:18:41 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Thorsten http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2009/11/30/paintable-user-interfaces/#comment-30 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:37:00 +0000 http://blog.downstairspeople.org/?p=106#comment-30 You can do this with JavaFX, too. There you build a SceneGraph where you can define for each object whether and how it reacts to user interaction like being clicked on with the mouse. All properties of the objects (in your example the position) may be animated easily. The idea is quite nice, although several standard widgets are still missing but you can implement your own of course.

http://javafx.com/

]]> By: Anonymous http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2009/11/30/paintable-user-interfaces/#comment-29 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:18:36 +0000 http://blog.downstairspeople.org/?p=106#comment-29 Cairo is annoying for this because to detect a click you have to check as you draw each object if it was clicked.

]]> By: Luke Palmer http://blog.downstairspeople.org/2009/11/30/paintable-user-interfaces/#comment-28 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:40:51 +0000 http://blog.downstairspeople.org/?p=106#comment-28 I don’t know what model Flash uses internally, but it sounds similar. At least you can do the button passing behind a tree thing.

If you were to build a GUI in graphics-drawingcombinators (or something based on it), that’s how it would work (except it wouldn’t look like what you wrote because it is a functional specification). It draws with OpenGL and detects clicks with OpenGL picking.

Games can get away with that. More down-to-earth applications need to be more event-based, so that they can sit idle if you are not using them. I think that is the reason for the widget hierarchy.

Maybe there is a happy medium? Eg. build a combinator library that caches its renderings, so that drawing is very very easy when things aren’t changing.

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