The Barium Experiment

There’s been a lot of buzz about GUI stuff lately, which made me briefly reflect on the state of the art and share something I’ve been working on as of late. What's this? Read on, it's a bit of a story... It seems folks really feel the pain of their ever-expanding tech stacks, multiplied by an explosion of display form factors and related tech such as accessibility. People are coming up with new ways of the GUI (PanGui, Dear ImGui, etc.), which is very exciting and encouraging in itself. Are we getting close yet? You might be led to believe so… But just a brief glance into the rear-view mirror… in the ’80s and ’90s you could get away with programming Athena (later Motif) in C and proudly (and rightfully) call yourself a GUI programmer. You had a couple thick books on your shelf (X Window System User’s Guide …) which looked intimidating to people visiting you at work (where you had your own room). In retrospect, those books were nothing compared to today’s tech overload. On the desk ... Read full article.