The second goal of the bounty has been just finished. It finally consists of 5 new articles:

Magic User Interface Programming, the main article.

Short BOOPSI Overview

Event Driven Programming, Notifications

"Hello world!" in MUI

and an additional article: Taglists

These articles contain over 40 kB of text, 5 images and one complete source code. Comparing it to 20 kB of the previous goal I think 40 euro will be the fair amount of money for the goal 2. Feel free to post any notes or remarks to the MUI introduction tutorial.

Very good to see! Still reading... Looking forward to compiling...

1 euro per 1kB of text - that's quite a bargain for the bounty contributors. But where to from here?

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Great news, will download and read tonight.

What is next?

What is next?

We should discuss it in this thread.

Maybe Hello World is too simple for a discussion about debugging so could the next tutorial feature an SDL application? Then perhaps modify or extend it and add some deliberate bugs to move on to the debug topic.

Maybe Hello World is too simple for a discussion about debugging so could the next tutorial feature an SDL application?

SDL tutorial must be written by someone else. I don't know the library at all and do not plan to learn it.

I think the more tutorials the better, it's a very good idea to have a bounty.

My only concern, however, is that the focus seems to be on basic stuff, which is already covered elsewhere. For instance, "Hello World" in MUI is valuable... but has already been done many times before because it's been a standard for so many years.
What coders like myself need are tutorials that are not covered elsewhere. I'm currently finding it much more difficult to port my driver to MorphOS because the information I need doesn't seem to be out there, viz. how to write a device handler, and how to program PCI cards. Both of these are different on MorphOS to any other OS, so documentation and tutorials are very valuable.

I guess it depends on who you want to attract. If your target is the seasoned Amiga programmer, you need in-depth stuff specific to MOS. If you want normal people you need basic tutorials, but because this is an Amiga-like OS you can usually point them to other resources anyway.

Just my 2c on what is a very good idea. :)

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Man, this is delicious!

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I deeply disagree: Actually, your articles are priceless.

@krashan:

I think there are some MUI4 / subclassing topics you have yet to cover if you want to consider the MUI tutorial complete.

Things that come to mind:

1) object ownership / memory management, notification ownership and issues that arise when a notification tries to delete its invoking object (as in: when and how to use pushmethod even in singlethreaded apps)

2) the purpose of and technicals of subclassing of application/group/numeric/list objects (most common cases I guess), the point of having app's functionality spread across the subclasses since I believe many people still don't grasp the idea and are trying to use hooks for notifications resulting in a very poor application code structure

3) writing mccs

4) building interfaces dynamically - all the Group.mui magic with object insertion/addition at runtime

5) multithreading MUI apps (with a networking example) - all the tricks related to proper synchronization, waiting for threads to finish, messaging between threads (when can one pushmethod safely and when one should consider messages/signals instead), proper synchronization, etc

as for debugging information lots of content can be found here:

http://www.biclodon.com/documentation/morphosdebug/

thx Krashan 4 Part2!!! Good Work again! i think 40€ Euros are ok to. It helped me already a lot, but i think its still really basic. could you pls be more detailed for example in sum extra chapters 4 mui? thx in advance!

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This is great to have one accomplished programmer writing tutorials, or articles and other accomplished programmers (including programmers from the MorphOS Dev. Team) reviewing the work and suggesting ways to improve, or expand it. Even the best of programmers approach certain tasks in different ways and having more than one point of view can be very useful to other programmers that are trying to improve their skills, as well as beginning programmers that are just learning.

@spirantho,

This set of articles that Krashan is writing was asked for by, or influenced by a group of members here that wish to learn how to program for MorphOS2.x, so having these first few installments at a very basic level is appropriate, but I also hope that there is content within them that is useful to existing programmers.

I am sure that Krashan plans to raise the level of future articles/tutorials so they will be more useful to existing programmers and still be worded in a way that the beginning programmers will not get lost and be left behind.

