Request for critique

[bairui]

Hi, guys,

I'm very new to lisp (in general, and newLISP in particular). I'm also fairly... GUI challenged - I spend all my time in command-line or text-only environments. Most of my coding experience has been limited to this domain.

As such... I suck at building GUIs and would LOVE for some constructive criticism on a little app I built:
https://github.com/dahu/Marathon-Wow

Some questions I have:

1. Is the (set-locale "C") necessary? What effect does that have?
2. I don't really like the way my contexts at the bottom (WordEngine, Score and Timer) "touch" the GUI directly. Perhaps this is unavoidable. Perhaps this is the right way to do it. Perhaps I've offended the GUI gods. Either way, I'd like to know.

I guess I should have split the contexts out into separate files, but with their interdependence on the GUI, I felt they should reside in the same file (at least for now, until someone can assuage that fear.)

I have tested this on Windows (which sadly happens to be my target platform, despite me living almost purely in linux land), and it *seems* to be coping so far.

Any and all feedback welcome.

Thanks,
Barry

[cormullion]

It works well on my Mac. A few thoughts:

I think the slider for the words could start at the bottom - the words are initially cut off, and the slider needs to be adjusted to the left.

If other keys are pressed (such as Y or Control), there are error messages. For example: set-foreground cannot be applied to MAIN:word_U. You might want to handle all keystrokes.

I think it would look better without the curly brackets, and if the words were left-aligned - but that might be hard..

Otherwise, it looks pretty good!

[bairui]

Thanks for the feedback, Cormullion. I have integrated all of your suggestions along with a few other modifications. While I appreciate any and all feedback, I was particularly looking for some solid GUI best-practice corrections. I have this niggling feeling that I'm Doing It The Wrong Way. Too many fingers in too many pies.