UI ideas/questions or can we animate things as smooth as iPhone?

[Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri]

On 6/8/07, Silva, Daniel <danielsilva at danielsilva.net> wrote:
> The problem with evas as i see it, is the available developer pool.
> GTK as of now is more mature and has many more knowledged developers
> available.

If you mean developer with real knowledge of the platform, even GTK
doesn't have much, and those that do know will easily change back and
forth ETK, for example, since API and design is similar, ETK can even
load Glade files using Enhance.

BUT, unlike GTK, you can just mix form-oriented ETK parts inside your
beauty custom UI, just check etk_test or ewl_test and embedded
components. You can have something like "canola"
(http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/) and then the password form could
fade in or slide from some component (thats why we, the canola team,
are working on EFL).
   To do that with GTK, you'd need to mess with ARGB windows,
Composite extension and window manager. MUCH more work for something
that may not even look as cool as what you get with EFL :-(


> One other problem is that i don't see many language bindings for EFL ( at
> least mature )
> other than Ruby, that could hinder a bit future development/support for more
> languages.

I wrote python bindings for Evas, Ecore, Edje and Emotion in about 1
week, it's not 100% but good enough. I plan to take on ETK as soon as
I need it.  ETK also have bindings in Perl.


> Another option, i just thought it abiut it now, is to loose GTK and EFL
> altogether and use
> Cairo to render all the widgets, its has many backends already available
> including X, DirectFB and OpenGL so
> that wouldn't be an issue, it also has bindings for MANY languages so that
> isn't an issue either.

Do you really know what Cairo, GTK or EFL are? Maybe some
misunderstandings here. While Cairo is almost like Evas, in the sense
it renders the scene, EFL also have Edje, a theme system and atop of
these ETK a toolkit system (like GTK). So, you have Evas engine to use
Cairo (not updated), that will enable you to use ETK on top of
Cairo... but then, what's the point of using Cairo? Remember that
vector operations are bit expensive on our devices and on bitmap
images, Evas is really efficient and optimized.


> It would require some initial work to program all the widgets, but i believe
> in the long run it would pay off.

I don't.. I just don't get what people have against Evas. I'm not a
old-time Evas user/developer, but I like to know alternatives so I
always check Qt, Gtk, Efl... and  so far the best graphics engine is
Qt4, followed by EFL and then GTK. With Qt being huge and people
against its licensing schemes (which is GPL, so I really don't get
this too), we're left with EFL and GTK, that can even work together
and coexist... so why don't use EFL instead of inventing
yet-another-lib?

PS: so far, the major "problem" integrating EFL and GTK is that EFL
uses Ecore as its main loop, while GTK use Glib, these main-loop use
same concepts, but have different primitives, possible one can be
implemented on top of the other, but by using a GUI thread is enough.

-- 
Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri
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