7 ms·

7GUIs

507 points by dsego 6y ago

diggan 6y ago
I'd love to see one website/git repository with implementations from every major framework (desktop+web) implementing these 7 GUIs, and have some benchmarks additionally to some E2E tests. Would make it easy to see at a glance what kind of complexity you would get exposed to as a user of that framework. Anyone know any collection? Closest to that that I know about is http://todomvc.com/ http://todomvc.com/ but it's biased in a way that it's very trivial example, geared towards MV* frameworks/libraries and only for web. I fist became familiar with 7GUIs after getting into statecharts of the various flavors, and xState (statecharts in JS) has some of the tasks from 7GUIs implemented: https://xstate.js.org/docs/tutorials/7guis/counter.html https://xstate.js.org/docs/tutorials/7guis/counter.html
- bussierem 6y ago
  You might be looking for something like this? https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld
  - diggan 6y ago
    Yes, that looks like a building block towards what I would want to exist indeed. Thanks for sharing! Pulled down some of repositories listed and ran the provided Postman collection against them. None of them passes all the tests, so seems it's missing a bit of testing infrastructure and possibly centralization, to ensure they all pass the tests. Once that would be in place, it would be easy to add benchmarking to it, to be able to do some honest comparisons. At least it works as a baseline for seeing the complexity of frameworks, so it's still useful.
- pdamoc 6y ago
  there are a lot of implementations (some of them obsolete): https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/implementations https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/implementations
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    I poked around, and it seems nobody managed to implement the spreadsheet task. I guess this says a lot, not sure though if about the implementors or the frameworks.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      Well, not a lot seem to have bothered. There are JS spreadsheet implementations in 200 lines, so it's not that it's very difficult, more like this didn't have enough exposure to attract programmers yet -- for example there's not a Cocoa or SwiftUI implementation.
    - thomasqbrady 6y ago
      Reading through the challenges, the last one seemed like a big leap. Made me think of the “learn to draw” meme that progresses quickly from simple shapes to a simple cartoon and a god leap to a super realistically rendered pencil drawing.
      - mst 6y ago
        The spreadsheet task does rather feel like "draw the rest of the owl", yes.
      - diggan 6y ago
        It might seem complicated at a glance, but if you look through the implementation guidelines / rules / description, it's not that big of a leap. It has clear requirements and the paper[1] outlines everything together with example code (in both JavaFX and ScalaFX), and it's not a "god leap" if you have at least a bit of experience building UIs. - [1] "Comparison of Object-Oriented and Functional Programming for GUI Development" - Eugen Kiss - Page 49 - 3.9 Cells
        WorldMaker 6y ago
        Neither is it really a "god leap" in the art analogue either, that's what makes it a particularly apt analogy, I think. The implication in the art example is "iterate the above techniques a large number of times to obtain a finished result like this". It seems like a "god leap" because most people don't see the thousands/millions of iterated steps, they see the finished product as a finished product without the intuition of the component parts. That does seem to apply to the Cells project here: most of the same underlying components but yes iterated far enough and long enough it seems like a more insurmountable leap than it should without the right intuition pump.
- dmix 6y ago
  Isn’t this the whole idea? Unless you mean more widely used as a baseline test like TodoMVC is.
aninteger 6y ago
IUP's version: https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/7gui/7gui.html https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/7gui/7gui.html
k__ 6y ago
Nice! For web dev I would also add a plain "convert static HTML to a framework based UI", without any interactions as a step zero.
netcyrax 6y ago
If this became popular enough, wouldn't GUI frameworks just optimize for these 7 use cases? And then the benchmark wouldn't be so useful.
- Minor49er 6y ago
  Wouldn't that make them even more useful since these 7 are supposed to represent the most common types of GUI components?
- coldtea 6y ago
  That makes more sense for an e.g. processor benchmark, where people compete to cheat and sell more units. That's not exactly the case in GUI frameworks - where the different axes of evaluation (ex. expressiveness etc) would require lots of changes to logic and API of the framework (as this is not about mere performance). And even if this did happen, optimizing for those 7 use cases would make them (a) better than what they are now, (b) better for 7 very common cases, which cover most of everything.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
benbristow 6y ago
