On Nov 15, 2007, at 9:33 PM, Ciprian Mustiata wrote:
Hi team,
I will make the following premises about me (Ciprian Mustiata) and a
designer (John Merill):
1. I use Delphi and Lazarus for fun and always like the elegance of
FreePascal language and the power of Lazarus project
2. I came from another world, means I work with Opensource but I am
from an enterprise world, where one project can stand when is great
from a lot of reasoning, including design, marketing, help,
updates, support
3. I am not want to make separation, trolling, etc.
The issue I want to put on top is Lazarus resemble with 10 years old
UIs, FreePascal the same, and they don't want to add value for the
product is today most needed. I've not means about Lazarus bugs, all
software has bugs.
So, the eexpectations for a new user, (I put me in that use-case) is
to get for first time a wizard to understand what to do with
Lazarus, secondly the UI should be innovative, probably the best in
market, to be consistent UI-wise, to give me tools and as much I've
don't need to be hidden, by my choose or choosing a profile.
For making Lazarus to succeed it has to be UNIQUE and best from all.
Means best in the market, at least at his level. Lazarus' focus is
on matter of today approach is to add value by adding a lot of
features inside the IDE. That is great, still it has issues:
- the UI is not consistent
- there is duplicating work in form code
- the metaphora of it is like Delphi 4 - 7 (!?) resemble, means one
top bar with project management and components, floating windows for
components, ui, errors, etc.
Personally, I love this IDE because it is simple to use. You directly
have what you need.
And above all, one-window application are really boring, even more
under OS X.
I really don't like the lastest version of Delphi for these reasons.
What is wrong on long-term relation of Lazarus with Delphi:
- every people from Delphi's world think: I'll write everything in
Delphi and I'll rewrite in Lazarus to be supported on Linux (OS X,
etc.)
Really ?
- making Lazarus a worse image of Delphi, even it can have extra-
features
- Lazarus is tied of innovation by forced to not use another UI
metaphora, for one simple user, Delphi devels using Lazarus, will
use even less, cause the UI is not the same.
Identity of Lazarus will make people to not think in Lazarus as the
worse twin of Delphi. Lazarus has to be best in what it does: it
must be simple to add a component, or to write a dll, it MUST
provide a simple Wizard, even seems a foolish from many view, that
will make to be used in schools, it must have less annoying bugs,
that should be the BLOCKERS, not one bug in one toolkit.
Lazarus have to implement it's own dialogs using not TForm with
strict UI rules, they have to implement all dialogs from a TIDEForm,
so managing the docking, etc. in future by that inheritance.
Lazarus itself has to grow to a better IDE in terms of feedback, it
MUST provide hints, and make the UI responsive at least by providing
dialogs that say that something is happening. I.E. when an user say:
Build Lazarus, it has to appear in front of user one dialog saying:
Lazarus is building... and one Cancel button to press, instead
making the user to have an unresponsive UI.
The IDE is still in development and I think there are other things to
do before that. First of all a complete set of components which work
fine under any widgetset is more important for any developpers than a
beautiful dialog. I agree, it is important. But I prefer in this order
for my part :)
Based on that issues, and some more, me and that designer will not
look back to Delphi legacy, excluding the LCL and we will try to
manage to make a fork of Lazarus. The role of that fork is very
easy: it will must provide bet UI for user, and will not take care
about users that say: "in Delphi is different", because Lazarus is
not Delphi, is much better. That fork will be maintained to an
external server, like OpenSVN one and hopefully when will get enough
substange to get it's own merit as an upgrade to Lazarus, hopefully
will be merged back to Lazarus code.
The project will be named LightZarus and will have the notice that
is based on Lazarus code.
Wish to you the best,
Ciprian Mustiata and John Merill
Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.
--
Damien Gerard
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