This work by Krashan is perfect in its timing for me, as my motivation to improve my meager programming skills and start writing code on a regular schedule each week and month, is very high at this time. I hope that other experienced MorphOS2.x programmers will join Krashan in creating future tutorials, or other programming articles and applying for a portion of the bounty money already collected for such work. Diversity and different points of view from different experienced programmers can be a good thing, as long as it does not confuse the beginning programming students.

Thanks again Krashan for all your efforts and please continue to provide this valuable service to our community.

I still claim that Python tutorial is a must have, as long as some quids are still in the pool.

Both Python and PyMui by yomgui are mature enough to use them for making apps, I did Hello World some year ago or so. Python is very attractive, unlike C/C++, especially for non-programmers. Also it is easy and very popular/ I did not look at recent yomgui's page but AFAIR the only shortage was the documentation... Frankly it was the factor that stopped me from writting a spreadsheet app.

Python anybody?

DD

Go ahead with MUI Tutorial! The goal 3 should imho contains some basics on designing GUI layout (something new for people used to wizards and creators), basic multiprocessing with MUI (aka how to perform cpu intensive calculations without making an application unresponsive) and some word on new MUI4 lists (I know that there is an autodoc, but well described example is much easier to understand).

@March & jacadcaps

That's a good point about multithreading in order to keep an application interface responsive while other processing continues - and I can think of a simple yet processor intensive example app: an interactive fractal generator / explorer.

Maybe that's a bit too '90s but I'm sure there are many other simple yet intensive projects that could be undertaken.

'nother idea... What's a useful (yet modest sized) Linux / open source app that isn't already ported to MorphOS? If the next part of the tutorial focused on porting C projects from other operating systems, a few us C newbies might feel brave enough to start porting independently.

@ausPPC

Porting? That's not really something you could cover without covering most of the issues I suggested first.

I know I'd get more cred' for figuring this out by myself - and I haven't given up yet, but... Using helloworld_mui as a starting point, how would I get the program window to take a typed line of input, print it backwards somewhere and then reset the input buffer so it's ready to take a new line of input?

Ok, so now is the time for the next tutorial. I'm considering following subjects:
1. Subclassing in MUI - general description + typical cases.
2. GUI layout in MUI.
3. Multithreaded programming - general methods, MUI extensions.
4. Dynamic GUIs.
I think topics 1. and 2. are most important. I expect the topic 2. to be shorter, so it can be finished faster. Both are essential for writing good applications. In my opinion topics 3. and 4. can be covered later, as they are more advanced. What do you think?

Topic 1 and 3 is most important. Topic 2 is widely described among other mui courses.

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Agree. But, even if the second topic is available elsewhere, I'd still love reading it from Gregorsz lovely prose.

i agree wid jcmarcos. would also like to read more detailed point 2 and 3 from krashan if possible :) all points krashan named are important in my noob eyes :)


[ Edited by manga on 2010/11/22 11:41 ]

@Krashan,

Looks like a good plan to me.

After talks with experienced MUI programmers in the team, I've decided that subclassing topic is the most important and will be done first. Because it is very broad topic, it is possible, that it will be splitted into smaller goals.

Developing MUI applications by subclassing has been considered a "higher level of magic" for years. It was very bad, as it led to using bad programming practices and ignoring object oriented nature of MUI. I hope my tutorial will change this .

one more thing... another languages, i'd love to see some simple examples developed and described in several languages including their final executable sizes, i'm not a python guy, but i know some, so imo it's really a must have examples, also pascal, lisp, portablE, C/C++ (ofcourse), i guess, that the main goal should be to spread the developers base, not everyone will be satisfied with C/C++. Also some MorphOS compatible Basic would be awesome.

Does anybody here remember AMOSBasic Pro 2.0? I do... I developed lots of stuff in it in it's times, and it had the best documentation/tutorials, because all functions had precise description including a small example of usage... that should be the most important thing imho...

i do keep my fingers crossed!!!

bye, MarK.