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GUI-o-Mac-tic!

This is a tool for creating minimal graphical user interfaces; usually just a splash screen and an indicator icon with a drop-down menu.

This tool is a native Mac port of GUI-o-Matic!. GUI-o-Matic was initially written as part of Mailpile, but was then released seperately for other projects to make use of it.

The tool is inspired by dialog and other similar command-line utilities which provide drop-in user interfaces for shell scripts. It also a drop-in UI, but it differs from these tools in that it is meant to be used as long-running process, either communicating with a background process (a worker) or providing access to URLs or shell commands.

Background worker processes can mutate GUI-o-Mac-tic's state using a JSON-based protocol, and the GUI can communicate back or perform actions based on user input in numerous ways. Background workers that need richer user interfaces, than are provided by GUI-o-Mac-tic, are expected to expose web- or terminal interfaces which GUI-o-Mac-tic can launch as necessary.

When used without a worker, GUI-o-Mac-tic can provide point-and-click access to shell commands or URLs (see [examples][./scripts/]).

Project Status and License

This project is a work in progress. Please feel free to help out!

Supported Platforms

GUI-o-Mac-tic is written for macOS.

Other platforms are supported by GUI-o-Matic

If you have experience developing user interface code, please consider helping out!

User Interface

GUI-o-Mac-tic currently allows creation of the following UI elements and behaviours:

  • A splash screen with a progress bar,
  • a main window with buttons and graphics,
  • a taskbar with a mutable icon and a drop-down men,
  • to open URLs in browser,
  • to load URLs in backgroun,
  • to launch apps in terminal windows,
  • to run shell commands in the background,
  • to display notifications.

The UI feature-set is deliberately meant to stay small. This is to increase the odds that the full functionality can be made available on all platforms as this project shall conform with GUI-o-Mac-tic's behavioural specification.

Configuration and Communication

When used as a command-line tool, the GUI-o-Mac-tic tool will read a JSON formatted configuration from standard-input, until it encounters the words OK GO or OK LISTEN on a line by themselves.

In GO mode, the app will continue running until killed.

In LISTEN mode, the app will then continue reading standard input, expecting one command per line. On EOF the app will terminate. The command format is very simple; a command-name followed by a space and a single JSON structure for arguments. Examples:

update_splash_screen {"progress": 0.2, "message": "Yaaay"}

set_item_label {"item": "frobnicator", "label": "FROB IT"}

notify_user {"message": "Hello World!"}

Consult the file PROTOCOL.md for a full specification of the program and a full list of available commands. The scripts folder contains working examples illustrating these concepts.

Credits and license

This is a tool for creating minimal graphical user interfaces. Copyright 2018, Pétur Ingi Egilsson.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.