Heads up - The 'Flight Booking Java example in Sodium' link seems to take you to a fake McAfee virus scanning page.
spdegabrielle 6y ago
The Racket (site)[https://racket-lang.org/ https://racket-lang.org/] / (GitHub)[https://github.com/racket https://github.com/racket] implementations are not listed sadly: https://github.com/mfelleisen/7GUI https://github.com/mfelleisen/7GUI
- marvy 6y ago
  Might be worth filing an issue; a glance at the repo suggests that the list is still being actively maintained.
amelius 6y ago
How about a full-fledged rich text editor, with collaborative editing (not uncommon nowadays)?
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  That would be too long to implement. The way I see it is you do these exercises for every GUI frameworks you want to try.
- arendtio 6y ago
  I think on the front of collaborative editing we have too many open (research) questions regarding what the best algorithm for solving 'conflicts' is (OT, CFRD, etc.), so that the actual GUI toolkit doesn't matter so much.
register 6y ago
Is there anything similar that covers other fundamental and common task such as I/O,networking, json, xml, webservice, string manipulation and so on? Or in other words what today is considered as batch processing/system integration?
- exacube 6y ago
  for distributed systems, the assignments from https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ are fantastic. reading material tool, if you want to study and not just do
- H8crilA 6y ago
  UX seems to create an insane volume of different ways for doing the very same thing. In other areas of software engineering you just look at the standard library or commonly used libraries and that's enough. I would imagine that's caused by lack of "science" in the process, in the sense that you can't really measure things. I am trying to imagine how many syscalls would the Linux kernel have if it was designed like the web ecosystem. And more importantly how many of them would stop working after just 1-2 years ...
asp_net 6y ago
JFYI: Unfortunately, Eugen, the author of 7GUIs, has passed away. R.I.P. Edit: Source: https://github.com/eugenkiss/7guis/issues/28#issuecomment-518203146 https://github.com/eugenkiss/7guis/issues/28#issuecomment-51...
- pengaru 6y ago
  Huh, he looks relatively young in his github profile photo, I wonder what happened.
  - cpach 6y ago
    There are many possible reasons. But if his family hasn’t stated anything publicly, perhaps we should not inquire further out of respect for them.
    - pengaru 6y ago
      It's not like I'm suggesting or advocating for harassing his family.
      - cpach 6y ago
        Oh, I did absolutely not suggest that. But without knowing anyone of those involved, I just suggested that they might wish that no more information should be disclosed. That was all.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lostdog 6y ago
The circle drawing and spreadsheet tasks are very interesting, because most GUI frameworks and tutorials just focus on laying out standard widgets and make it difficult to create custom components. Gtk and QT help you when your interface is a bunch of checkboxes and text inputs and buttons, but as soon as you want to plot a curve or make a custom tooltip or a chessboard, all it gives you is a canvas and some pixel commands. Web-based tools, on the other hand, have clearer ways to float divs around, or draw with svg elements, or even if you're just using a canvas they help you lay out your data in a convenient way. Am I missing something about GUI frameworks? As soon as you want to make something complex like Audacity (and audio and waveform editing tool), the frameworks stop being helpful and are just a way to get a blank window.
- joshuak 6y ago
  Actually this is exactly why we use QML. QML makes it easy to create new GUI primitives that can be called in the same way as the standard library widgets. The coding flow is also nice, in that you can start buy embellishing an element inline, and then when it reaches your complexity tolerance or you find other uses for the same component you can literally cut and paste your code into a new file remove hard coded layout and add imports and you've got your new custom GUI widget.
- detaro 6y ago
  You make a waveform display widget (where indeed, drawing the waveform is something you implement), and position that using the frameworks layouting options, position sub-elements using the framework tools, use event-handling mechanisms the framework provides, ... Just because you need one piece with custom rendering doesn't mean the framework isn't helpful for everything else, and often it brings tools for that too - e.g. plenty of Qt apps use SVG support for rendering graphics that fit the SVG model well, it has its own graphicsview features that do a lot more than a plain canvas, ...
- gmueckl 6y ago
