Greetings Steve et al Congrats. on election result (to you and others of course)
> > I'd say that flash, although it's more or less fine for media, has no > place in the requirements list for EMC2 :) There are any number of fine > programming languages and environments to use for the UI. I'm not sure > what you'd use to make a flash presentation on Linux anyway, and I > wouldn't want to be beholden to Adobe to make updated versions for my OS > (which they don't - I use a 64-bit version of Linux, and they don't seem > to like supporting 64-bit OSes on anything but PowerPC macs AFAICS). No, I accept the current problem in a Linux environment but things do change surprisingly quickly sometimes. Flash player penetration is very high in the "parallel universe". Reliance on Adobe or any one vendor is unhappy but Sothink and SWiSHMax both offer very capable development environments. > On > a technical level, I'm not sure what facilities Flash has for actually > doing things that aren't "media" or web-related anyway. It is not the time/place to be dogmatic as I cannot show a demonstration, but there *are* two aspects I think Flash offers (a) A framework for design of very interactive graphic interfaces (e.g. the label for an Axis DRO that opens up to show scaling, offsets applied etc. when it is clicked) integrated with (b) A powerful and well structured script programming language. The difficulty in applying Flash is that the documentation/tutorial material is highly orientated to the web design aspects and the terminology is thus "foreign". The ability to instantiate graphics objects, which can be "movies", as buttons, text, DROs, etc. with overideable inherited properties is, however, a very powerful tool. On a more general point, we have come to accept heirarchical dialog systems as the norm. So many application program dialogs are "modal" and we while away our lives clicking OK/Done etc. When I started using Solidworks and Pro/ENGINEER I was blown away by the benefits of the implied OK in Solidworks. As an example, you place a dimension and a panel comes up for entering its properties. This panel has an OK and a Cancel button but if you just click on the sketch then OK is assumed and you can place another dimension. This works wherever there is a reasonable assumption. Where the implication is "risky" you need a positive confirmation of OK. Pro/E on the other had pendantically wants confirmation at every step (and in Wildfire 2 at least different modules ask for it in different ways and on different parts of the screen). The available computing power seems to offer scope for increased safety and ease of use in HMIs provided the development tools are available. </mini-rant> John Prentice ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
