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#gui

14 posts10 participants2 posts today
Public *
Blake Patterson

Thinking of NEXTSTEP this morning...I'd guess many aren't aware of the unusual color display arrangement.

The NeXTstation, which was the first "affordable" color solution for NEXTSTEP, has a 16-bit framebuffer, but instead of rendering the desktop in 65,536 colors (as per Windows or Mac hardware, say), it rendered in 12-bit color with 4-bits of alpha channel (transparency).

That means it had a palette of 4096 colors, with all colors available at once on the display (not like, say, the Amiga or Apple IIgs with a 4096 color palette, but video modes with a small subset of those colors available (yes, yes, HAM mode excluded). Additionally, anything on the screen had 16 levels of opacity available.

It's interesting to see in person, on the actual hardware (especially on a good LCD display). With dithering, it looks very close to 24-bit truecolor.

(The NeXT Dimension color board for the Cube allowed 24-bit color with 8-bits alpha, but that was not so frequently used -- less so than most NeXT hardware even...)

But that's not nearly the weirdest that NEXTSTEP-capable hardware got, when it came to color video display...

OpenStep CD icon
#NeXT#NEXTSTEP#NeXTstation
Replied in thread
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Blake Patterson

@bitnacht Good point, re: the busy bee.

As for the spinning disc (or "beachball"), it got its start in NEXTSTEP as a greyscale spinning magneto-optical disc rendering indicating the system is busy / data is loading, which was seen quite often on the early NeXT Cube, as it came with no HD but only an MO drive, and it used that drive for _swap_, if you can imagine...

That spinning disc became color when NEXTSTEP gained a color display on later hardware, and from there it evolved into the spinning "beachball" we know today (macOS being structurally based upon and evolved from NEXTSTEP/OPENSTEP).

EDIT: Oh, I think I misread - you are talking about the busy mouse pointer icon in Windows, I think. I'm not sure of its specific history. Apologies.

NEXTSTEP OS loading screen showing spinning magento-optical mouse pointer icon indicating that the system is busy
Shot showing the evolution from NEXTSTEP's color spinning MO-disc to the curretn macOS spinning beachball indicating system is busy
#macOS#NeXT#NEXTSTEP
Public
Develer

⚡️ Slint: 4 librerie per GUI #embedded a confronto ⚡️

@lucaotta, nei suoi articoli, sta portando avanti un confronto tra librerie per #GUI embedded.
Oggi ci parla di #Slint, una libreria moderna, che pone notevole accento sulla facilità di sviluppo e sul tooling, e con termini di licenza accessibili.

Leggi il blog post: bit.ly/3wZe16v

Develer · Slint: 4 librerie per GUI embedded a confrontoSlint è una libreria moderna, che pone notevole accento sulla facilità di sviluppo e sul tooling, e con termini di licenza accessibili.
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Steven Rosenberg

I just made an Erlang GUI "Hello World" in a Fedora 41 Toolbox.

$ toolbox create erlang

$ toolbox enter erlang

$ sudo dnf install erlang

$ erl -smp

1> wx:new().
{wx_ref,0,wx,[]}

2> M = wxMessageDialog:new(wx:null(), "Hello World").
{wx_ref,35,wxMessageDialog,[]}

3> wxMessageDialog:showModal(M).

Thanks to:

arifishaq.wordpress.com/wp-con

wxerlang.dougedmunds.com/

A three-line Erlang program produces a simple "Hello World" GUI window in a KDE Plasma Linux desktop.
#erlang#gui#fedora
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