It is showcased in the SGI Indigo Magic Desktop.
You can build similar GUI apps with FLTK today
6,513 karma · joined September 5, 2014
Main focus: Embedded, small scale systems
I have done a lot with CAD, PLM, and enterprise level engineering software, and have more than a passing interest in UX.
Additive Manufacturing is cool, and what I do now. Polymer printing and soon DED metal!
doug.dingus@gmail.com
You can build similar GUI apps with FLTK today
I bought Redhawks 5.2 or .3 in the big box, bought the Linux Bible and went to town.
Was running Sgi IRIX full time back then. When Linux booted, I had two thoughts!
(Glances at spiffy Sgi Indigo Magic Desktop)
1) Hoo Boy, we have a long way to go
, and
2) YES, a lot is possible today!
Good times.
It must be in combination with one or more of the intersex conditions, yes?
I just wrote up thread about a recurring chat between my wife and I all about what if Men got this disease... the law would change quickly!
Old Note 9, Chrome and Firefox.
Non flagship mobile devices could very well choke on one of those pages, but most newer devices should display these pages with little grief.
In my view, there is one universe. We are in it. It cycles from maximum to minimum condition endlessly. This cycle is much longer than any entity lifespan and for any entity, the current state is THE state for them, and all they will know and become.
What does it expand into?
Nothing. Space itself just gets bigger and smaller over time.
No beginning, no end. It all just is.
Kidding! (Though there is truth in my snark)
Always happy to see research funded.
No 365, lol and the Win 10 pro license was $5 (electronicsfirst.com)
Libre Office is GREAT. I have not used it in a while. In a couple hours, I had my styles, fonts and goodies all setup.
Making docs and a fairly detailed presentation were a pleasure.
Office is degrading rapidly right now!
(Has cleared overgrowth consisting of both vines and grasses roughly a meter high give or take some)
What you do is tip the mower up, holding the handle near the ground and push it right into the mess. Then lower it down, essentially taking a "bite", which will cut many folded over plants.
Pull back, then tip and advance repeatedly, cutting more each time.
I cleared a quarter acre this way. Took one hard afternoon and a couple tanks of gas.
I remember a lot. One oddity with me is I seem to remember an unusual amount when it is connected to a question. I seem to record for a while, then can play back.
And this sticks, sometimes for years until the question is resolved. Then a bunch of it fades and becomes like most other memories are.
I remember every year of school and a lot of related activities. Saturdays out playing, or first concert, that sort of thing.
So, why am I not fine?
Take 9/11
I remember the state before that day. We have come a long way since then.
Too far, if you ask me.
Cops in schools. There were no police in my schools. Kids made mistakes, teens demonstrated poor judgement, and other things..
They were treated like kids.. today??
They have records..
I worked for one company for too long. The culture shifted. Soon, I felt like the stranger. I held the history nobody else did, or if they did, they did not share.
Now, I do consider these mostly nice problems to have. I have options and can exercise them.
Thought you might appreciate some perspective.
I enjoyed this piece.
That is also why very large numbers of people do not participate in many areas of the economy.
Guess I will now always fetch a text editor. Having the simple character only notepad is great. It is general purpose stripping tool. Paste there, pick up just text, move on.
Doing that, and editing text files are the two things I use the program for.
Adding formatting breaks the paste to strip function, leaving only editing text files, and now I don't know what the program will insert.
Who decides this stuff?
In 11 we are already getting a ton of low value, many believe high cost and risk features we do not want. Continuing to piss in the OS is not helpful.
It took quite a bit of tinkering to get rid of both the nag ad and Copilot installer appearing every morning.
I won't need to do that with notepad thankfully.
But it would not surprise me a bit to learn Notepad includes a key logger to improve things by learning more about how we edit text files...
Clowns. Seriously.
My TV is 3D. Bought it because of that and my SGI experiences.
Sadly, we botched 3D TV and few owners ever really got to use that tool to potential.
I am likely to have ADHD. Was never diagnosed as a youth because I never allowed it. Seriously! Growing up during the late 70's and 80's was a weird time for these things.
My mistrust in all of that came from watching friends get diagnosed then medicated. Then most of those people kind of shut down. Some presented very differently, generally not in a good way, as far as I was concerned.
A few personas I loved just got medicated away.
So... nope. Not gonna happen. I threw up a barrier that took well into maybe my late 30's to come down.
I had decided very young that I was in charge of who I was, nobody else and was fairly aware of all that during formative years. My trust was literally zero on that front, unless knowing someone would, in my eyes, be good for me.
From there, I identified with who I thought were pretty great people and the rest got the Okie Dokie, next treatment.
These days seem different for sure.
