I might try to develop some GUI tools for program development before even attempting the operating system ! Ha, what an strange idea. Write the programs before the OS is ready to run them ! But didn't PARC have that idea - design the technology before the hardware is ready to run it ! Oh well.
I have in mind an extensible GUI development tool which will eventually have a VMS written for it - thus the GUI programs can be run from the command line, or an icon - with source looking something like a compressed form of this ;
Window (10,10,50,50);
Text_Input.Window(80,80,150,150);
Text_Button.Window(50,50,'Okay');
for setting up an interface with several windows. (or something like that. details, details.) It will be written in itself (a basic OO graphics I/O event driven engine), and will thus be extendable by the programmer. Initially programs will run under a simple interpreter, but when the VMS is written, all programs will compile, hopefully with no code redundancy. ie - this means code is snipped so that functionality not required, is not present in the final program. Code can even be snipped inside methods ! I hope.
The goal is to write a Graphical developer that will eventually allow you to simply draw file formats, and it will create a VMS to handle them. It will also hopefully search all available OS code for similar functionality, and thus reduce code redundancy. The goal is also to allow complex applications to be developed completely grapically - with no coding required. Though coding should always be an option.
The GUI tool's extensibility should allow it to branch off into several
specialized areas, thus from the basic GD, you could load up word processing
extensions, allowing you to design a word processor, file handling extensions
, etc, or any and all of the above - to mix and match.
I'll do some experiments to find out what I like in a GD, then maybe get going on it. When I get time.