Create accountLogin

Recent searches

No recent searches

Search options

Not available on dice.camp.
dice.camp is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A Mastodon server for RPG folks to hang out and talk. Not owned by a billionaire.

Administered by:

Server stats:

1.6K
active users

dice.camp: AboutProfiles directoryPrivacy policy

Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.3.7

#gui

2 posts2 participants0 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
Public *
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
Lynnesbæn :bune_ylw:

i've been using relm4 for a while and i'm really happy with it. i love the #elm architecture - your app's state is a struct (or object), your user interface is rendered by a function that takes your state and returns a tree of widgets (or similar), widgets emit messages, messages modify state. i find it so much cleaner and easier to wrap my head around than traditional imperative methods or MVVM.

what are some other nice cross-platform #desktop app frameworks that use this architecture? i'm mainly familiar with #relm4 and #iced in #rust. :boost_requested:

relm4.orgRelm4
#programming#gui#linux
Public
Tom

Weird question, I'm wondering.

Is there a correlation between decorating your house and customising your computer's GUI (Desktop)?

· 5 people · Closed
#computer#house#decorating
Public
Rachel Wil Singh ~ Moos-a-dee

As I use Canvas LMS, I am more convinced that we shouldn't let web developers just invent their own basic UI widgets like buttons, check boxes, etc. lol.

Make them assemble pages like in Visual Basic.

Canvas LMS checkboxes let you check the boxes about 75% of the time? If they didn't build their own GUI and used some standardization maybe I could check "this quiz question corresponds to course catalog requirement IV-3-a" 100% of the time.

#rant#GUI#internet
Public
attila

I want to like Tuba, I really do, but it is SO ... SLOW. Not just in normal interaction (yes, that's slow), but when it goes to fetch new toots it just jumps out of the window for minutes at a time and due to the shit that is GNOME/Gtk4 that means all the window-level controls are dead: can't iconify, can't move it aside, ... and no, I don't use GNOME as an environmeng and tbh I don't understand why anyone does.

Whalebird is worse, performance-wise. Tokodon is at least as bad.

Is there no deck-style native Fediverse client for Linux? Preferably that is not based on Gtk4/anything GNOMEish?

#mastodon#fediverse#clients
ExploreLive feeds
About