XikiΒΆ
| Authors: | Craig Muth |
|---|---|
| Time: | 15:00 |
| Session: | |
| Link: | http://xiki.org |
| Slides: |
[Pre-show music makes me feel hostile towards presenter.]
Xiki is a langauge for creating UI languages. Muth has been involved in Xiki for 10 years. Muth would argue that there aren’t really simple ways to create user interfaces, and there should be. These just aren’t interfaces for your users, but for yourself, as well.
Xiki doesn’t try to solve all UI problems, but focuses on a single problem: nested menus. Many user interfaces consist of vast lists of choices.
Xiki consists of a web server, a xiki shell command, and editor plugin[s?].
When we start thinking about new interfaces, a lot of times we start with an indented list of items. Xiki uses that sort of indented list as it’s basic data structure:
book flight/
one way/
round trip/
check in/
flight status/
[Shows demo of Xiki web server reading a file and generating a mobile UI on the iPhone simulator.]
Any item that ends with a / is a menu item. Lines that don’t end in a slash are just plain text. You can also embed Ruby code for simple dynamic generation.
The built-in web server allows you to also created new items through the browser.
Xiki provides a command line interface, and generates a desktop GUI, too. I still don’t know why I’d use Xiki.
[Demonstrates using the Emacs editor plugin to pipe things back and forth with the Xiki command line.]
Lots of capabilities for Xiki; Muth is obviously very well versed in using it.