Subject: GUI front-end for pine?

From: Marc Evans - Contract Software Hacker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1993 17:04:23 -0400

Hi -

I just joined this list and therefore I don't know if this has been (or is 
being) discussed already. What I am wondering is if anyone has considered, 
started, or even completed code that would provide a GUI front-end to pine? 
Ideally, I prefer a Tk or Motif (possibly using wafe?) based GUI, but anything 
is of interrest.

Thanks in advance - Marc
/| -----------------------.         ~      .                    ~
X|=|    Marc N. Evans     |------------------.       ~                .
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From: Ken Hardy <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1993 15:36:38 -0600 (CST)

Pine is a front-end for the mail system.  If you're talking about writing a
_new_ user front-end, you're talking about replacing Pine, not augmenting it. 
That's not necessarily a Bad Thing.  Pine's UI is great for character-based
interfaces; a GUI mail interface that supports Pine's philosophy, and
supports MIME, IMAP, and Pine's addressbook format, etc., could be a Good
Thing for those who prefer GUI UIs.  But it wouldn't be Pine. 

I noticed your signature; when will you have this ready for us?  ;-)

> Ideally, I prefer a Tk or Motif (possibly using wafe?) based GUI, but anything 

Ken Hardy
[email-masked]  (racerx!ken) --__-_____--__-__--_--__-___-__-__-___----

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From: Marc Evans - Contract Software Hacker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1993 18:03:50 -0400

>I noticed your signature; when will you have this ready for us?  ;-)

Well, now that you have essentially confirmed for me that a GUI-pine is not in 
progress or existence, I will probably start cscope'ing the sources and try to 
determine how cleanly this could be done. My goal would be to provide a seperate 
directory which provides the GUI front-end while continuing to use the existing 
pine back-end code. At first glance it would appear that the code layout is well 
auited for this, because the *action* routines appear to be well seperated from 
the *UI* routines...

And yes, of course anything I create will be made available to the Internet 
community at large, but no promises as to when (yet).

[[ As a side note, the other option I am looking at is to modify Mosaic to use 
additional URL hooks, such as NNTP, IMAP, and maybe even something like MH. I 
don't have as good a grasp on what's involved in this direction, but it sorta 
feels like a more natural direction to go in (think about a MIME message which 
bursts into HTML). ]]

Another question I have which somebody on this list may be able to provide an 
answer to is -- Does anyone know if there is any planning for NNTP messages to 
be able to be MIME based. From what I can tell, this wouldn't be very 
difficult...

Thanks - Marc

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From: Barry Landy <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1993 15:17:25 GMT

While there is no "GUI front end for PINE" there are GUI (or partially 
GUI!) IMAP implementations, so the cupboard is not empty.

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From: Ian Leiman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 1993 16:27:49 +0300 (EETDST)

> auited for this, because the *action* routines appear to be well seperated from 

Actually I have already started the work to 'upgrade' the PINE tty-UI
to Motif/Vue-based GUI on HP9000/730 platform. I have the GUI interface
itself completely ready, I built it with the Visual Edge Software's
uimx2.5 interface builder, that didn't take more than a few hours.

Now what remains is to unplug the tty-interface from the pine code and
plug the GUI instead. That is not an easy task and will probably take
several weeks to do (and I can do it only on spare time as a hobby). 

One problem is that, I also have to modify the c-client communications
to suit the XtAppMainLoop(), e.g. INBOX modifications must be observered
as Xt-callbacks.

There is a big difference in how a tty-based interface outputs stuff
on screen vs. an event-based GUI. The philosophy of building the code
is just completely different. A lot of modifications will be needed
to the pine code.

If I ever get a software release out of this, it will work for HP700's
only (HP/UX 9.01). The c-code generated by uimx2.5 relies a lot on HP's 
extensions.
With some extra work it can be modified to work on any platform with 
Motif 1.2 and X11R5. I don't see why a an xview-based (Suns) GUI shouldn't 
be easy to plug in instead of the Motif GUI, but somebody has to write 
the xview-code.

-- 
Ian Leiman, M.Sc.             phone +358 0 5104 4453, fax +358 0 5104 4764
Development Engineer          mail: TL2E, P.O. BOX 12, FIN-02611 Espoo, Finland
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