The odds are good that the fraction of this project's user base—developers writing GUI applications in Rust—who would be interested in Linux support is much more than 2%.
I think ZenPsycho is right calling out for accessibility features. It's unfortunate that most low-key UI libraries don't support them, partly because those OS API are so complex and for a non-user it is hard to understand them (much like for English users it is sometimes hard to understand what's needed for localization).
A pragmatic way to see it - and arguably it's an issue I don't have answer for - is that the sum of all desirable modern features (incl. but not limited to accessibility features) are growing the scope so complex and large it is also - very unfortunately - hindering innovation. Everyone agrees accessibility features are desirable. Yet if every experimental or hobbyist project needed to implement all accessibility features, those projects wouldn't exist. So two steps forward is costing us one step back here :(. There are _so many things_ dear imgui doesn't do at this point, it can't handle full internationalization and right-to-left text. Maybe it'll catch up. Maybe other solutions will solve this. For now as I don't have the resources to do it all myself. But the more people use and work with a given software the more likely it is to evolve and improve. I would gladly surrender to a much better product than dear imgui that implemented this while also solving the problems dear imgui aims to solve.
Any internal tool or debug GUI has reasonable odds of becoming a user-facing tool eventually, and it's a matter of time until you end up needing to support staff/customers in territories with RTL languages or ideographic character sets. At that point, you end up regretting most of the corners you cut.
I built lots of internal developer tools for a mid-sized western studio and it wasn't long until I had to go back and patch in a bunch of localization support because it turned out the publishers overseas needed to be able to use it and not all of their staff spoke English. Any blind employees were probably completely out of luck (maybe not, I did use Win32.)
Where do you draw the line? Some companies are using it for polished large tooling which may have thousands of end-users. Those users will eventually want a solution to tackle that.
Until HR/regulations/compassion hits you, please don't comment please.
Got it though - these things are perceived as - meh, why would I need it - I have perfect vision, two hands, can speak, can hear, can touch, etc. And then you start realizing you maybe working with folks with disabilities, and the same products/apps that you are working with allow them to do so (like Visual Studio), so on one hand it's easy to ignore them (without even realizing so), but once you've become aware of what they are facing, and seen enough it makes you think - should I use this, because there is no native control, and usually native controls have ways to be decoded by Assistive tech (my reasons back in the days to prefer wxWidgets over Qt), or recently even if it's non-native (Qt, flutter, etc) it can feed to the assistive sdk (say on Windows) details of what's going on in the control.
It's rather important! It's not just a gimmick. It shows compassion, love, and someone might already a project doing so with "Dear IMGUI" (not aware of one), but probably internals can be exposed in some fashion.
The problem is that accessibility APIs are very limited and stagnated in every single OS (except maybe Apple).
For basic default widgets accessibility works out-of-the-box, but as soon as you want to do something more complex or do custom drawing like Dear ImGui does, you're forced to write WAY more code than anticipated.
In Windows, for example, you need significantly more code to get a11y than to draw a custom widget. If you're drawing to a framebuffer like Dear ImGui is doing, it's even worse. In some OSs have to use other APIs (like focus management) to take advantage of the a11y APIs, which is kind of "at odds" with the whole immediate-GUI paradigm.
This is amazing new for corporation-backed products like Flutter, React Native or even Qt, because it makes the barriers to entry way higher. On the other hand, open source project will lack the resources to do proper native a11y.
Asking OS vendors to have proper accessibility in their OSs is IMO the more appropriate step for accessibility advocates, rather than forcing dozens of Open Source projects to reimplement the same thing over and over.
> Asking OS vendors to have proper accessibility in their OSs is IMO the more appropriate step for accessibility advocates
What more should OS vendors do? Is there anything OS vendors could do that would actually help the state of accessibility in fringe GUI toolkits like Dear ImGui? This isn't a rhetorical question. In addition to being an outspoken accessibility advocate on threads like this one, I'm currently a developer on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft, which owns the UI Automation API among other things, and I want to know what more we should be doing.
For a small developer I believe the whole topic seems quite overwhelming. To attract fringe GUI toolkits it would be useful to provide easy-to-chew accessibility samples based over 3d graphics technology (say: take a DirectX11 samples drawing a few text and buttons and make it accessibility compliant).
That's a fair request. All of the full-featured accessibility implementations are buried in complex UI frameworks and browser engines. I'm also aware that the sample UIA provider implementations in the Windows SDK aren't very useful; they all implement a single control in its own HWND, using GDI or GDI+.