  Well, I don't think you had a good look at toolkits like Qt. They provide a lot more than just a bumch of widget and window frames. There are application framework style features in there like a very capable undo stack, abstractions over resource loading, MVC pattern implementations, plugin loading, ... Also, advanced toolkits like WPF and Qt allow you to build upon existing controls and extent and nest them in really interesting ways to create powerful UIs. You can also do pretty crazy fringe stuff easily like adding arbitrary widgets to context menus. Arbitrary widgets within list view or tree view items are probably more useful. The trick is to take as much of that composability as you can for your use case and build upon it. (I am sure other mature toolkits have similar properties, but Ibam not familiar with them to the same extent)
boterock 6y ago
Would love to see immediate mode GUI toolkits like Dear ImGUI [1] in the implementations section. [1] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
xixixao 6y ago
What extensions can people think of? What is #8, #9 on this progression? A different angle would be to introduce server-single-client interop to each application (starting with counter). Then multiplayer. Another one is to show how easy it is to take one instance and add another on the screen. Any singletons preventing this? How easy it is to then connect the two instances / drive them from another source of data.
- akiselev 6y ago
  Off the top of my head: #8 Error handling: on an exception, does the whole app crash? What parts of it become unusable? What are the reset paths? #9 Data consistency indicators: how functional is the UI when in a fallible state like server updates? (In multiplayer games this would be stuff like client side prediction and reconciliation) What is the recovery path so that data isn't lost across many users? CRDTs and their competitors solve it for document editing but what about general purpose GUIs? #10 User driven layout: Plugins, configurable UI elements, and a panel manager like you'd find in most IDEs. #11 Automation/accessibility: mapping UI actions to command line calls or a scriptable layer (former for technical fields like EDA packages, latter for more GUI centric stuff like line of business app). Automation and accessibility are two distinct factors but the implementation details align almost perfectly. Bonus #12: Remote execution for secure GUIs and ultra high processing power collaboration - think stuff like graphical CAD/FEA simulator with an entire bridge assembly. This is usually only possible with X or if you stream something like display lists/GL calls from a browser engine on the server to a client renderer. I've seen #8-10 absolutely tear through every UI architecture I've ever seen and #11 is important because it's a nonstarter (or should be) for any serious application that goes out to the public, especially as the ADA's reach expands. The latter requires deep integration with any platform it's on so sadly would eliminate all but the big well funded GUI packages. #12 has broad implications on how humans interface with computers but I've never seen it implemented at the GUI framework level - think WASM style bytecode for streaming UI state updates (I think ember.js's renderer works this way?).
  - AndriyKunitsyn 6y ago
    I don't quite get #8. An exception should be handled where we expect it, depending on a reason for the exception. If something totally unexpected happened, it's better to let the whole app crash than to let it continue running in a corrupted state (unless it's a software for nuclear plants), isn't it?
29athrowaway 6y ago
With Visual Basic you could do these 7 things very, very quickly.
- sossles 6y ago
  True for most, but it wouldn't be so great on the spreadsheet one due to the data structures involved. c# would be my pick.
nixpulvis 6y ago
I decided to try out drawing these GUIs on my new e-ink tablet: https://i.ibb.co/n6Xbd69/5-FDDAD87-F397-4-A0-C-92-B0-1243-B8-CBD950.jpg https://i.ibb.co/n6Xbd69/5-FDDAD87-F397-4-A0-C-92-B0-1243-B8...
- scroot 6y ago
  What is sad here is that you are drawing on a computer (and a pretty advanced one at that), and you can draw buttons, but you can't make them "do" anything.
  - nixpulvis 6y ago
    I appreciate how much of the interface was written for this tablet (I can even SSH into it over USB-C), but the OS still seems pretty locked down, which is sad indeed.
    - scroot 6y ago
      Yeah I also have a Remarkable (2), and the potential is all there but the execution on the software side -- beyond the excellent drawing capabilities -- is stunningly unimaginative
      - nixpulvis 6y ago
        IDK, Ethernet over USB seemed really smart, as did self-hosting a little web server for upload/download. It's all pretty basic still though... I don't want this thing cluttered up with a bunch of bullshit. This is why I really want access to make more modifications to it more easily. That said, I poked around the OS a bit and have access to root, so it stands to reason hacking on this thing isn't insanely restrictive already. Would be really amazing if Remarkable gave out their UI toolkit though.
mikewarot 6y ago
What are reasonable times for completion of each of the tasks? My rusty Lazarus/Free Pascal coding times so far are: 1) Counter - 10 minutes 2) TempConv - 30 minutes Code is up on github: https://github.com/mikewarot/7guis https://github.com/mikewarot/7guis The only tricky bit I see is expression evaluation in the spreadsheet, the rest is straightforward.

