Personally I don't dislike the Spec approach, but the API still looks
not expressive enough for doing things beyond the standard.
I am deepening my knowledge of Morphic now, thanks for your answer!
Tommaso
On 22/06/16 17:11, Dimitris Chloupis wrote:
Documentation is always a problem.
I dont use Spec because I dont like it , but I use Morphic for my
project ChronosManager. I do some "styling" for example use different
fonts for different labels , different sizes , I format strings to
time stamps and even offer easy ways for user to change them without
modifying the whole string.
You can do a lot with Morphic, though I have not played with layout
stuff since this GUI is static and image (PNGs) based but yeah Morphic
can do that as well. My project is on Catalog browser and it has class
comments , dont know if this exactly what you want but it may be a
good start.
Obviously there are a ton of things you can do with a web page that
Morphic will not offer you out of the box.
You can use Html as the front end / GUI and keep Pharo as the backend,
thats how most web apps made with Pharo work. This you get the full
power of Html/JS and Pharo. Seaside has classes that map html to pharo
methods so you dont have to write html and js, and also I remember a
pharo library dealing with CSS.
Another option is to use a GUI API like QT , I have tried this with my
python bridge and it works at least on a very basic level, again
similar recipe to the above solution.
But yeah if you are not too demanding I think Morphic will serve you
well. Personally I only like Morphic , its the only GUI API that does
not kill my inner child.
On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 5:44 PM Tommaso Dal Sasso
<tommaso.dalsa...@gmail.com <mailto:tommaso.dalsa...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hello everybody,
I have a question about the UI toolkits available for Pharo. I already
asked something about this on Slack, but since I saw that there was a
recent discussion about UI in the mailing list, I think this is a
better
place to discuss the matter.
I am writing an application for Pharo where I am displaying some
structured text. The structure is similar to the one of a web page: A
main title with a list of paragraphs, where each paragraph has a title
and a description.
What I would like to do is to format the text to present the
contents in
a meaningful way: For example, I would like a bigger font for the
title,
and change the background of the text, to give a better separation
between the paragraphs. Basically I would like to manipulate and
display
my contents as I would do in a web page.
To write UI widgets I usually use Spec, but I found that going beyond
easy formatting (e.g. bold text and emphasis) is harder than I
thought.
I saw there were discussion about the styling text and the role of the
theme class, using TextStyle but that part is not really documented.
So far, the easiest way to solve my problem seems to be to use Morphic
to display the contents as I want it, and then include my widget in my
spec application.
Do you have any suggestions about how to do that? I think that styling
the UI widgets is an important part of the application
development, but
it is really hard to find documentation about this.
Thanks, have a nice day!
Tommaso
