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points by elcritch 3 days ago | 0 comments

I've been working on an attempt at a modern OpenStep/Cocoa inspired GUI called Merenda [1], but built with modern GPU based stack. The original theme was an Aqua clone but without using any images for the buttons! I used the NextSTEP OpenStep specification as part of the original specs. The workspace ideas were fascinating.

The GUI library aspect is progressing well, but getting a desktop environment going is challenging even with AI. Still I want to capture things like the document workspaces and such. Lately Ive been tempted with making a postscript like display server based on GPU accelerated vector primitives.

1: https://github.com/elcritch/merenda

[–] mmargerum 3 days ago

How did they get it to run well on the iPhone 2 I wonder if it was that slow

[–] elcritch 3 days ago

From what I've read careful programming. They also used images for buttons and other widgets. Pre-canned images look great but are also fixed in size, shape.

One of my goals with Merenda is to make a NextStep/Cocoa like GUI system but with a richer primitives - things like resizing corners dynamically with the shadows or adjusting gloss positions on skeuomorphic buttons.

Things web pages can do nowadays but in a NextStep like framework with rich MVC. Also with message passing but in Nim a more strongly typed language than ObjC.

An alternative evolution of Cocoa instead of SwiftUI.