Re: Fluid Application Environment 3.0.alpha1 Released!
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Oct 13, 2013
- 2344 views
Yes, you could make your own custom widget classes, but it has to be done a specific way or it won't work correctly with the other widget classes. My intention is to provide a complete set of standard widgets classes so that people don't need to make their own.
I applaud your attitude. It is better to give the application programmer a reasonably complete set of functions and tell him not to meddle with those rules.
I'd like to see ryanj clarify this, but that's not quite my interpretation of what he said.
Here's my interpretation:
"You can do this, just make sure you figure out what the hidden rules are or things may break in surprising ways. If this sort of thing is not fun for you though, I hope to spare you as much of this pain as possible by doing my best to make sure you'd never need to make your own."
ryanj didn't explictly state this, but I thought the following was implied: "If his sort of thing is fun for you though, go ahead and have fun!"
Perhaps the most useful, or interesting, custom widgets will even be adopted by ryanj into the next release of FluidAE!
It'd be nice if ryanj could explicitly spell out what rules need to be followed, and what the exact consequences for violating each one is, however
A) You get what you pay for. AFAIK, although ryanj has been paid to develop at least one application, which involved work on and using FluidAE, he's not being paid to develop docs for custom widget writing.
B) This is an alpha version, so the rules and the consequences may have changed between now and the final release. "Internals" tend to change more frequently than a solid, external API.
He/she could then concentrate on creating a good application without worrying about the GUI and without worrying abolut any absent features.
There's always the occasional, odd, exotic app that needs its own custom widget though.
I will even say that it is best to give a reasonably complete set of GUI functions and tell him to take it or leave it.
I strongly disagree with this. People should be free to tweak things. Maybe this library meets 95% of my needs, but if I can't add the missing 5% myself then I have to spent 100% of the effort doing it from scratch. That's a far cry from best.
There are too many people writing too many functions and modifications to Euphoria, and not enough programmers using the language. The time spent (wasted) in these so called modifications is better spent on promoting the language in forums and areas where it matters.
A programming language is a tool. Most, if not every single one of those functions and modifications were done to address a specific need encountered in real life by someone.
I agree with you on the promotion and stuff, but for me, I haven't done it because that's no fun.
ryanj: My suggestion to you is to go ahead and finish the task the way YOU want to finish it, and then spend some time in giving us the demos and documentations. You then look at it later only when there are significant changes in windows APIs
I agree with this, but at the same time, I'd recommend that ryanj keep an open mind about new ideas to improve his grand masterpiece. You never know who might suggest what to make this GUI easier to use or develop or more fun to deal with.
