Most of the Self's animation effects described in "Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface" do not seem to be present in the latest version. e.g. Use of cartoon-style motion blur allows Self objects to move quickly and still maintain their comprehensibility. Self objects arrive and depart smoothly, without sudden materializations and disappearances, and they rise to the front of overlapping objects smoothly through the use of dissolve. Anticipating motion with a small contrary motion…
Were these ever used in practice? If so, why were they removed?
Thanks, Sean
Hi Sean,
As I understand it, most of those were used in practice (and look pretty good!) for the original UI (dubbed retrospectively UI1) and didn't completely make it over into Morphic, the current GUI (UI2).
UI1 is still in the source tree and runs, but only on X11. Are you on Linux or Mac? I can do a quick howto list if you want to play with it.
Best, Russell
On 4 Feb 2014, at 3:32 am, sean@clipperadams.com wrote:
Most of the Self's animation effects described in "Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface" do not seem to be present in the latest version. e.g.
Use of cartoon-style motion blur allows Self objects to move quickly and still maintain their comprehensibility. Self objects arrive and depart smoothly, without sudden materializations and disappearances, and they rise to the front of overlapping objects smoothly through the use of dissolve. Anticipating motion with a small contrary motion…
Were these ever used in practice? If so, why were they removed?
Thanks, Sean
On Feb 3, 2014, at 5:23 PM, Russell Allen mail@russell-allen.com wrote:
As I understand it, most of those were used in practice (and look pretty good!) for the original UI (dubbed retrospectively UI1) and didn't completely make it over into Morphic, the current GUI (UI2).
Ah, yes. Okay, I found a few videos of it being demoed.
UI1 is still in the source tree and runs, but only on X11. Are you on Linux or Mac? I can do a quick howto list if you want to play with it.
That would be great. Thanks.
HI Sean,
I've put a description of how to get UI1 working below. I'll add it to the Handbook. If you do manage to follow this (or if you don't!) it'd be great if you could help out with documenting the process.
Depending on your platform, I think the hardest bit is getting a 256 color window open on a recent X windows installation. This is something getting trickier rapidly, so if we want to keep UI1 runnable we may need to fix this at the Self end.
Cheers, Russell
******************** The Original Self UI ********************
Last updated 4 February 2014 for Self 4.5.0
Before Self used the current `morphic` user interface (also known as `UI2`) it used another, nameless, user interface framework which has been retrospectively dubbed `ui1`.
------------------- X11 with 256 Colors -------------------
UI1 only runs on 8 bit X11 systems. There are a number of suggested ways to get a 8 bit X11 window on modern systems detailed at `WineHQ`_.
On OS X systems, you will need to install XQuartz if you are running Mountain Lion (10.8) or later. You will need to set the color depth to 256 colors in the Preferences, then restart XQuartz.
.. _WineHQ: http://wiki.winehq.org/256ColorMode .. _XQuartz: http://xquartz.macosforge.org
------------------- VM with X11 support -------------------
The standard Linux VM already has X11 primitives. However the standard Mac VM doesn't, so that users can run Self on Macs without requiring X11 to be installed. You can either build a OS X VM which includes X11 support yourself as described :doc:`the section on building the VM <buildvm>` or download one from the Self fileserver.
-------------------- Preparing a snapshot --------------------
The first step in using UI1 is to build a new World including it. Assuming you are in the `objects` directory in the Self source tree, and that the Self vm is in your path, do::
Self -f worldBuilder.self
and when it asks you::
Load UI1 (X11 only)? (y/N)
answer `y`. When the World has built, save it at the prompt by doing:
save quitNoSave
This will save a snapshot of the world in the file 'Snapshot'.
--------------- Starting the UI ---------------
Once you have a 256 colour X11 desktop running, you can start your Self world and start using UI1 by::
preferences xDisplay: ':0' "This is only needed if different to $DISPLAY environment variable" ui demo
On 4 Feb 2014, at 12:24 pm, Sean DeNigris sean@clipperadams.com wrote:
On Feb 3, 2014, at 5:23 PM, Russell Allen mail@russell-allen.com wrote:
As I understand it, most of those were used in practice (and look pretty good!) for the original UI (dubbed retrospectively UI1) and didn't completely make it over into Morphic, the current GUI (UI2).
Ah, yes. Okay, I found a few videos of it being demoed.
UI1 is still in the source tree and runs, but only on X11. Are you on Linux or Mac? I can do a quick howto list if you want to play with it.
That would be great. Thanks.
self-interest@lists.selflanguage.org
-
Russell Allen -
Sean DeNigris -
sean＠clipperadams.com