As part of Microsoft's Hack for Good program, I worked with the developers of the Quorum language and development environment (https://quorumlanguage.com/) on their UIA implementation. So I know how frustrating it can be for a non-expert to implement UIA, and how easy it is to get it wrong.
I'll have to see what I can do about implementing a better sample.
Just better documentation, tutorials and samples would improve the situation 100x! The current ones are hard even for veteran native programmers.
Next thing I'd love to see would be a simplified API to allow smaller developers to also use it. As it is, only giant companies can afford handling accessibility.
A personal wish would be to have an immediate mode imperative API for accessibility that abstracts the Automation Tree. Similar to how Dear ImGui does. Something like: BeginFrame, TextInput, Checkbox, EndFrame, etc... plus some commands to "ask" if the Automation API wants to do something, like moving to the next control. Maybe a Dear ImAccessibility?
This would work perfectly for Video Games and would allow accessibility to added even to games that didn't predict it. Games are pretty simple, and don't require too much variety. I worked in an Adventure Game in the past and it would be 100% playable using A11y with something like that. I would love to make a 100% accessible game in the future.
This of course could be a simple multi-platform wrapper instead of something from your team.
it’s a distributed personal content addressed blob object store, with a variety of configurable storage back ends, plus a web interface to make that kind of usable to a human for human things.
it’s like git but for all your stuff.
why would you want to use it? you probably wouldn’t, quite yet. but it’s an interesting attempt at doing something a little more sophisticated than a plain file system.
I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why previous reimplementation efforts didn't get anywhere. Here's where they get stuck
swf format: 100% implemented
Tamarind AS3 VM: Open sourced by adobe.
AS1, AS2, AS3: Not technically 100% but effectively so
Flash platform API: Enormous and bug ridden, like mapping the coastline of finland. you can get 90% through this and have 90% to go, over and over again for however many decades you care to work on it. It's not like the stuff here is hard, it's just the sheer quantity of stuff, like, for instance, the precise way that XML whitespace gets parsed by the XML parser into a DOM matters. The gamma interpretation of RGBA colours. And so on.
Flash rendering pipeline: No one has succeeded in figuring out how this works, at all. You can get far enough for strongbad, but for 100% compatibility, the CheerpX approach is the only one that I think has any chance of success.
Your reply to this comment is dead for some reason. As a response: I really, really wish Mozilla hadn't abandoned Shumway. I also wish they'd written it as a standalone translator instead of making it depends on Firefox. The worst part is that I've got several flash sites I used to visit that are still around, but now can't be used because even though they worked with Shumway, Shumway itself no longer works with Firefox.
I was shadowbanned by dang for expressing disappointment in some HN commenter's defense of coronavirus conspiracy videos. I really wish there were a way to delete my account and all my posts, but this is apparently the best they can do.
also, you may be interested in the openflash project
Open-Flash author here. Open-Flash was originally intended to be a fork of Shumway, but it ultimately became a fully separate project intended to provided modular libraries to handle SWF files. I had less time to push the project forward in the last few months.
It currently provides one of the strongest models for parsed SWF files and AVM1 bytecode, and the corresponding parsers and emitters. These libraries are in use to process SWF files automatically (remap identifiers, edit tags, compress files).
The end goal was to provide a player, but Ruffle already has relatively good support, so the goal is shifting to automatically convert SWF files to other languages and help with migrations. The current focus is on AVM1 (Actionscript 2) decompilation.
I forgot to mention the myriad ways that flash would interact with the browser and the operating system, with swfs often designed to interact with browser javascript in particular, in platform and browser specific ways. the various network protocols, RTMP streaming, prioprietary video codecs, ALPHA MASKED video, the CSS parser and styling engine! the API has everything but the kitchen sink. You can have a look at the sorts of challenges you're in for by looking at Shumway's issues register here:
The worst part of that preservation problem is, that as a DRM measure, some games will "phone home" to download a swf component that implements some critical path of the game. If the server goes down, those games are dead in the water unless you can reimplement the missing pieces.
this kid really embodies the american spirit: rich white boy doing whatever the fuck he wants without the slightest concern for who he might hurt or kill in the process, all in the delusional pursuit of a meaningless status symbol he has been conned into thinking he can get because of the cultish adherence to the belief it’s the land of equal opportunity despite any and all evidence to the contrary, all while trumpeting about how great he is to anyone who will listen
Your comments have been breaking the site guidelines badly, not just in this thread but unfortunately in other threads too. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart?