507 points by dsego 6y ago

I'd love to see one website/git repository with implementations from every major framework (desktop+web) implementing these 7 GUIs, and have some benchmarks additionally to some E2E tests. Would make it easy to see at a glance what kind of complexity you would get exposed to as a user of that framework. Anyone know any collection? Closest to that that I know about is http://todomvc.com/ http://todomvc.com/ but it's biased in a way that it's very trivial example, geared towards MV* frameworks/libraries and only for web. I fist became familiar with 7GUIs after getting into statecharts of the various flavors, and xState (statecharts in JS) has some of the tasks from 7GUIs implemented: https://xstate.js.org/docs/tutorials/7guis/counter.html https://xstate.js.org/docs/tutorials/7guis/counter.html

bussierem 6y ago
You might be looking for something like this? https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld
- diggan 6y ago
  Yes, that looks like a building block towards what I would want to exist indeed. Thanks for sharing! Pulled down some of repositories listed and ran the provided Postman collection against them. None of them passes all the tests, so seems it's missing a bit of testing infrastructure and possibly centralization, to ensure they all pass the tests. Once that would be in place, it would be easy to add benchmarking to it, to be able to do some honest comparisons. At least it works as a baseline for seeing the complexity of frameworks, so it's still useful.
pdamoc 6y ago
there are a lot of implementations (some of them obsolete): https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/implementations https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/implementations
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  I poked around, and it seems nobody managed to implement the spreadsheet task. I guess this says a lot, not sure though if about the implementors or the frameworks.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Well, not a lot seem to have bothered. There are JS spreadsheet implementations in 200 lines, so it's not that it's very difficult, more like this didn't have enough exposure to attract programmers yet -- for example there's not a Cocoa or SwiftUI implementation.
  - thomasqbrady 6y ago
    Reading through the challenges, the last one seemed like a big leap. Made me think of the “learn to draw” meme that progresses quickly from simple shapes to a simple cartoon and a god leap to a super realistically rendered pencil drawing.
    - mst 6y ago
      The spreadsheet task does rather feel like "draw the rest of the owl", yes.
    - diggan 6y ago
      It might seem complicated at a glance, but if you look through the implementation guidelines / rules / description, it's not that big of a leap. It has clear requirements and the paper[1] outlines everything together with example code (in both JavaFX and ScalaFX), and it's not a "god leap" if you have at least a bit of experience building UIs. - [1] "Comparison of Object-Oriented and Functional Programming for GUI Development" - Eugen Kiss - Page 49 - 3.9 Cells
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        Neither is it really a "god leap" in the art analogue either, that's what makes it a particularly apt analogy, I think. The implication in the art example is "iterate the above techniques a large number of times to obtain a finished result like this". It seems like a "god leap" because most people don't see the thousands/millions of iterated steps, they see the finished product as a finished product without the intuition of the component parts. That does seem to apply to the Cells project here: most of the same underlying components but yes iterated far enough and long enough it seems like a more insurmountable leap than it should without the right intuition pump.
dmix 6y ago
Isn’t this the whole idea? Unless you mean more widely used as a baseline test like TodoMVC is.

aninteger 6y ago

IUP's version: https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/7gui/7gui.html https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/7gui/7gui.html

k__ 6y ago

Nice! For web dev I would also add a plain "convert static HTML to a framework based UI", without any interactions as a step zero.

netcyrax 6y ago

If this became popular enough, wouldn't GUI frameworks just optimize for these 7 use cases? And then the benchmark wouldn't be so useful.

Minor49er 6y ago
Wouldn't that make them even more useful since these 7 are supposed to represent the most common types of GUI components?
coldtea 6y ago
That makes more sense for an e.g. processor benchmark, where people compete to cheat and sell more units. That's not exactly the case in GUI frameworks - where the different axes of evaluation (ex. expressiveness etc) would require lots of changes to logic and API of the framework (as this is not about mere performance). And even if this did happen, optimizing for those 7 use cases would make them (a) better than what they are now, (b) better for 7 very common cases, which cover most of everything.
orthoxerox 6y ago
https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/

benbristow 6y ago

Heads up - The 'Flight Booking Java example in Sodium' link seems to take you to a fake McAfee virus scanning page.