I knew damn well I was not neurotypical, a word that did not appear for many years ahead of my own struggles, and frankly that had to be OK, because I needed to be OK to exist as me. Who were others to say otherwise?
Today, seems like we live in a more permissive society than we did before. I do know my own perception is keen for having managed my own struggles. I can reach others and help. No meds needed, just real trust and the right experiences.
Sometimes meds are needed too. I feel they are used in lazy ways too often. Other means should be first.
And my beef with the meds boils down to how effective the right experiences can be.
Kid has anger management issues?
Medicate!
Or.. maybe put then into a wrestling club and see them mello right out and become a great, fairly tolerant person.
Both can work well, and both can go badly too.
It mostly boils down to how the humans in charge of debugging and empowering the young humans handle problems and the tools they use.
IMHO people reached for the meds far too often back then.
Maybe we are now too permissive, not doing enough to tease out the best in people, coping instead.
What I like most in your take is you are self aware and have others like you to build on.
I did not. Or, I did, but finding them and experiencing what you are was a lot harder, due to how less connected everyone was back then.
What I did was seek good mentors. Found them and came up OK, and capable. You appear to be getting after the same thing.
Good!
It all starts with self acceptance and awareness. From there, many who achieve those things can build on that and live a fine life.
I bet you do. Thanks for sharing a little perspective. It is high value.
Spiffy!
I like this one a bit less than I do the all text mode, though I will have to go through a bunch of widgets to see if that remains true.
Requiring Python seems a bit excessive, compared to the other one with works more lime the author intended, I believe.
Thanks for these. Interesting to look at.
Sometimes it can be hard because people want to see the same GUI. And this is true even when it is input equal, I mean click to keystroke identical!
Most will say "modern" when they mean, "the one I drive daily."
And in many cases, those are one and the same. Modern simply is the daily driver, be it MacOS or Windows, or...
Doing that cross platform is hard!
With FLTK, a solo dev can write once, build for almost anything and it will work great. This is especially true for a C++ developer, which they are.
Over time, we have found building a modern GUI either takes a ton of time tweaking FLTK to look damn close, or it requires essentially different builds and dependencies, one set per platform supported, or...
Don't do it.
The thing is, we really value being able to bring the application to the user on their platform of choice. And today doing that is damn near free.
Basically, we just need to build FLTK on the target once, and the app will build with few to no problems. Easy peasy.
Users currently use Win 7 through 11 (yes, there are more of those out there than we may want to admit), Mac Intel and MX Apple Silicon, and a Linux user or two.
No Droid yet.
I wish it were different, but it isn't.
This tool seems high value because, like the other one mentioned here "dialog", which simply does the GUI in a terminal, command line tools are often the easiest, most portable build.
From there, one needs to adopt GUI foundation tools, which are specific to an OS, or like FLTK, look different.
Or, spend a ton more money, hire more devs and brute force cross platform tools.
I wish it were different. Is it?
Are we missing somethng?
I used Termux, and did this for a hello world:
pkg install dialog
dialog "hello there" 20 3
Thanks for the reference. I agree with you.
Way back when I was daily driving an SGI IRIX box, I was struck by how SGI often made IRIX system programs dual mode, command line and or GUI.
On the command line, one could specify -v or --verbose or -GUI and generally get the desired outcome.
Some programs, usually the ones with some sort of -GUI option, or that would detect the user running on an X Window system, contained the GUI mode in the same executable. And it would just appear on whatever display was specified in the user environment.
Others, generally the ones offering --verbose style output, were designed so that GUI wrapper type programs could just call them and have a robust enough command line interface so as to support a GUI without the user experience suffering much, if at all. All that extra output was so a gui could display options, progress, and all the things we might expect. The program just streamed that stuff on STDOUT, GUI streaming actions on STDIN and both using STDERR as needed.
neato!
Anyhow, I loved that kind of design. Learning either the GUI or command line was cross productive, generally speaking.
And back in the 90's and 00's when all this was happening, IRIX was NICE. Seriously. I cannot count the number of people who would come by and end up talking shop, often prompted by various desktops they might see in action.
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I really do miss that compute environment. I rarely have experiences in computing as good as all that was back then. I know, an SGI was a ton of money! But damn! Worth it to many.
Often felt like computing a little ways into the future:
We would be playing 3D games in the 90's via X and or various boxes capable of running them locally, all while yelling and making faces at one another via web cam and mic, sharing videos and files with one another using standard desktop tools included with the Indigo Magic Desktop, and more...
The PC got there close to a decade later, but I digress...
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We have bigger, faster and recently, more functional systems today. Things are almost there!
(In both Unix and Windows land, surprisingly)
What you say? Almost there?
Back then, say I wanted to bring up a new box, then perform software management on it.
The system bring up would start with a nice GUI running under ARC loader.
