SEUL: More GUI Musings

[Jay Bloodworth <jay@pathways.sde.state.sc.us>]

I spent much of the long weekend installing, compiling, tinkering, and
debugging in an attempt to get a nice, easy to use GUI on my home Redhat
system.  My window manager is Afterstep, so one of my goals was to make
everything as neXtish as possible.  My other big goal was to have desktop
icons ala Win95 and MacOS, including desktop access to a good looking,
full featured, multi-window file manager.  I was reasonably successful
achieving those goals (I'm not finished, but the end is in sight); more
importantly, the process made me think a lot about what is needed for a
good looking and functional desktop.  What follows is a brief outline of
my experiences, along with with my opinions and other thoughts.

*There is a replacement for libaw (Athena widgets) called libneXtaw that
is intended to give you neXtish widgets.  That's cool, but it has to be
compiled differently depending on whether it is going to replace or
coexist with libaw.  Wouldn't you know, the rpm I found had it compiled
the wrong way for me.  No biggie - find the source, recompile.  Pretty
painless.  Only other problem - bad things happen (and it looks ugly) if
you haven't patched .Xdefaults.

*TkStep is a neXtish replacement for Tcl/Tk.  There are rpm's for it -
unfortunately they are all aimed at Tcl7.5 and I (and many others,
apparently) have Tcl7.6.  I finally found an rpm geared towards 7.6 and it
worked.  The only other problem I ran into was that the rpm put the new
shared library in /usr/local/lib, so LD_LIBRARY_PATH has to be set.

*I chose OffiX for my file manager for a variety of reasons.  The only
real competition was TkDesk and I like look of OffiX better.  I'm also
kind of predjudiced against Tcl as a platform for serious applications.
Anyway, I found WMOffiX, a source distribution of OffiX that had been
patched to work better with Afterstep (well, really Window Maker but
they're closely related).  The WMOffiX distribution was not at all well
configured.  The autoconfig stuff did a lousy job finding libraries, there
was no built in option for linking against neXtaw, and the Makefile
completely neglected one source file.  But eventually I got it compiled
and installed.  The only problem left was that Afterstep does not provide
transparent icons, and I wanted the file manager icon to sit directly on
the desktop.

*So after a quick message to the Afterstep mailing list, I found tycoon.
Tycoon is a desktop icon manager that does exactly what I want.  Even
better, the OffiX file manager works well with by sending it an icon
create message whenever a file is dropped on the desktop.

*I also tried to install the Afterstep Control Panel, a tcl app for
manipulating your .steprc file.  That was relatively painless after I had
gotten TkStep installed.  It's a nice looking app, and fairly intutitive,
but I think it really provides far too many options.

So, what did we learn today?  Well, for one thing, it takes a lot of work
to make a consistent, attractive interface.  I had to pull together about
five different packages, edit Makefiles, reset environment variables and
lots more and I only ended up with two new applications that have the neXt
look and feel.  If I were serious about it, I'd have to go back and
relink all my libaw apps against libneXtaw and probably have to fix
Xdefaults for many of them to make them look right.  A nice set of rpms
and or debs that gets this right might be a nice place to start work on
the seul UI.  We'd probably need to be clever (and somewhat draconian)
with the dependencies to ensure that all of these related tools are
installed together.

Toolkits are a bitch. ;)  No, really, the're great, but it's a pain that
every app seems to use a different one.  In some cases (as with libaw and
it's variants) you can choose a library (and thus a look and feel) at link
time (or runtime, but it's prolly better to link against the fancier
library if you're gonna use it).  The higher level toolkits are much less
compatible.  We need to minimize the number of toolkits we use, both for
consistency and to conserve memory.  Gtk seems to be emerging as the
toolkit of choice for Linux (though it must overcome Qt's headstart).  Any
volunteers for porting xforms/Qt/Motif apps to gtk?

The desktop I've been working on combines the Afterstep Wharf with desktop
icons.  Though I thought this was what I wanted, I beginning to think that
I may be mixing metaphors.  I'll have to play with it some more to decide
how it suits me.  What is perhaps a bigger problem is that the Wharf
really depends on high end graphics to function well.  On my 1024x768
screen I have a nice column of a dozen buttons.  That sounds like plenty,
but by the time I've swallowed a clock, xload, a cd player, xbiff, a
mixer, and set up a few 'standard' buttons (exit, restart, etc.) that
doesn't leave a lot room for buttons to launch apps.  Besides, users that
aren't terribly sophisicated probably need text to tell them what they're
running.  So I don't know what the answer is.

I think I'll stop here.  I know I've kind of spewed a lot of material of
varying quality here, but hopefully it brings some of the issues related
to GUI design into sharper relief.  My little project has brought out more
questions that answers for me, so I think some discussion would be
valuable.

Jay  

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