Re: [linux-audio-dev] libcui - design-question

Julien Claassen <julien@email-addr-hidden-lab.de> writes:

> Hi!
> Yes there is ncurses. But with ncurses as is you can just position
> characters on the screen, whereever you like and in which color you like. Yet
> I want to design a library, that is useful for blind and possibly other
> disabled people. This will incorporate predefined keys for movement, ALWAYS
> AND ONLY moving the hard cursor, don't use color-attributes. Try to display
> objects so they are useful on a braille-display. This library should come with
> a good set of objects and init and fini (start and exit) routines. So
> programmers have a standard library with objects they know. Yet in contrast to
> just writing direct ncurses code: they don't have to know what is good for a
> blind person and what is not.
Did you ever look at libcdk?

Description: C-based curses widget library (development files)
 CDK stands for "Curses Development Kit". CDK sits on top of the curses
 library and provides 21 ready to use widgets for rapid application
 development of text-based interfaces. CDK delivers many of the common
 widget types required for a robust interface. Widgets can be combined
 to create complex widgets if needed.

Looks like you could use that and extend it as needed?

I am personally not that convinced about the idea of a library specific to
blind users, I'd rather have a library which eases ncurses-based UI
development (i.e, wraps some of the obscure apsects of ncurses) and
which simply has different modes for different sorts of users. A normal
mode and a braille mode if you want. Then simply check an enivonment variable
at startup for what mode to use, or any other sort of configurability.
This way, your userbase will potentially be greater, and therefore you will
find and fix more bugs in the implementation.

> This library is intended to be used for applications, thatdon't already have
> a textbased interface (synthesizers, sequencers...). Using this library
> enables the user to get it "a bit more the GUI way". A sequencer (especially a
> step-sequencer) is very easy to handle from such an interactive UI.

BTW, do you know about midi.el?
http://delysid.org/music/midi.el

-- 
CYa,
  Mario