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Using our revolutionary new talk issue label as a sentinel for discussion threads, this one will serve as a rendezvous for all of the high-level planning for Carta.

To my knowledge, no other GUI toolkit in the wild is data-oriented; object-oriented APIs predominate heavily. This break in trend is in the interest of user empowerment and the core mission of Carta: Provide a user interface tool kit driven by productivity.

So far, we have found four tenets of the project’s nature in development:

1. code is totally ANSI C†
2. graphics are constructed with scalable vectors
3. the API is data-oriented
4. software rendering should be feasible, at minimum as a fallback

Moving on into the meat of Carta, we have, as an alternative conceptual base to Object, the ‘item’, which is simply any given thing that appears on the screen. Carta provides five fundamental items with which a powerful GUI can be created:

1. Text – An abstract term for high-density information intended for humans. Usually is composed of literal text, but it is not limited to that
2. Plaster – The unit of visual foundation applied onto an interface. Comprised of colour, gradients, and simple patterns constructable with math
3. Overlay – Modifies the view with the purpose of controlling focus. Like Plaster, but with filters and adjustments instead of colours and gradients
4. Picture – A canvas of pixels providing the finest granularity of image control. Useful for the centrepieces of many applications, including image editors, code editors, and so on
5. Reflection – Takes an input from a source (such as a screen partition or external video source) and displays it. A good visual example is a video editing software showing a miniature of the camera view

There is a sixth kind of construct in Carta, but I have separated it from the list as it is more meta than literal. It is the Partition, and it provides the delineation left by our departure from object oriented programming and its easy provisioning of boundaries with its veneer of class hierarchies. Partitions demarcate a portion of the viewport, in units of the nominal resolution, and this demarcation can be referenced when compiling the state of the UI for rendering.

These systems are designed to be fundamentally excellent for UIs of power, and this is proven with Carta’s signature functionality: zooming. The power of Carta in space is detailed above, and zooming is its power in time. An intelligent zoom in a program is nothing more than an increase in the amount of information to view. This maintains the amount of information on the screen at any given time to be relatively constant, while allowing potentially infinite amounts of information to be processed easily by human beings. What you see is what you get, brought up to speed for the information age.

† “ANSI C” colloquially refers to the 1989 standardisation of the C programming language by the ANSI committee X3J11.

The project repository filesystem schema, ADP 1, has been published and finalised. cartalib’s Git repository should adhere to this specification.