On 24 Jun 2016, at 16:38, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:

I dont see what Bloc and Bric have to do with sexiness.

The only thing I see is Athens which Morphic already has access to. To be truly custom GUI friendly the API needs to at least offer some GPU acceleration and access to a myriad of graphical effects. I have not seen anything in Bloc and Bric that would make me abandon Morphic.

Actually the one thing that I am waiting for with some excitement is SDL support which would make things easier for someone like that loves to create custom GUIs.

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 11:51 AM Yuriy Tymchuk <yuriy.tymchuk@me.com> wrote:

It���s kind of a pity that to make something sexy we still have to use Morphic��� Hopefully this will change with Bloc & Bric 

On 24 Jun 2016, at 10:25, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:

In my case is just personal preference none the less Spec has ways to wrap morphs to Spec widgets so you should be able to build Spec widgets using Morphic for more flexibility. You dont have to decide to use Spec or Morphic, you can use both. Last time I checked Spec came with examples on how to do this and I think Spec docs also mention this.

Also I think Athens is very good at rendering text (because its wraps around the Cairo library)  , so maybe you can take advantage of that though I suspect Bloc may be even better choice in this case because it is based on Athens and it is fully compatible with Morphic.

There is also a text widget that is being build that is much more flexible with handling text

https://vimeo.com/67752734

Be advised though that both Bloc and TxText are far from finished

On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 1:28 AM Tommaso Dal Sasso <tommaso.dalsasso@gmail.com> wrote:

Personally I don't dislike the Spec approach, but the API still looks not expressive enough for doing things beyond the standard.

I am deepening my knowledge of Morphic now, thanks for your answer!

Tommaso

On 22/06/16 17:11, Dimitris Chloupis wrote:

Documentation is always a problem.

I dont use Spec because I dont like it , but I use Morphic for my project ChronosManager. I do some "styling" for example use different fonts for different labels , different sizes , I format strings to time stamps and even offer easy ways for user to change them without modifying the whole string.

You can do a lot with Morphic, though I have not played with layout stuff since this GUI is static and image (PNGs) based but yeah Morphic can do that as well. My project is on Catalog browser and it has class comments , dont know if this exactly what you want but it may be a good start.

Obviously there are a ton of things you can do with a web page that Morphic will not offer you out of the box.

You can use Html as the front end / GUI and keep Pharo as the backend, thats how most web apps made with Pharo work. This you get the full power of Html/JS and Pharo. Seaside has classes that map html to pharo methods so you dont have to write html and js, and also I remember a pharo library dealing with CSS.

Another option is to use a GUI API like QT , I have tried this with my python bridge and it works at least on a very basic level, again similar recipe to the above solution.

But yeah if you are not too demanding I think Morphic will serve you well. Personally I only like Morphic , its the only GUI API that does not kill my inner child.

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 5:44 PM Tommaso Dal Sasso <tommaso.dalsasso@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello everybody,

I have a question about the UI toolkits available for Pharo. I already
asked something about this on Slack, but since I saw that there was a
recent discussion about UI in the mailing list, I think this is a better
place to discuss the matter.

I am writing an application for Pharo where I am displaying some
structured text. The structure is similar to the one of a web page: A
main title with a list of paragraphs, where each paragraph has a title
and a description.

What I would like to do is to format the text to present the contents in
a meaningful way: For example, I would like a bigger font for the title,
and change the background of the text, to give a better separation
between the paragraphs. Basically I would like to manipulate and display
my contents as I would do in a web page.

To write UI widgets I usually use Spec, but I found that going beyond
easy formatting (e.g. bold text and emphasis) is harder than I thought.
I saw there were discussion about the styling text and the role of the
theme class, using TextStyle but that part is not really documented.

So far, the easiest way to solve my problem seems to be to use Morphic
to display the contents as I want it, and then include my widget in my
spec application.

Do you have any suggestions about how to do that? I think that styling
the UI widgets is an important part of the application development, but
it is really hard to find documentation about this.

Thanks, have a nice day!
Tommaso