Is there a windows XP style for the GUI?

[nowind_lee]

In China, most of people use Windows XP, but the default style of Ecere(windows 2000/NT) looks a little strange in a WinXP system.

I wannt know is there a windows XP style for the GUI? Or is it easy for us to create one?

I think, if it has a windows XP style, it will be much more popular than current.

[jerome]

你好

If you look under sdk/samples/guiAndGfx/skinning, you will find a project that shows how to skin the GUI. If you create any nice skin, please contribute it to the community!

There is also plans for 2 things that should help in this regard:

- Developing a 'native Window decorations' options
- Developing a much more modern looking default look that will stand out as the Ecere look.

We also hope to greatly improve the GUI toolkit and its skinning capabilities in the future.

Regards,

Jerome

[nowind_lee]

Jerome, 你好

Thanks for your answer, I searched for that sample, but not found.

These are the files under my "samples" directory:

D:\Program Files\ECERE SDK\samples 的目录

2010-07-06 22:09 <DIR> .
2010-07-06 22:09 <DIR> ..
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Animate3DS
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Balls
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Blank
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Chess
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Clock
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> ColorSpheres
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> ContainersTest
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> DCOMSample
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> eCom
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> EDATest
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Fractals
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> HelloForm
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> HelloWorld
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> HiraganaCube
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> HTTPServer
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> MedDB
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> ModelViewer
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Othello
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Start
2010-07-06 22:06 <DIR> Test3D
22 个目录 17,061,715,968 可用字节

I installed a 0.4.3 vertion on windows XP.

And, your 2 plans are very good, is there a schedule for them?

I have searched for a language which can build GUI applications easily for many years, and I think ECERE is a very good one. I hope it can be better and better.

I knew Ecere 1 year ago, but it seems not change much from then. I joined some Ecere groups, but found little people are using Ecere. But one year ago, I saw many people were talking and learning Ecere.

I haven't look deeply in the code, but I think the GUI is very important. Many people will use a language or tool just because its beautiful style. If you can provide 'native windows style', I think there are more people will learn it again. I hope that will happen soon.

And, the homepage of Ecere need to be changed. It's not display well under IE6( there are still a lot of people using IE6 in China, this because there are many good componies created good browers base on IE6), I hope you can fix the home page.

[jerome]

The recommended way of installing Ecere on Windows right now is to install the 'win32 setup 0.43' (The Windows logo on the main page), and then build the latest source version ( 0.44pre1 The big download button on the main page )

The skinning sample is in there: http://www.ecere.com/ecere-sdk-0.44pre1.tar.bz2

When we are done with the version 0.44, we will have binary installers for all platforms.

I think Ecere is great for building GUI applications. And I hope it will get a lot better.
There was a lot of interest from China after that article was posted at that time.

Because we don't really have any other source of funding, and after having worked full time on Ecere for about 6 years, I am now mostly busy with contracts to pay off debts and make a living. I spend the little free time I have to try to improve Ecere. I hope to get the chance to work more on Ecere in the future, but at the moment my time is quite limited. So that is why there is no schedule yet for the plans. But for certain Ecere will stay around and will keep getting better.

Contributors to the project are welcome however! I also invite you to join our IRC community, although that might be difficult due to timezone differences. The channel is most active during day time in EST (-5 GMT) time zone.

About the page in IE6, that is due to IE6 not implementing the web standards properly. If you know of an easy to fix it for those browsers, let me know. Otherwise I'm afraid I don't have time to worry about that and those browsers should try to improve their web standards compliance. Thanks for letting me know about this.

Cheers,

Jerome

[nowind_lee]

"Because we don't really have any other source of funding, and after having worked full time on Ecere for about 6 years, I am now mostly busy with contracts to pay off debts and make a living. "

You are good! (I have a lot to say, but I don't know how to express it in my poor English)

How many people work on Ecere? Is there any person contribute code to Ecere?

I know little about C programming(I'm a java programmer), that I think I can't be a contributor(I hope I can). But may be do something with the web site, but not now ( I'm learning ruby on rails now, not master it yet, and busy).

I know there are some people in China are still be interesting with Ecere, but the problem is, they don't know what to do and what they can do. It must be a very hard work to read and understand the source code of Ecere, that most of people don't have the ability to contribute the core code.

But I believe there must be something they can do. Is it possible to provide something, like "plugins-structure" as Eclipse or ruby gems, that people can add something easily? You point the direction, and other people will do it.

[jerome]

There are a few people who contribute code to Ecere.

Let me know when you have time to contribute, and I will guide you to work on something valuable that needs to be done

Another thing we need is someone who speaks good English like you to organize that interest in the Chinese community!
A few people did that before like Jia and MysticBoy but I think they are busy nowadays

I also still hope to work on this internationalization system sooner than later to release an official Chinese translation of the SDK...

[jerome]

It could be worth noting that the latest source from git will now show up with native decorations, that means XP title bars on XP =)

Cheers,

Jerome

[nowind_lee]

How to compile the sources on windows? Is there any document about this?

[samsam598]

Please allow me to explain as I have asked this question before.

Under windows you should have MinGW and UPX installed and set path to them.If so building the latest snapshot from https://github.com/ecere/sdk/commits/master is just a piece of cake:
1.Nagivate to the root of the extracted snapshot,say e:/your/path/to/ecereSnapshot
2.type mingw32-make then enter;
3.After a successful built,navigate to /ecereSnapshot/obj/win32,there are two sub folders,/bin/ and /lib/,copy both entire folders to /ecereSnapshot/;
4.Navigate to /ecereSnapshot\ear\extract\obj\release.win32\,copy extract.exe to /ecereSnapshot/ .That's all;

I use bat file to build the latest sdk.Below is my bat file which resides in the root of the SDK.
buildSDK.bat:

Code: Select all

set path=c:\person\codelite\gcc\bin;c:\person\codelite\gcc\include;c:\person\codelite\gcc\lib;c:\person\codelite\gcc\include\gl;C:\person\lovedev\tool;%PATH%
mingw32-make
pause

[jerome]

Welcome back nowind_lee

This post should help you, just follow the instructions there, but skip the extracting the source tarball step (use the git source code instead). Please checkout this thread as well which is about a new dependency on MinGW gettext/libintl/libiconv packages.

Thanks Sam for the answer.
Why are you copying stuff directly under ecereSnapshot, and why are you copying extract.exe?
extract.exe is used internally by ear.exe to create self-extractable Ecere archives. It's also useful as an Ecere archive/resources viewer/extraction tools =) I just use 'mingw32-make install' to update the files in Program Files/Ecere SDK , no manual copying necessary. But I think you had permissions trouble

nowind_lee: please let us know if you're having any difficulty.

Regards,

Jerome