We're here for curious conversation, not smiting enemies. If you want the latter, please do it elsewhere.
if there were a way to delete all my posts and my account I would do that. the hacker news community has become thoroughly disappointing to
me and I retroactively want all my contributions withdrawn. i want nothing to do with it.
in my non expert impression from reading a lot on the topic, in the grand scheme of pollution and environmental problems, waste paper ranks very very low on the list of problems we should be worried about.
That said, I always liked the idea of receipts being replaced by QR codes that display on a little LCD screen, and automatically logged into a receipts app.
i would have thought miniaturisation would make this basically impossible without thousands of dollars of specialist equipment. I’ve never known a mac repair shop to do anything other than replace the whole bosrd. the thing is smaller than a raspberry pi.
spend enough time on hacker news and you’ve seen many srticles complaining specifically about how unrepairable macs are. especially newer ones, that cryptographically brick themselves if they detect tampering.
Any chance you know any repair place with great board repair capability around South East Asia? My MBA 2011 is alive without battery, screens and everything work fine. But the previous repair shop jumped something in a weird way and my backlight doesn't come on with battery plugged in. It's been sitting still for 4 years..
That is what people said, and yet still repair techniques are devised. The cryptographic storage is not tamper proof and thus is all the more reason to repair a board at least well enough to recover your data.
Well obviously nothing is impossible, but this sorta work is about as close to literally rocket surgery as you can get. Software: difficult, hardware: difficult, thousands of dollars of specialist equipment, and the steady hands of a surgeon. There's a difference between possible and "possible".
also there's a difference between devising a technique for a model, and doing a repair on this specific device. To get to a working technique you probably need to brick a lot of machines.
welcome to the list of hacker news commenters I am extremely disappointed in then. I cannot logically argue you into caring about human life. though personally i don’t think conspiracy theory videos and slippery slope arguments are more important.
I'd argue you care about human life less than you think I do. Lockdowns are not about saving lives, you know that right? It's about making it take longer to kill who it is going to kill -- not overwhelming the hospitals.
It doesn't change the actual number of people killed by the virus, at all. That is to say, regardless of the shape of the curve, the area under the curve remains the same.
And economic depressions kill people too, in fact in far greater numbers than this virus has, yet. You don't seem to care about those lives either.
That's the problem with having a comfortable life. You don't see the consequences of your choices. I live in a place where I see people suffering and starving because they live hand to mouth and can no longer make the $2-$3 dollars a day it takes to keep them alive. They can't go out on the street to sell food. They can't make their few cents helping cars in and out of parking lots. They can't open their "shop" the size of a porta-potty in order to sell a few shirts. And when these conditions spread, crime and death spread with them. I've started to give away what food I can just to try to help whoever I can.
All the while, cozy HN commenters who earn $250,000 USD a year pontificating about whether we should shut off the entire planet for 18 months or more because it doesn't affect them one tiny little damn.
Nobody arguing for that point of view gives a shit about human life, they want control, plain and simple.
Do you even understand how insulting it is to deny other people agency? That's the most insulting thing you can do or say, worse than racism, sexism or whatever else, it is plain denying that the other person is a human with their own free will.
Except people who decide out of their own free will to watch and follow a specific advice and they end up dying due to it are responsible for their own deaths. You can't blame the medium though which said advice propagated. Regardless, as is and by your own belief youtube should be held responsible for the people that end up dying due to following the WHO recommendations instead of what the experts suggest.
by all means inject yourself with bleach as your “expert” suggests but don’t pretend that people deciding to spread covid19 around because they believe it’s caused from miasmas are only hurting themselves.
> but don’t pretend that people deciding to spread covid19 around because they believe it’s caused from miasmas are only hurting themselves.
Indeed, asymptotic carriers (as well as healthy people that are going to become asymptotic carriers) following the political crackpot pseudoscience advice from WHO and end up not wearing masks do not harm only themselves but everyone around them as well.
I am not referring to the tweet that you think that I am referring to.
(plus there was plenty of evidence for said X but this is irrelevant for the discussion)
For the next time I would suggest to confirm if you haven't misunderstood something before hurrying to insult the one that you are talking to.
What would be nice is if there was something like a standard test or demo set of HTML for all these to work against, which would enable a way to switch themes.
