Hello Tuomo, hello *!

Gathering all my courage I dare to mention E again on this mailing list
:) Yes, I know, E is all bloat and only about eye candy, while Ion is
all usability and not precisely famous for its looks. And, no, I am not
going to argue for a Ion drawing engine based on the EFL (though that
might be nice to have as an option).

BUT I would like to point to an interesting connection between Vis and
the EFL: One component of the EFL is Edje [1], Enlightenment's "Theme
Engine". It takes a different approach to themeing by making it possible
to "theme" an application's *behaviour*. 

The application author defines a set of
  
  * signals the app sends
  * signals the app receives/responds to
  * variables it exposes to the UI

The themer (i.e. interface designer) then creates an interface based on
this using a minimal C-like scripting language. These interfaces/themes
can then be switches w/o having to recompile the application.

The difference to Vis, of course, is, that Vis plans to autogenerate a UI
and with Edje every theme for every app has to be hand-written, but IMHO
the two approaches do have a lot in common.

I have not tried Edje myself yet and I do not know how mature (i.e.
usable) it really is, but the fact that it is an already existing
library makes it worth a look.

Cheers,
Felix


[1] http://www.enlightenment.org/docs/edjebook.html

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