Tell Gus what you think, but remember- you are in his home. Be a good guest.

So that's what the app is!

In July at a Lua workshop held at Adobe, Mark Hamburg referred to a "major Adobe application" that was 40% Lua:

http://www.lua.org/wshop05.html#Hamburg

I could never figure out what app that could possibly be. Now we know... Thanks for the tip!

Posted by Brad at January 9th 2006 10:10 PM

Sure. Jens is also on the list, and pointed out the workshop connection as well.

Posted by August Mueller at January 9th 2006 10:17 PM

Hey, that's great news. Never thought a major software company would be right on the edge using brandnew technology.

Does somebody have any pointers to some real world Ruby/Lua comparisons or insights? Ruby seems to be in at full speed right now, probably because of RoR, which I'm using on a new project.

This post may sound a little bit "trollish" but are there some outstanding new concepts in Lua which would somebody getting into Ruby/RoR right now to change his mind?

Posted by Michael Nordmeyer at January 10th 2006 01:27 AM

Hey Gus,

Pull some FScript (or Pyject) action on this sucker - the top-level UI appears to be straight-up, heavily customized Cocoa. The thing that looks like a slider is an NSSlider subclass, the buttons are all NSButtons, even the thin little scrollbar is an NSScroller subclass. There are hooks for Lua stuff, but I'm not sure what they do. It would probably help if I knew Lua. Anyway, interesting.

Take a look at AgUI.framework. Looks like Adobe has their own ProKit. :-) I guess this look should be called 'silver'.

Posted by ken at January 10th 2006 02:01 AM

Well, it's disappointing the Lightroom GUI is so terrible. But I guess Lua would explain the non-native interface. Shame...I had high hopes for Lightroom. :(

Posted by Dude at January 10th 2006 07:09 AM

At the Lua Workshop last year I had lunch with Troy Gaul, one of the Lightroom engineers (we're both part of the OpenDoc diaspora.) The UI code is mostly written in Lua but driving AppKit: they have, IIRC, a custom Lua-ObjC bridge, so they can code in Lua but use native controls (a similar approach to the old Java AWT.)

The surprising thing is that it seems to work well -- I haven't tried the app yet, but overall people seem to think it's pretty snappy. I was grilling Troy about some of the typical interpreted-language-UI issues (that I know well from trying so hard to get AWT to play nicely on Mac OS) but he seemed confident about it, and it seems he was right. I need to download the thing and try myself...

Michael: Lua and Ruby are rather different beasts at this point. Lua is considerably faster and more compact. It's also somewhat lower-level: it isn't natively object-oriented, although it offers the facilities for implementing various flavors of OOP. There also isn't as much of a "platform" for it, as most users are just taking the core language and using it to drive their own apps. There is a web server (Kepler) that is still in development and looking good so far, but absolutely nothing comparable to Rails.

Posted by Jens Alfke at January 10th 2006 08:16 AM

The FlySketch palettes are better because they highlight when you click them :)

Posted by John at January 10th 2006 11:12 AM

As far as the panel scrolling is concerned, that's a bug (and it's assigned to me :-) ).

It's happening because of the way we implemented the side panels as separate child windows which are set to not activate then not necessary. This seems to keep the mouse scroll events from coming to the appropriate NSView. Hopefully I'll be able to fix or work around this bug before our next preview release.

As for Lua, Jens is right. It's working well for us. It's fair to say that any performance problems we might have are probably not the fault of Lua.

And regarding our UI, we do have custom appearances of several controls and whatnot, but this is done by customizing Cocoa controls for the most part, and again is not the "fault" of Lua (we're intentionally trying some different things with our UI -- some of them are working out better than others, and you can expect to see us continue to tweak things as we go forward).

Posted by Troy Gaul at January 11th 2006 11:42 PM

Adobe Lightroom is a Mac app, but a Windows port is planned. Cocoa is not an option for cross-platform software development.

Posted by Chris Peterson at January 18th 2006 09:24 AM

You know that sqlite comes with OS X, eh? Mail and RSS use it too.

Posted by barefootguru at February 20th 2007 07:50 PM