[sldev] Re: New Viewer Shell Proposal

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 23-Aug-2007, at 11:17, Chance Unknown wrote:
> now give me a clue on what common UI widget set is already
> available on such a diverse bunch of operating systems?

Apart from the fact that there aren't OpenGL bindings for all those  
operating systems and at least one does not even run on any computer  
powerful enough for SL, and that I wasn't talking about the  
implementation but the look-and-feel? Apart from all that? I can  
think of one off the top of my head... Tk.

I'm pretty sure Tk has been ported to all of them except BeOS... with  
native look-and-feel on everything SL currently runs on... and it has  
bindings for Tcl, Perl, Lua, and Scheme for scripting... about the  
only major scripting language that doesn't have a Tk binding already  
is Javascript.

Ref: http://wiki.tcl.tk/17264, http://wiki.tcl.tk/2420.

Making Tk the top level and running the SL UI in an OpenGL canvas  
widget would give us all kinds of cool functionality.

Going the other direction? There's been a number of GUI-inside-OpenGL  
toolkits, but they all seem to be defunct.

Now on a completely different issue: I agree ... there are definitely  
support issues going to native widgets. But not using native widgets  
is really hurting SL's ability to support multiple top-level windows  
and there are definite user-interface problems on MacOS because of  
SL's non-standard key bindings. Do you see a way to address these  
problems inside the current framework? The Linden proposal seems to  
be going in a completely different direction.