Gtk2Hs

Barracuda (by Stephan Friedrichs, Henning Günther, Oliver Mielentz and Martin Wegner) implements an ad-hoc (p2p) network. On top of that, a chat application has been realised.

Just like in IRC, the communication is organised in channels. A channel maybe anonymous (the messages’ origin is obscured), private (encrypted, only invited users may join them) or public (free for all users).

The GUI has been designed to hide the rather complicated network from the user and to look like a usual chat application. At first, every user has to select his/her private and public key, Barracuda checks if they match:

Then the user may create or join private and public channels and actually chat:

It is also possible to send and receive attachments:

Himerge is a graphical user interface for Gentoo Linux’s package system. Araujo wrote it in Haskell using Gtk2Hs.

The main idea is to simplify browsing the package collection as well as to allow the user to perform the most common operations that the Gentoo package tool provides: “emerge”, “unmerge”, “world”, “sync”, “buildpkg”, “fetchonly”, “usepkg”.

Himerge also offers several handy tools, like a browser for global and local “use” flags, a packages branch editor (keyword/unmask/use files), mozilla support to check the package homepage, and it also uses eix as backend to search for package information.

Here’s a nice example which shows that GUIs can be made quickly enough that they can be used for “one off” or “throw away” programs. Christophe Poucet wrote this little GUI to help him debug a C++ implementation of a red-black tree:

Christophe says:

After countless hours of hacking an RB tree in C++, and getting frustrated, I finally coded up a haskell program to check the consistency. With the help of this I was easily able to find the final bug which I doubt I would’ve ever found without the visual view of the tree, allowing me to detect exactly what case was failing.

This is a GUI for the 2005 ICFP contest.

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