>>>>> On Fri, 04 Aug 2000 11:00:39 +0200, Oliver Rauch <oliver.rauch@Wolfsburg.DE> said:
Oliver> A lot can be covered by qt and gtk wich run on X11 and
Oliver> WIN32.
Yup.
Oliver> Like xsane already shows it is no great problem to port a
Oliver> frontend written for unix/X11+gtk to run on Windows+gtk.
Yes, great work, btw!
>> Mark and Jon offered to start working on a prototype for
>> TWAIN-on-SANE. I offered them help with constructing a GUI
>> builder based on our existing GTK frontends (probably xsane).
Oliver> The main problem is - I think - the definition of the
Oliver> inter-process-comunication between the application and the
Oliver> sane-frontend.
Oliver> Did you discuss that, were there any suggestions?
Not much. I'm actually reluctant to propose yet another RPC layer
between TWAIN and SANE. That's why I suggested Bonobo. It's
basically using (a lightweight) CORBA.
>> Also, Mark and Jon said that the scanner vendors really like to
>> be able to customize the look of the scanner GUI.
Oliver> I think in the moment each scanner vendor does write it's
Oliver> own GUI. So if they want to have a totally different look
Oliver> they are free to write their own GUI.
It is interesting how scanner vendors insist on writing their own
frontends. Graphics cards vendors seem to be able to live with the
fact that, on Windows, all they can do is add a couple of tabs to the
"Display Properties" dialog. I think the Graphics card approach is
MUCH better because it gives users a (mostly) consistent user
interface, while still giving vendors a certain level of
differentiation.
I think if TWAIN were to become widespread on non-Windows/non-Mac
platforms, vendors would sooner or later realize that it's just not
practical to write a custom frontend for each case. What we can offer
to them is to give up some (not all!) of the control over the look of
the scanner dialog in return for not having to worry about the scanner
dialog ever again. Given how scanner prices have dropped over the
last couple of years, I'm quite sure there must be _some_ vendors that
would go for this deal.
>> Slightly fancier would be to have a simple language that would
>> control how and where each SANE option gets laid out in the
>> device dialog. Of course, a driver vendor could also feel free
>> to implement a GUI from scratch if they want full customization,
>> but that would be a fair amount of work. I think some level of
>> scriptability would provide a very good tradeoff between custom
>> look and a uniform user experience.
Oliver> It should be simple to change the gtk-style-settings in
Oliver> dependance of the backend. (and to add a logo). We also
Oliver> could add an info field (sane2.0) to the options that gives
Oliver> the backend the chance to e.g. requests that a range is
Oliver> displayed as slider or text-entry-field, ... but already
Oliver> this can make it hard for the frontend to create a good
Oliver> looking outfit.
Different "skins" (themes) are also a way to make a dialog look more
unique without even changing how the interface works. Anyhow, making
the user-interface scriptable certainly would require some thought.
It's of course a chicken-and-egg problem. It would help greatly if we
had one or two scanner vendors that would be willing to work with us,
so we can make sure that the work wouldn't be wasted.
--david
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