Wow!!! You have no idea how incredible I found to be reading something like this: "I am willing to invest years and if all goes well even decades of efforts since its an area that I love to code for". It definitely made my day! :-) Especially the last part, that you really *love* to code in this area (something I cannot but admire). I always found the Squeak/Pharo environment so cool to code in, the "aliveness" of the image, but also had the feeling that the graphics system was a little outdated. Unfortunately being unable to do something about it, first because I have no expertise in the area, and second, because... well... I guess I'm lazy and not patient/talented enough for graphics programming ;-). It is therefor great that Igor and now you showed up, able to improve in this area, and also willing :-) To sum it up: I always thought that open-source Smalltalk should *look* as great from the "outside" as it is cool on the "inside" (the semantics). It simply deserves no less. So I am really grateful for any effort put in this. Pharo already looks great, much has been archived, and I can't wait to see what you guys will come up with next... Best regards, Sebastian 2012/11/25 dimitris chloupis <thekilon@yahoo.co.uk>:
"eye candy" wise this is exactly the focus of my Ephestos project , Morpheas section. A custom gui , gui designers for easy creating of GUIs by the user and additional moprh widget with customized look including eye candy.
I can't make any promises, as I have no clue what kind of obstacles and technical limitations I am going to find in the process but I can tell you I am willing to invest years and if all goes well even decades of efforts since its an area that I love to code for.
As a first part I am in the process of creating a tutorial generator which will be ProfStef on steroids for at first offering tutorial for Athens and later used for any kind of Pharo tutorial.
I am also interested in helping Athens porting to OpenGL and generally using NBOpenGL as the next step for Morphic. Excitting stuff the only thing it worries me is the type of technical blocks / obstacles I may come across but trying is certainly well worths it.
________________________________ From: Sebastian Nozzi <sebnozzi@gmail.com> To: Pharo Development <Pharo-project@lists.gforge.inria.fr> Sent: Saturday, 24 November 2012, 17:06 Subject: [Pharo-project] Athens OpenGL backend - what does it mean?
Hello Pharo Devs,
I am really excited about the direction Pharo is taking regarding many areas - one of them being the graphics. I played with Athens a bit and it's cool to see anti-aliased vectror graphics coming to Pharo.
I keep reading about a possible OpenGL back-end in the future... what would this mean exactly?
For years I have been "dreaming" about graphic-accelerated "eye-candy" effects inside of the Smalltalk environment. Like compiz-fusion effects in Linux, or Quartz-Extreme powerded in OS-X (Exposé, etc.).
Would this be possible with such a back-end? Or am I misinterpreting things? I'm not a graphic-dev expert.
Best regards,
Sebastian