This is really cool, Michel wrote this for his Apple II emulator, and I've been using it (as a slight troll) to replace the front-end for an Archimedes emulator. It's early days, but if _I_ can understand the API, it must be OK :)
I liked the dual header 2D graphics rasterizer that this uses: https://github.com/xboot/libcg. I'm always amazed by how we can build powerful software with minimal dependencies like that.
Would it be that hard to build nice, clean and powerful UI libraries as alternatives to Electron?
This is incredible. It's MIT licensed AND written in C! If you added shims for the AppKit APIs this might give GNUstep a run for its money.
This looks great. I wish I could switch my entire MacOS ui to that.
Nice project, I really liked the old classic Mac UI. All your examples look great and it seems easy to use from looking at the widget demo code.
That’s very cool. I wonder how much effort would be needed to read resources from a resource fork (.rsrc) to create UI.
If it could be done, ResEdit could be used :-)
Loved the FAQ.
Not a Mac fanboy even if I now use a Macbook Pro for most of my work (and like it).
But this is good.
I mean: anything that brings back some sanity. Clear unambiguous controls. Menus instead of gear icons, hamburger menus and fly droppings.
Great work!
Great Job !
I know that this is picky but the old Apple Human Interface Guidelines specify things like how much distance you put between different elements! Try it out. Go for the 1992 edition of the HIG, for this System 7 look.
Like, when you have a dialog box, you have a certain number of pixels on the left, right, top, and bottom. The buttons are a certain number of pixels apart. If you look at old software from the very early days of the Mac, you’ll see that it’s kind of the wild west of user interfaces—either the HIG wasn’t out yet, or people weren’t reading it.
The HIG also has a bunch of good practices for thins like how to name buttons and menu items. Buttons should ideally be single words, and should be verbs. Menu items get a “…” ellipsis if there’s a dialog box that appears before you perform the action. The book shows how common interfaces look in non-English languages, like Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese.
> I miss the days were UIs were /crafted/ not just decided for you bad a bad 'layouting' engine with huge rectangular flat buttons and no sense whatsoever of 'design' or usability.
I couldn't disagree more regarding 'layouting' engines. I absolutely detest pixel-perfect English-only UIs that basically look like a mess the moment anything (including font DPI) changes. You CANNOT imagine how much pain the work of the translator is and it just doesn't matter because it will look horrible anyway, specially the more "smarts" the original English form designer applied.
I want to enlarge the fonts, reduce the size of the useless icons, and set black backgrounds, and no amount of "creativity" from the original designer is going to convince me to lose that flexibility. I'll also translate to my native tongue thank you very much.
Flat buttons and no usability testing is another story, of course.
> In the 'example' folder, the playground demo copies it to an X11 window via a XCB 'shared' pixmap, so works great even via remote X11. The library is 'smart', like the old OSes, it keeps track of 'invalid' regions, and only redraws what is needed, so theres very very little overdraw.
So it actually is technically superior to most (all?) "modern toolkits. Nice:)
This is gorgeous. Well done!
My only nitpick is that MUI is already the name of an Amiga GUI toolkit. A widget lib named libmui is not what I’d think it was.
Already better than GTK4
Amazing. Now all we need is for this to replace all the Electron stuff out there, and sanity will be restored on the desktop.
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Glad you didn’t post tomorrow. The one day of the year I don’t look at any HN or Reddit or any social media sites. I hate April Fools pranks.
Related, there's a public domain truetype font that's a pretty great copy of the original Chicago system font: https://fontlibrary.org/en/font/chicagoflf