Re: GUI Octave

[Philip Nienhuis]

Hi Jordi,


Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 
> On 10 February 2011 16:49, Philip Nienhuis <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Like QtOctave, it has to "connect" to Octave. Does that point to
>> pipes, nJordi?
> 
> Yes, that probably means it's repeating the same old tired mistake.
> 
>> (1) After invoking graphics_toolkit ('fltk') (as first statement,
>> otherwise this will be ignored and Gnuplot will still be used - a
>> glitch in 3.3.91MingW)
> 
> I don't think it's a glitch; gnuplot is still the default because
> we're not fully confident with fltk yet.
> 

Sorry, I think you didn't quite catch it:
in MingW 3.3.91 (& on both my Windows machines), fltk only works if
'graphics_toolkit ("fltk")' is the very very first statement after starting
up octave.
If issued as second statement, gnuplot shows up for plots rather than fltk.



>>  and trying some simple plots like plot (randn (10, 2)), the
>> graphics window never shows up.
> 
> QtOctave has the same problem. Which is probably also related to the
> "Octave connection".
> 

I think Tatsuro's comment is more to the point: console (text-only
interface) programs have specific problems producing graphics output from
within the same process.
Pipes (GNUplot) seem to work around this limitation quite well.



>> (2) It crashed Octave miserably when I tried a script producing 34
>> plot figures using fltk. May be (hmmm... probably) related to (1).
> 
> No, that's probably the fltk race condition, and the biggest reason in
> my opinion why fltk still can't be the default plotting engine.
> 

Running the same script in 3.3.91MinGW as a stand-alone prog (no GUI), the
34 plots appear with dazzling speed.....
BTW Octave did this quite a bit faster than ML r2007a on the same machine
(but OK I know, the competition may have improved in the meantime)



> :
> <snip>
>> But about the license.... (many Windows users don't care about that.
>> Free = gratis is all that counts)
> 
> Maybe they'll care if they come asking for help in the Octave mailing
> list and tell them there's absolutely nothing we can do without
> source.
> 

Well, we can point them to the on-line forums the GUI Octave author has put
on his web site.

We'll see what happens.

BTW I'm not against QtOctave. I thought it was the most useful of the 3 that
I knew until now (XOctave, QtOctave & OctaveDE). 
Regardless, I find that most GUI's don't really offer useful extra
functionality, and quite often even stand in the way rather than help me
forward. 

IMO well thought-out ergonomic focus handling is one of the most neglected
issues. E.g., in the end it becomes very irritating to repeatedly (1) find
out that an input line or console had no focus and keyboard input landed
somewhere else (hopefully without too much adverse effects), (2) search for
the mouse pointer, move it into position and click, and (3) only then be
able to type input statements. Somehow, ML's GUI behaves more natural there
than the Octave GUIs I've tried until now.


Philip
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