[Oberon] Re: Oberon Digest, Vol 16, Issue 5

[Soren Renner]

> Personal rant here.  While I'm still a fan of
> original Oberon "tiled viewers" I'm beginning to
> be weary (wary?) of the corded mouse setup.  

CHORDED mouse. Think of a piano. Mouse CHORDS == interclicks. Corded mice have cords. That's most mice, but not an interface issue. While I am on this subject. let me mention that: the Xmas Bluebottle release is beautiful, but I would LIKE the mouse chords (interclicks) to COME BACK, that is, for interclicks to work in the non-embedded-Oberon-window part of Bluebottle, because while I continue to use Oberon as my Bluebottle IDE, I can see that it would be fun to move to using a native Bluebottle dev environment, and without mouse interclicks such a move is almost unthinkable. 

Here is another idea: could Bluebottle be LNO-ized? So that a Bluebottle installation could run on a Linux box? Then it would be easy to release one of my amazing fractal-voxel-thingy demos for Linux. Not that it would be difficult to port to LNO itself -- I would just have to rewrite some code. But I really like the Active Oberon features. 

Here is another idea: embed the fractal-voxel-thingy renderer IN BLUEBOTTLE. Not for a large, extremely slow raytraced desktop and window system: no, only for small, extremely fast raytraced icons / buttons/ border elements/ decorations/ skin components.

Look at it like this: on the one hand, we have what is clearly the best OS and language project in the world*1, yet almost noone will pay any attention to it. On the other hand, we have the first fruits of a new approach to 3d realtime rendering, yet EVEN FEWER people will pay any attention to it*2. Perhaps by multiplicatively leveraging these two obscurities we can break through to the other side. All that would be required is that there be a really nice demo (but the Sierpinski flythrough was probably almost good enough: some of you must remember it) and that it be in a form that dozens, hundreds, or thousands of interested parties (programmers, mostly) ACTUALLY SEE. 

Perhaps someone on this list could take a demo that I write and port it to WinAOS. Could it be distributed then as a single executable file (standing alone?) 

Is anybody interested in the voxel-renderer for skinning Bluebottle?


1. I do admit that functional languages have some claim here as well, especially Ocaml. It is just that I would prefer it to run on top of Oberon.

2.But thank you, University of Chicago CS department for hosting my talk on October 22nd ["What is Realism in Realtime Graphics"] and permitting me to fulfill my lifelong dream of baffling and alienating a whole roomful of people at once.


sr

"cygnus inter anates"