musher0 wrote:Euh... Fredx?
You do with your time what you will of course. If your radio app above is practice
for becoming an even greater yad virtuoso than you are already, that's fine.
Otherwise, why go through the trouble? There already exist a host of good radio
players on Linux: aqualung, deadbeef, mplayer,mpv, etc.
Just a thought.
I think it's a fair question, musher, and nothing to do with anyone's 'mental health' per say, except that all 'hobby-like' activities are probably undertaken for the pleasure derived in such. Different people no doubt have different motives for undertaking any kind of programming work. There are certainly usually plenty of alternatives out there nowadays, but that shouldn't mean we suddenly stop trying to do our own thing - particularly if we can achieve something slightly different. In the Puppy world it has always been the case that 'small' applications that provide a lot of functionality in a small footprint have been an important driving force.
It may be argued that even 'oldish' computers nowadays have sufficient resources available to them that size etc no longer matters at all to any important degree. Still, old habits die slowly, and there remains an attraction, it seems to me, to try and make tiny or small systems and that's where gtkdialog and yad-type apps come in (plus that it is relatively easy to program with them, whereas the likes of C++ and gtk or Qt, and even Python (and its extensive libs) are complicated to learn and use comparatively).
Aqualung and so on can certainly do the job but, as Fred has shown with Dog Radio, sometimes one of these tiny yad or gtkdialog-based apps has an appealing frugality, convenience and charm - perhaps because that old UNIX philosophy of designing a tool that only does one job but does it well is refreshing in this world of over-the-top-often-unnecessary-and-stressful-complexity.
But yeah, sometimes I wonder why we don't just all abandon small Linux distributions altogether since the larger offerings have most every facility available on tap anyway (in any shape or size or form). But small definitely sometimes means 'more efficient' - from a user point of view, that certainly depends on the user-interface provided though.
I haven't myself put much effort at all into learning yad, which is not a comment against yad, just that I've stuck to what I know a little of, which is gtkdialog with bash. The only thing is, I don't know who is likely to maintain gtkdialog for the future, whereas yad development appears to remain active.
Might be nice to become specialists in other programming languages such as Genie, Vala, Bacon, C etc (or even scripting ones such as Python, or small Lua) but still have to have some sort of graphical user interface toolkit to go along with the main programming language you are using. For bash, yad or gtkdialog are making that part of the programming effort relatively easy. Funnily enough early Pups came with John Murga's slant on Lua with a modified FLTK toolkit for graphics - I can't help feeling it is a shame that was left out of later Pups actually...
Despite John Murga not going with it in his early Lua/Puppy implementation, I still think this apparently simple-to-program multi-platform toolkit (IUP), for Lua, or C, sounds very interesting. It's been around for over 20 years (!) and is still actively being maintained. I guess I should try it:
http://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/
https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/iup/en/led.html
https://webserver2.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/i ... lkits.html
or... ?
http://www.murga-projects.com/forum/sho ... hp?tid=429
But is murga Lua still being maintainted??? Seems not?
I've started a thread for possible further discussion of IUP in following link, in case anyone starts using this in any productive way on Puppy-related distros. I can program in C, but only very little experience in using gtk+ with that, but have always had a desire to try Lua since I think a scripting language is best for small distro utils/app development work (since others can easily modify such work, without having that compile-need burden inbetween) - but need a simple graphical toolkit for such work (and Lua itself, unlike Python, is light enough to include in a small distro by default):
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=113013
wiak