That would get a person into single user mode where one would run "swmgr" and specify the system load and sometimes additional software to be loaded.
Powerful commands got this done quickly.
Keep default
Add [subsystem name or wildcard]
Resolve conflicts would bring up a list one could work through, or one could also just specify a default, the system would sort it and then...
Go.
And soon you had a running system!
Run "swmgr" again, and this time you got a GUI that looked a lot Ike package management tools do today, but with hidden power!
Say you asked something to be installed and part way though disk ends up near full.
The SGI system would allow one to pause the current operation, yielding time to solve the problem simply through file management, or adding space. Whatever.
But, it would also allow one to start another operation right in the middle of one in progress too!
Often, I would Uninstall bigger subsystems not used often, and then carry on with the initial operation, all while...
A user is at the machine working! And I could do that graphically, thanks to X and multi user graphical computing, or command line, old school UNIX style, or both!
They might notice the high disk activity, but it was rare to see their work impacted beyond that. I could always bump the admin tasks to low priority, or bump their task up depending on what mattered most.
Managing those kinds of things command line is crazy, but possible. And scriptable.
Using a GUI is still a bit crazy, but a lot more possible, but not so scriptable in the GUI.
Because of how so much was made to work either way, it just did not matter much. Anyone wanting to automate could.
And there was always Tcl/TK for crude GUI actions in shell scripts. That was hard enough to be unused by me unless the automation was really going to see a lot of use and varied scenarios to make the effort worth it.
These functions seem much simpler than I recall from back then. And it appears one can write programs that work with the best of them too.
An application could be a combination of shell code, compiled C or Python, or any other thing, even the likes of Fortran, and the GUI tools presented here provide the user with more than enough.
Neat!
I going to have to test drive this by making a wrapper for something I use a lot.
And I look at tools like gparted and realize creating more like that one may just have become easier?
Double neato!
That was my first really fun Linux setup. At the time, I had RedHat running at work and was running SGI IRIX daily along with WinNT 3.51 then Win 2k.
I had setup Ogle to play DVD media and at that time DECSS was a controversy. People could have legal media, legal drive, display, computer, sound, but playing the movie under Linux was a crime.
Any how, I set Mandrake up in our bedroom so my wife and I could enjoy great movies. Ogle would just play the movie. No bullshit, insert disk, press T then P and you were into the movie.
That was a hit and the fam wanted a DVD player for the living room.
I got one and the second day, I got the call: "this POS is broken"
M: What happened honey?
H: It won't just play the movie
M: Which movie?
H: Tarzan
M: Slaps head! Of course. Honey, that one has 15 mins of previews that players will not skip.
H: WTF? That one you made sure would. Why?
[I explain OSS and she gets it and always has since. Neat!]
M: OK, I can solve the problem.
I ripped the movie, brought it home and proceeded to do that to all the kid movies.
They love it and when they break one, I just make another. Same for the neighbors kids mooching one, etc...
Mandrake was nice. I had it running on a Matrox G400 card that could do a very respectable TV out. Was gorgeous on our huge Sony WEGA set in the living Room.
Good times!
Basically, if we are going to allow single humans to have so much buying power, that needs to come with some clear expectations.
Risks must be taken. Pick something and advance society. Or, empower others in a reasonable, non discriminatory way, with no hooks.
There are a ton of things need doing.
Why not require a real effort?
We do not need more dynasties, and other enduring signs of wealth.
We do need those people to have earned it. (That is the no dynasty part again)
I know sounds harsh, but the fact is anyone can live very well for the rest of their lives on just a fraction of that money.
May well put it to work.
And if it were me personally? I got a list. Ready?
Great work by that team! Seriously. The graphics are great, and for the time period, excellent enough to be lumped in with the real 3d games.
Back then, it was fun at times, bit was also limiting in ways sometimes hard to fathom ways.
Things are crazy good now, BTW. Almost anything is a few clicks away. The CRT is old, panels so damn good..
Niche, style points first kind of thing for sure.
Meta: old enough that getting either a new color not intended, or an additional one visible on screen and having the machine remain able to perform was a big deal.
No worries. I've friends in various industries doing production who hate the change.
I like it, of course. Losing the volume knob is a direct result of the many abuses.
Often, we don't get that and this topic, plus my relative ignorance on it, welcomed the post as written.
There are still gimmicks, but at least they do not include music so badly clipped as to be unlistenable... hint: go get the DVD or Blu-Ray release of whatever it is and you are likely to enjoy a not clipped album.
It is all about maximizing the overall sonic impact the music is capable of. Now when levels are sane, song elements well differentiated and equalized such that no or only a minor range of frequencies are crushed due to many sounds all competing for them, it will sound, full, great and not tiring!
Thanks audio industry. Many ears appreciate what was done.