macOS Best UI for my app?

[Cromulent]

I've basically finished the basics of my application (news group reader) but before I go onto the next stage I need to add a UI to allow people to choose articles and display newsgroups etc. Does anyone know of a command line UI that is better than ncurses? If not I'll just use that as it is a pretty easy API to pickup.

Thanks for any help .

 

[toddburch]

How about giving the Ruby / Cocoa interface a go?

 

[Monkaaay]

A command line UI?

 

[Cromulent]

A command line UI?

Yep. Like ncurses. Note I said UI (User Interface) NOT GUI (Graphical User Interface).

As for Ruby and the Cocoa bindings it is just another language I would have to learn.

I'm already pretty bogged down with trying to improve my C and get to grips with x86 assembly (which is not going too well).

Anyway the whole point of the application was to write a command line app that I could later bolt a GUI onto. I'm interested in learning new things, but there comes a time where I need to prioritise and adding another language wouldn't help my long term goals too much at the moment.

 

[toddburch]

Well, a character based menu system in C is a no-brainer, sort of like

Enter a selection: 
1. Do something
2. Do something else 
3. Do nothing
4. Go away

If you want to get fancy, you could implement the interface such that any action that is kicked off from the menu selection is spawned in another thread or process, so the menu system will always be ready for the next selection. (just like it would be in a GUI)

Todd

 

[lee1210]

I think what everyone has meant to say is "no". If you want to practice integrating with an API, ncurses should be fine. If you just want an interface, making your own wouldn't be terribly difficult, but things like arrowing through lines, etc. would definitely be better suited to ncurses than trying to figure out all of the escape sequences for video inversion for the selected lines, etc.

 

[yeroen]

What's wrong with just using curses? The distro comes with CDK, a "curses widget" set that'll speed things along.

 

[Cromulent]

What's wrong with just using curses?

Nothing at all, I just wanted know if anyone knew of a better API before I started making the UI.