A Uniform User Interface (UI) independent from the HW/SW platform

(defined as the mix of Hardware/Operative System/OS GUI).

Description:

Actually Celestia is available for a lot of different platforms. This is one of the most valuable and considerable characteristics of this wonderful software.

But has some drawbacks: there are several Celestia versions specifically developed for the various platforms and each one has a slightly different User Interface (UI). Moreover each time a modification or a new version that has an impact on the UI is implemented all the platform specific versions of Celestia must be updated. This causes a non negligible amount of work by the developers and causes itself the propagation of small differences between the various platform specific versions.

The requested feature is to implement a platform independent UI with the graphical aspects based directly on then OpenGL features.

This UI could be a simplified version of the GUI of the various supported OSes like windows, MAC OS X, Gnome, KDE, etc.

Implementing this feature will imply the following advantages :

a) Reducing the differences between the various versions of Celestia. Those differences should remain only in the management of the other OS specific activities like file management, message dispatching and so on.
b) Reducing the development work and development time for the porting of the new features on the other platforms. All the new graphical UI related features should be developed one time.
c) Unifying the look and feel of the program.

The last point will allow:

1) A better sharing of the sensations of different platforms users;
2) A common background that will diffuse the same way to operate to obtain the better results.
3) A more clear and complete implementation of the user manual including the screenshots of the menus, dialog boxes etc.
4) A shorter and easier learning process by the newbie.

An UI developed internally by the Celestia’s development team could be customized creating a particular easily and widely recognizable style instead of using the anonymous GUI style of the various platforms.

As further reference see my user interface implementation proposal.

Required/Suggested:

  (...).

Further related improvements:  

  FR2 Multilanguage,

  FR3 Integrated help.

Related Newsgroup Threads:

  (...)

Reference Celestia Version:

  1.3.0

Status:

(18-06-03) Submitted to the forum attention.

(05-07-03) Received opinions by Celestia Development Team. In a future this request will be implemented, but at the moment has a low priority.

(19-08-03) Since lately there was a lot of misunderstandings caused by the differences between the various Celestia versions introduced in the latest pre-releases this Feature request is resubmitted to the developers team attention.

Subscribers (Subscribe this item)

  Paolo Angeli

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