spdegabrielle 6y ago

The Racket (site)[https://racket-lang.org/ https://racket-lang.org/] / (GitHub)[https://github.com/racket https://github.com/racket] implementations are not listed sadly: https://github.com/mfelleisen/7GUI https://github.com/mfelleisen/7GUI

marvy 6y ago
Might be worth filing an issue; a glance at the repo suggests that the list is still being actively maintained.

amelius 6y ago

How about a full-fledged rich text editor, with collaborative editing (not uncommon nowadays)?

jmnicolas 6y ago
That would be too long to implement. The way I see it is you do these exercises for every GUI frameworks you want to try.
arendtio 6y ago
I think on the front of collaborative editing we have too many open (research) questions regarding what the best algorithm for solving 'conflicts' is (OT, CFRD, etc.), so that the actual GUI toolkit doesn't matter so much.

Is there anything similar that covers other fundamental and common task such as I/O,networking, json, xml, webservice, string manipulation and so on? Or in other words what today is considered as batch processing/system integration?

exacube 6y ago
for distributed systems, the assignments from https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/ are fantastic. reading material tool, if you want to study and not just do
H8crilA 6y ago
UX seems to create an insane volume of different ways for doing the very same thing. In other areas of software engineering you just look at the standard library or commonly used libraries and that's enough. I would imagine that's caused by lack of "science" in the process, in the sense that you can't really measure things. I am trying to imagine how many syscalls would the Linux kernel have if it was designed like the web ecosystem. And more importantly how many of them would stop working after just 1-2 years ...

asp_net 6y ago

JFYI: Unfortunately, Eugen, the author of 7GUIs, has passed away. R.I.P. Edit: Source: https://github.com/eugenkiss/7guis/issues/28#issuecomment-518203146 https://github.com/eugenkiss/7guis/issues/28#issuecomment-51...

pengaru 6y ago
Huh, he looks relatively young in his github profile photo, I wonder what happened.
- cpach 6y ago
  There are many possible reasons. But if his family hasn’t stated anything publicly, perhaps we should not inquire further out of respect for them.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    It's not like I'm suggesting or advocating for harassing his family.
    - cpach 6y ago
      Oh, I did absolutely not suggest that. But without knowing anyone of those involved, I just suggested that they might wish that no more information should be disclosed. That was all.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lostdog 6y ago

The circle drawing and spreadsheet tasks are very interesting, because most GUI frameworks and tutorials just focus on laying out standard widgets and make it difficult to create custom components. Gtk and QT help you when your interface is a bunch of checkboxes and text inputs and buttons, but as soon as you want to plot a curve or make a custom tooltip or a chessboard, all it gives you is a canvas and some pixel commands. Web-based tools, on the other hand, have clearer ways to float divs around, or draw with svg elements, or even if you're just using a canvas they help you lay out your data in a convenient way. Am I missing something about GUI frameworks? As soon as you want to make something complex like Audacity (and audio and waveform editing tool), the frameworks stop being helpful and are just a way to get a blank window.

joshuak 6y ago
Actually this is exactly why we use QML. QML makes it easy to create new GUI primitives that can be called in the same way as the standard library widgets. The coding flow is also nice, in that you can start buy embellishing an element inline, and then when it reaches your complexity tolerance or you find other uses for the same component you can literally cut and paste your code into a new file remove hard coded layout and add imports and you've got your new custom GUI widget.
detaro 6y ago
You make a waveform display widget (where indeed, drawing the waveform is something you implement), and position that using the frameworks layouting options, position sub-elements using the framework tools, use event-handling mechanisms the framework provides, ... Just because you need one piece with custom rendering doesn't mean the framework isn't helpful for everything else, and often it brings tools for that too - e.g. plenty of Qt apps use SVG support for rendering graphics that fit the SVG model well, it has its own graphicsview features that do a lot more than a plain canvas, ...
gmueckl 6y ago
Well, I don't think you had a good look at toolkits like Qt. They provide a lot more than just a bumch of widget and window frames. There are application framework style features in there like a very capable undo stack, abstractions over resource loading, MVC pattern implementations, plugin loading, ... Also, advanced toolkits like WPF and Qt allow you to build upon existing controls and extent and nest them in really interesting ways to create powerful UIs. You can also do pretty crazy fringe stuff easily like adding arbitrary widgets to context menus. Arbitrary widgets within list view or tree view items are probably more useful. The trick is to take as much of that composability as you can for your use case and build upon it. (I am sure other mature toolkits have similar properties, but Ibam not familiar with them to the same extent)

