Zune is stopped (see Status) - I did not say dead, because miracles do happen ...
Zune is to MUI what MesaGL is to OpenGL : a free implementation, covered by LGPL, the same license as GTK+ for example.
Then what is MUI ? An ("The") object-oriented GUI framework for the Amiga, written by Stefan Stuntz.
If you have no clue about MUI, read on !
... and don't barf at reading the word "Amiga" : quick Amiga advocacy ...
| "Bah, why should we care for an old Amiga GUI?" |
Federico Pomi made this interesting remark:
"... remember that most of the people come to your page, have a look and go away if they don't find it interesting. Some developers will just pass thinking "Bah, why should we care for an old Amiga GUI?", due to the fact that they don't have any clue about MUI, and why porting it is worth."
Developers who used MUI can never forget it, and unlike Motif, they really miss it. So there should be some reasons ? :) ("typical madness" :)
As a short MUI description, I could say that it makes application programming quite fun, compared to most other frameworks, and the resulting GUI is of good quality and extreme user configurability. At least when the prefs editor will be available :)
| About Zune implementation |
Zune is coded from scratch, needing only original MUI headers (freely available in the original MUI SDK), and based on the publicly available MUI API documentation. See the official MUI homepage
Development platform is Linux, but it should be portable to any Unix, and possibly (with more or less work) to Windows and BeOS. Zune is coded in ANSI C, and based on GLib and GDK.
How knows, it could make it's way to the soon coming, linux-based Amiga platform ? :)
What about starting yet another desktop project for Unix, with Zune as the cornerstone ? Beware, Gnome and KDE people, the AmiNostalgia Desktop will eat your market shares ! :)
I really would like to make Zune a community project. Feel free to contribute ! I especially hope MUI developers will help, as they wrote very valuable custom classes !
| Status |
The project is about 20 percent completed, with a dozen of key classes like Notify, Window, Group, Area, Text, Image very useable and dynamic class loading (mcc) support, among other features.
Zune misses mainly gadget classes, in order to develop the prefs editor. For now, just edit prefs file by hand. That's why if MUI had IFF prefs file, Zune has ASCII prefs file.
Don't hesitate to report bugs or missing features, I have some difficulties maintaining a TODO list :) For example, application-specific prefs are not tested yet ...
Update Nov 5, 1999 : Zune seems pretty dead as nobody besides me develop on it. And I stopped devel around as the same time Zune went public (in September) :) Why ? I lost my incentive to code. And I don't *really* need a MUI clone. (and it would have been more difficult than expected to make it really portable with all this TagItem and varargs stuff, not to mention those unique ids in BOOPSI). Perhaps all I wanted was to know if I could do it, and when I saw that "more or less" I could succeed ... Anyone to code the Slider, it bores me to death ... Now going to experiment with threaded apps with my dual Celeron ...
Update Apr 18, 2000 : if I ever do something related to Zune, it will be natively in C++ (or, exotically, Java :), but reusing the layout algo and the configuration paradigm. And "more or less" the API, though this time I will break with pleasure (harm with harmony ?) the API whenever portability is needed.
Update Dec 26, 2000 : I'm still alive :) Not the project :(
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| You want screenshots, don't you ? |
| Mailing list |
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Just send a blank email to zune-subscribe@egroups.com, or use the form:
| Now it's your turn |
Of course, all patches, sources, and bug reports are welcome. As well as webmasters, etc ... All kind of support is welcome !
Convince your local MCC writer to go open source !
Show him ESR's papers,
especially the magic-cauldron (my favourite :)
On any attempt of resistance, tile an RMS photo in his desktop's background !
