brk / jenkon.com wrote:

> ...
>
> Ben's got a great suggestion, which aside from helping with system
> administration would also enable accessibility. Writing a cross-platform,
> cross-windowing-toolkit GUI is far from easy. The difficulty goes way up if
> you want to support internationalization, accessibility, or even drawing.
> ...
> Don't forget to look elsewhere for ideas. Consider UIML (www.uiml.org), XUL
> (www.mozilla.org/xpfe), Swing, and the SmallTalk GUIs. Read some books on
> user interface design.
>
> If people think this all the way through and still decide to do it, and do
> it well, Ruby could benefit greatly.
>
> </rambling>
>
> Bryn

If someone knows "Some Bigwig" at Corel (makers of WordPerfect), they could see
if they still have the Universal User Interface (UUI) that was developed when
WordPerfect was it's own company. I talked to an engineer working for
WordPerfect 6 years ago (sheesh! has it been THAT LONG!?!? <sigh>... ;-) who was
part of a team that developed this UUI. He said it worked with out changes as a
character based interface (DOS, Linux or Un*x), Win31, Win9x, WinNT, MacOS, or
OS/2 graphical interface. WP never used the UUI so maybe Corel will let it go.
That could be a big start.

I know that when Novell bought WordPerfect, know one would answer questions
about the interface though (UUI was not the interface used in WP). I was working
for Novell at the time and my group needed a user interface that worked on
almost any platform that connected to the network. I knew the UUI existed but
the WP engineering group was not allowed to talk to the networking engineers.

I no longer work at Novell, but I'll see if I can track down someone who might
give me some info on UUI. That may not produce anything, a lot of the engineers
I knew there have left.

Well that's my current "Two Cents." Hopefully I can contribute more to the Ruby
Effort ;-)

Lawrence C.

--
    What I think is What I Think
    What my Company Thinks is What my Company Thinks
    Sometimes there is a Union of Thought
    Sometimes there is an Intersection of Thought
    And sometimes there is an Empty Set!

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