[Pipet Devel] Slashdot: Pipes In GUI's

[J.W. Bizzaro]

I don't know how I missed this.  It's over a month old:

``Caine asks: "While having some dead time at work, I spent some time thinking
about how to write a good GUI. I started thinking about if you could implement
pipes in a GUI. My thought was something like this: You could connect two
programs and/or widgets by a GUI pipe. This could be visualized if the user
wanted to, as a thin, pulsating red line or something. For example, you could
pipe your browsers' status/error window to a log colorer. You could also pipe
other things than text, such as pictures; if you're watching a streaming movie
you could pipe it into the graphic programs' filters for example. Basically
they would do the same as a normal "|" but with all kinds of data and in a
GUI. Has this ever been done or written about before? Any implementations?"
Interesting idea, but before this would be possible, we'd have to introduce
the concept of discrete input-channels and output-channels into our GUIs, and
that's not as easy as it sounds.''

http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/08/11/2052243.shtml

There are some good comments to read, which will be your homework assignment
:-)

I did just contact Caine, and someone else posted a comment with a link to
Piper's website, which is how I found the article.

Jeff