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Adobe Unveils Open Source Library
anamexis writes "Adobe premiered (no pun intended) opensource.adobe.com recently. The first two libraries available, titled Adam and Eve, respectively, take on complex GUI issues in applications. They are written in C++ and have been released under the MIT License, an OSI-Approved Open Source License."
So, YES, Gimp could use the Adobe UI, as long as it includes the "obnoxious advertising clause".
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
X11 License
This is a simple, permissive non-copyleft free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL.
This license is sometimes called the "MIT" license, but that term is misleading, since MIT has used many licenses for software.
source
That's not the obnoxious advertising clause.
The OAC was a part of the BSD license which used to say you had to print out a message when your program started up giving props to the Regents of the University of Berkley, CA or some such.
This was probably the only real difference between the MIT and BSD licenses, but since the BSD license dropped this clause, they're the same for all intents and purposes.
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
To those wondering what the parent is talking about... ElcomSoft verdict: Not guilty
Thankfully, Acrobat is not a monolithic piece of crap. All the stuff that takes so long to run is extra plugins, and they can be disabled. There are even programs to do it automatically, but this is something that I would trust doing manually over some program. I mean, if I somehow mess up Acrobat removing some plugins, I reinstall Acrobat. If the program messes up the system, is loaded with spyware or whatever, then the whole OS might have to go.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
A friend uses acroread 7 (beta) on his solaris (or was it linux) machine and it's really good. I'm also very pleased with the reader in version 7 on windows. It's so much better, faster, more responsive, ... than version 6. It's probably as fast as version 5 with more features than version 6.
After the disastrous version 6, Adobe fixed the issues with version 7 and I can honestly recommend using the most recent Acrobat Reader version again.
From the documentation:
Adam is a modeling engine and declarative language for describing constraints and relationships on a collection of value, typically the parameters to an application command. When bound to a human interface (HI) Adam provides the logic that controls the HI behavior. Adam is similar in concept to a spreadsheet or a forms manager. Values are set and dependent values are recalculated. Adam provides facilities to resolve interrelated dependencies and to track those dependencies, beyond what a spreadsheet provides.
Eve consists of a declarative language and layout engine for constructing an HI. The layout engine in Eve takes into account a rich description of UI elements to achieve a high quality layout - rivaling what can be achieved with manual placement. A single HI description in Eve suffices for multiple OS platforms and languages. This document describes Eve2, the latest version of Eve. Eve2 was developed to work with Adam and to incorporate many improvements that have been requested since Eve1 was written.
I must admit that I haven't looked at the code in great detail, but that doesn't sound very trivial to me. Also, 1749K of zip compressed C++ code would be a heck of a lot of trivial code.
Theres no Advertising Clause in the MIT license - what the grandparent is calling the OAC is simply the bog standard copyright acknowledgement that goes in each sourcecode file. See the post a few posts down about the OpenBSD license - that certainly has no OAC and has pretty much the same wording.
I troubleshot this problem before, but I don't have the links handy. The short version is that it's a bug in the program itself, where it asks for too-general of a font, which causes buffer overflows. When requesting a font in X there's a whole bunch of dashes and asterisks such as -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-iso8859-1 . Each of these asterisks is an "I don't care" value. "I don't care what foundry it's from." "I don't care about its resolution." Or say -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-* which also says "I don't care about its encoding."
The encoding part is what you're getting around. When you have a proper LANG setting, like "en_US" the libraries you're using will recognize this and provide you with a nice beefy font. You'll often get a font which is not a nice, normal 8-bit font. It could be all wacky with like thousands of freaking characters, for, like, doing stuff outside of the Latin language set. Crazy.
When proper international fonts were being developed and the developers started to test applications, they realized that there were a ton of applications with this problem. They simply requested a font where they didn't specify encoding, and they couldn't deal with certain encodings that were returned, and they'd segfault. Therefore, making international-capable fonts standard was put off for many months while developers were encouraged to fix their applications. Unfortunately, Acrobat Reader is one of the stragglers. The recommended solution I've seen is to rename acroread and add a script in its place which sets the LANG variable and then runs the renamed executable.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Actually it's more like the frontend stuff for Photoshop--or more precisely, the engine that drives parts of the frontend.
Adam and Eve are two separate but related libraries.
Adam allows you to express a bunch of things in terms of other things (e.g. this button's right edge needs to be 10 pixels left of that button's left edge OR this HSV setting is related to that RGB setting) and then have them automagically be kept updated. Neat.
Eve is a UI library. It seems to allow for automated layouts (as well as manual?) and depends on Adam for some of its functionality.
Both depend on the boost C++ libraries.
Disclaimer: I used to work for Adobe. I left a few years ago.
.rc UI resources into expressviews (the precursor to EVE.)
I have experience with EVE that may be more interesting to read that a bunch of anti-Adobe slurs: For a while it was my job to localize Illustrator, and part of that involved converting the old DITL and
At the time, Illustrator had somewhere around six or seven hundred dialogs. Times fourteen languages. Times a few platforms (OS 9, OS X, 95/98/ME/NT, XP). That's a LOT of UI to program, translate, and test.
EVE lets you describe a dialog with one XML-ish text file, and have that layout work for all languages on all platforms. That is a significant potential reduction in UI programming (and hopefully bugs.)
It looks good, too. Take a look at Photoshop or Illustrator's UI. I don't mean the wacky custom controls-- I mean look at the widget layouts. Can you tell which ones were painstakingly created by a human, and which ones are being generated on the fly?
When I was working with this technology, there were a class of problems that couldn't be easily handled (such as alignment across separate view hierarchies) but it looks like EVE2 is fixing most of those areas.
I can't really comment on ADAM since that wasn't at a usable stage when I was at Adobe. Some people have commented that the static binding dates it, compared to say 10.3's Cocoa bindings and KVO. Maybe, but any sort of binding that gets rid of huge chunks of UI glue code is a good thing. It's in C++ because that's what Adobe's giant cross-platform codebases are.
So, this is good stuff. It works. Now you can play with it. What's wrong with that?