boterock 6y ago

Would love to see immediate mode GUI toolkits like Dear ImGUI [1] in the implementations section. [1] https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

xixixao 6y ago

What extensions can people think of? What is #8, #9 on this progression? A different angle would be to introduce server-single-client interop to each application (starting with counter). Then multiplayer. Another one is to show how easy it is to take one instance and add another on the screen. Any singletons preventing this? How easy it is to then connect the two instances / drive them from another source of data.

akiselev 6y ago
Off the top of my head: #8 Error handling: on an exception, does the whole app crash? What parts of it become unusable? What are the reset paths? #9 Data consistency indicators: how functional is the UI when in a fallible state like server updates? (In multiplayer games this would be stuff like client side prediction and reconciliation) What is the recovery path so that data isn't lost across many users? CRDTs and their competitors solve it for document editing but what about general purpose GUIs? #10 User driven layout: Plugins, configurable UI elements, and a panel manager like you'd find in most IDEs. #11 Automation/accessibility: mapping UI actions to command line calls or a scriptable layer (former for technical fields like EDA packages, latter for more GUI centric stuff like line of business app). Automation and accessibility are two distinct factors but the implementation details align almost perfectly. Bonus #12: Remote execution for secure GUIs and ultra high processing power collaboration - think stuff like graphical CAD/FEA simulator with an entire bridge assembly. This is usually only possible with X or if you stream something like display lists/GL calls from a browser engine on the server to a client renderer. I've seen #8-10 absolutely tear through every UI architecture I've ever seen and #11 is important because it's a nonstarter (or should be) for any serious application that goes out to the public, especially as the ADA's reach expands. The latter requires deep integration with any platform it's on so sadly would eliminate all but the big well funded GUI packages. #12 has broad implications on how humans interface with computers but I've never seen it implemented at the GUI framework level - think WASM style bytecode for streaming UI state updates (I think ember.js's renderer works this way?).
- AndriyKunitsyn 6y ago
  I don't quite get #8. An exception should be handled where we expect it, depending on a reason for the exception. If something totally unexpected happened, it's better to let the whole app crash than to let it continue running in a corrupted state (unless it's a software for nuclear plants), isn't it?

29athrowaway 6y ago

With Visual Basic you could do these 7 things very, very quickly.

sossles 6y ago
True for most, but it wouldn't be so great on the spreadsheet one due to the data structures involved. c# would be my pick.

nixpulvis 6y ago

I decided to try out drawing these GUIs on my new e-ink tablet: https://i.ibb.co/n6Xbd69/5-FDDAD87-F397-4-A0-C-92-B0-1243-B8-CBD950.jpg https://i.ibb.co/n6Xbd69/5-FDDAD87-F397-4-A0-C-92-B0-1243-B8...

scroot 6y ago
What is sad here is that you are drawing on a computer (and a pretty advanced one at that), and you can draw buttons, but you can't make them "do" anything.
- nixpulvis 6y ago
  I appreciate how much of the interface was written for this tablet (I can even SSH into it over USB-C), but the OS still seems pretty locked down, which is sad indeed.
  - scroot 6y ago
    Yeah I also have a Remarkable (2), and the potential is all there but the execution on the software side -- beyond the excellent drawing capabilities -- is stunningly unimaginative
    - nixpulvis 6y ago
      IDK, Ethernet over USB seemed really smart, as did self-hosting a little web server for upload/download. It's all pretty basic still though... I don't want this thing cluttered up with a bunch of bullshit. This is why I really want access to make more modifications to it more easily. That said, I poked around the OS a bit and have access to root, so it stands to reason hacking on this thing isn't insanely restrictive already. Would be really amazing if Remarkable gave out their UI toolkit though.

mikewarot 6y ago

What are reasonable times for completion of each of the tasks? My rusty Lazarus/Free Pascal coding times so far are: 1) Counter - 10 minutes 2) TempConv - 30 minutes Code is up on github: https://github.com/mikewarot/7guis https://github.com/mikewarot/7guis The only tricky bit I see is expression evaluation in the spreadsheet, the rest is straightforward.