User Interface

[Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr.]

Just a few quick comments:

Chirs was wondering on December 29 about how to access video hardware
directly in Linux. My Slackware 1.0 distribution came with svgalib. If
you don't have it, I am sure it must be easy to find. Try:

     find / -name "*vga*" -print

just to see what you have. I haven't done much with it yet, but it
doesn't look too hard.

I found the book:

   "Computer Graphics Using Object-Oriented Programming"
   Edited by Steve Cunningham, Nancy Knolle Craighill,
   Martin W. Fong and Judith R. Brown
   Wiley Professional Computing - John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
   ISBN 0-471-54199-0

very educating. I must admit that I learned more about how not
to do things, but it was very interesting and recomended even so.

My Merlin UI is only three-D in the sense that the objects float
around in space. The objects themselves are no more 3D than on
the NeXT or in Windows. I hope to change this in the future,
however. For a look at the true potential of 3D, see:

  "An Easier Interface"
  by Mark A. Clarkson
  BYTE, Februry 1991, pages 277-282
  Volume 16, Number 2

More next year :-)

-- Jecel