3) ElixirConf 2017 - Elixir Native UI - Boyd Multerer

[Eiji]

@boydm

All UI scenes are GenServers. Scenes can reference (embed) other scenes. Input is all message passing/filtering/handling. This also means that developers can build “components”, which are just scenes/GenServers that can be reused by other devs. Nice for extensibility.

Just WOW, this is how exactly I imagined creating some UI apps. Lots of processes with parent monitoring process. When entering Elixir it was only one thing I wanted to have.

For example as a total C++ noob I was thinking about making tabbar and each tab content in separate process and embed it in parent window. I have even asking about inter process communication ways at stackoverflow, but at end I did not have enough knowledge to do it well. Elixir processes, supervisors and all related topics looks much simpler for me and I really wanted to see some library which could be written in such awesome language.

@boydm

Drivers (rendering) are abstracted away from the scenes so that they can be swapped to run on different hardware without re-writing the UI logic. This allows me to run my app on Mac to debug, change a target, and build firmware for a raspberry on Nerves. Everything looks and works the same across the two.

Amazing. I believe such comfort would be very more than welcome in lots of languages.

@boydm

The driver model has also been really good for getting remoting working. More on that later…

Hmm, not sure if I get it. Do you mean something like builtin VNC for every app? Ahh, after small time I probably got it. You want to work always on same machine and debugging it remotely, right?

@boydm

As far as overall status goes, I’ve stopped adding features and am now focused on the large amount of supporting things around it. (Including stripping out the code from various dead-ends and experiments). I want the API to be pretty stable before it goes out to lots of people.

So you are working on 1.0.0-rc.0 version?

If you don’t mind I have some questions:

1. If I well remember it allows to work with OpenGL. Does it have any limitations (except Linux video card drivers)? Did you think about Vulcan?
2. Will you create some elements already or it should be a part of library which uses your project? If so then will be there auto and percentage height/width support available or we will need to implement it?
3. I have watched one video and you are using there RGB(A) format and named colors. Did you think about support other color representations?
4. Not really remember in which language and GUI library (probably C++/Qt) there was a way to embed one window into another. I was imagining about adding mplayer/mpv support in my apps. Do you have any idea if it could be even possible for us?

If you will find some time I would also say about one problem that I’m facing in all GUI libraries I know about. I have always a problem with finding easy solution for one thing … I always wanted to simply place a tab bar in title bar like lots of browsers have. Also I wanted to somehow automatically fetch icons and styles (like color and background color) based on current desktop environment (GTK+ or QT theme) and/or currently used distribution/operating system. In short I wanted to make window looks like native, but with tabs + optionally move it on bottom, left or right side (as user wishes). No matter which language and library I was looking for I always needs to create a custom frame-less window with basically everything including tab animations and styles in worst cases. All of this just for moving, resizing one bar and adding tabs into it. For an C++/Qt (or any other combination) beginner it was lots hours of really hard work. I though that GTK+ could help me a lot with their special API for elements in title bar, but just simple question shows me that’s not so easy topic. At the end I did not found even a limited solution (let’s say adding tabbar, but without ability to move and resize). I’m even considering paying someone for helping me with this part and making a simple library for generating windows with such bar.