[mythtv] New UI lib

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Thu Jan 17 14:30:58 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 12:38 +0000, Stuart Morgan wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 January 2008 03:21:56 Daniel Kristjansson wrote:
> > Hey, I'm going to be in Mountain View on Saturday to talk with Pluto +
> > KDE devs about extending KDE's libplasma so it is usable as an OSD
> > renderer and all around sexy UI library. Pluto is contemplating writing
> > a multimedia authoring program akin to Adobe's flash multimedia
> > authoring program to use with libplasma + a GPLed UI library built on
> > top of it. The idea is to create something that mplayer, MythTV, freevo,
> > etc. could use to take care of compositing and v-sync on various
> > platforms.
> 
> Should I be bothering to convert everything to mythui? :/ I'm not sure from 
> the description whether this is something designed to replace mythui or 
> simply a painting/drawing layer which could be slipped into mythui as a 
> replacement for the QT/GL painters. Obviously I'm hoping the latter since I 
> really don't want to know that I've wasted my time.

Well the design is just getting started, but I do envision it as looking
a lot more like MythUI than our existing Qt based stuff. I think MythUI
will be the UI for MythTV 0.22.

> I do have a number of things I like to suggest for a UI library but not so 
> much time to put them into a coherent, well argued case. In summary we need 
> as few widgets as possible but each one should be flexible, e.g. a single 
> list widget should be able to vertical, horizontal, diagonal and grid layouts 
> instead of having 4 different widgets; this gives power to the themers to 
> create radically different designs.

Yep, this is the idea for this library an idea behind MythUI too.

> It obviously needs to be fully themable, every option you might pass to the 
> widget should be come from the theme. Behaviour, movement and style should 
> never be hardcoded.

I've been looking at intermediary UI languages like OpenLaszlo.
OpenLaszlo has XML defining the UI + javascript to add functionality,
but it doesn't have the type of rendering primitives we need. I also
looked at the UI language that the freevo developers started working
on which was very javascript like with a powerful canvas object.
My leaning is to have XML defining the base UI so that this can be
easily generated and edited from a UI tool + a scripting language
for allowing more advanced behaviours. I would also like to be able
to insert libplasma applets anywhere within the layout.

> I've met Aaron Seigo in person and know that's he's pretty keen on this KDE 
> Media Centre idea which I guess is the driving factor behind this new UI 
> library.

He is someone I've been talking to. I'm still not sure if he can make
it on Saturday. If not, I may be able to pick his brain tomorrow when
he will be in Mountain View.

> Sorry, little bit far to travel at short notice (not to mention pricy or being 
> treated like a criminal by US Border Authorities).

Yeah, I know. I just came back from a trip to Amsterdam a couple weeks
ago and they treat us 'citizens' coming back the same way. :(

-- Daniel



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