30 ms·

You mention that no one has figured out how to make GUIs as composable as command lines. I would argue Apple is actually getting there with Shortcuts. Combining

You mention that no one has figured out how to make GUIs as composable as command lines. I would argue Apple is actually getting there with Shortcuts. Combining that with the Share Sheet/Share Menu and you get some pretty nice composability.

avereveard 5y ago
> how to make GUIs as composable as command lines beos did
acuozzo 5y ago
Apple has been there since the start of OS X thanks to NeXT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk
badsectoracula 5y ago
Microsoft did with VBX, OLE and later ActiveX, the entire point was to have embeddable reusable UIs. They sabotaged themselves by tying those to separate products you had to buy though instead of having a simple drag-and-drop form/window designer to put things - basically something like the QBasic equivalent of Visual Basic but also closer to the original idea of VB1 where instead of writing basic code you'd drag connections between controls to activate methods or pipe data between them. X11 supports this by allowing programs to "swallow" each other - the XEmbed protocol as well as normal IPC can be used for communication between them. Older desktop environments and window managers (CDE, FVWM, etc) can use this to compose programs. Some minimalistic window managers rely on this using single-purpose tools like dmenu. BeOS, as mentioned elsewhere also has a very limited form of OLE-like functionality. I'm sure there are others but TBH i think MS came closest, but they abandoned the entire idea after they decided to focus on .NET. FWIW the underlying tech is still there and in theory such QB-like-VB-lite app could be made but nothing really exposes reusable controls anymore so it'd be pointless. After all having the tech and ability is only half the battle at most, you also need applications to support it and nowadays everything GUI is made to be cross platform agnostic so any such solution would need to work everywhere there is a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse - not impossible but much harder nowadays than when computers were synonymous with Windows.
criddell 5y ago
There are consultants that make quite a bit of money writing glue software that automates processing of data through the various Office applications.

avereveard 5y ago

> how to make GUIs as composable as command lines beos did

acuozzo 5y ago

Apple has been there since the start of OS X thanks to NeXT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UiGnpmwAJk

badsectoracula 5y ago

Microsoft did with VBX, OLE and later ActiveX, the entire point was to have embeddable reusable UIs. They sabotaged themselves by tying those to separate products you had to buy though instead of having a simple drag-and-drop form/window designer to put things - basically something like the QBasic equivalent of Visual Basic but also closer to the original idea of VB1 where instead of writing basic code you'd drag connections between controls to activate methods or pipe data between them. X11 supports this by allowing programs to "swallow" each other - the XEmbed protocol as well as normal IPC can be used for communication between them. Older desktop environments and window managers (CDE, FVWM, etc) can use this to compose programs. Some minimalistic window managers rely on this using single-purpose tools like dmenu. BeOS, as mentioned elsewhere also has a very limited form of OLE-like functionality. I'm sure there are others but TBH i think MS came closest, but they abandoned the entire idea after they decided to focus on .NET. FWIW the underlying tech is still there and in theory such QB-like-VB-lite app could be made but nothing really exposes reusable controls anymore so it'd be pointless. After all having the tech and ability is only half the battle at most, you also need applications to support it and nowadays everything GUI is made to be cross platform agnostic so any such solution would need to work everywhere there is a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse - not impossible but much harder nowadays than when computers were synonymous with Windows.

criddell 5y ago

There are consultants that make quite a bit of money writing glue software that automates processing of data through the various Office applications.