Re: FreeAES

[Anthony Jacques <jacquesa@zetnet.co.uk>]

>  >I don't recall if there were any strange licensing restrictions on oAESis,
>  >but at least the work on XaAES can be continued by anyone.
>
> How about combining efforts and calling it FreeAES ?

I think internally they are quite different - Craig Graham (XaAES main
author) had some interesting ideas using pipes (and he always suggested
changing to sockets, but that never got done). This would make it 
difficult to merge them into one - although I guess it would be possible
to take some chunks of code from one and drop it into the other (eg.
objc_draw should be fairly interchangable, as should some other well
defined routines).

> Generally, I like XaAES's idea of a loadable GUI, à la X, which is
> definitely welcome within a multi-user MiNTOS environment.  

Yea, a nice idea.

> However, I'm told oAESis looks generally nicer than XaAES, despite 
> its current bugs.

Well, oAESis looks very like AES 4.1. XaAES looks like something new
(although using the loadable GUI system it *could* look like standard
AES)

>  >> > Question:  How far off is oAESis or XaAES from the capabilities of NAES? 
>
> Which nobody has answered yet... Stating preferences for either ones
> still doesn't tell how good these are...

oAESis:

Well, there are a number of bugs and some un-implemented standard AES
functionality which prevent some standard programs from working (eg.
Lattice/Devpac crash if you access the menus with the submenus, which
IIRC are implemented using progdef's).

AFAIK, there are no AES 4.1 features properly implemented (eg. the 
framework for iconify is done, but doesn't work).


XaAES:

There are quite a few bugs (probably more than oAESis?) which seems to
make it more unstable... the most obvious of these are single-pixel
redraw errors - although most of these have been fixed, there are still
a couple... Getting it set-up is a bit of a nightmare, because the docs
are a bit shaky, IIRC.

About the same number of AES functions are implemented. As with oAESis,
there are some errors in the object drawing code (although both are
fairly acurate, some things dont display correctly...)



As for speed, I dont know (Its been quite a while since I used either),
but I dont think that either is as fast as N.AES, although I could
be wrong.

Both XaAES and oAESis implemented a few things that aren't in AES 4.1,
and I dont think are in N.AES - oAESis (and also XaAES?) has non-blocking
menus, XaAES had tear-off menus, XaAES (and also oAESis?) has windowed
alerts that only blocked the affected app. I'm sure there are other
features that I cannot remember...

Basically, neither is usable atm. XaAES was more inovative, and IMO has
the potential to be better than oAESis, but I would say that oAESis
is closer to being complete.

>  >>I for one is not very happy with its Win95-look.

> XaAES and Win95 both derivate from X (window gadgets, etc.), AFAIR.
> However, if these GUI are RSC-based, this can be easily customized.

Yes, easy to customise, I think - although craig also built in code
so that you can also alter the effect of the widgets - you could 
implement a completely new widget somehow (compile time, or run time 
I'm not sure)


Anthony
-- 
----------------------------------------+-------------------------------
Anthony Jacques           IRC: AnthonyJ | Bad Mood, GEM-DEU, FracTalk,
                          ICQ: 11287923 | STOS patching, Falcon Extn,
jacquesa@zetnet.co.uk                   | MiNT.CNF, Reschange, Tuna,
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/jacquesa/ | and more... which shall I do?
----------------------------------------+-------------------------------