Q1: Is CELUI framework actually used in Celestia?

A: No, this is what I would like to do. In one of the previous versions of CELUI I've managed a "minimalist" CELUI GLUT interface to Celestia for my personal use.

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Q2: Did you work on Celestia?

A: was involved in Celestia since June 2002, I've submitted many ideas for improvements, but I was never in the official development team.

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Q3: It seems like CELUI was written for Celestia and now you are extracting it out and creating a framework from it. Is that true?

A: Yes I've started CELUI for creating a better and a unified cross platform UI for Celestia. I've taken from Celestia only some classes that now I've heavily modified. At the beginning I've taken the most of the ideas and inspiration from PUI. Now I hope that CELUI will gain some kind of general purpose usefulness beside its future usage in Celestia.

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Q4: Is it CELUI for general purpose, or is it specific to astronomy applications?

A: It is for general purpose, but some designed features should allow to make it fit very well with the astronomy applications.

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Q5: What is special about this framework? Something like GLUI has been around for a while and has been tested quite a lot. Is there anything in particular that CELUI is better at?

A: Celestia now Is available on several platforms with different features and different look & feel. The most of the programmers in the dev team are Platform-dependent-GUI-maintainers! The development team of Celestia now is heavily oriented against QT as tool for crossplatform portability. There was some fully functional cross platform attempts using GTK. We've discussed a lot about this, but I continue to believe that an OpenGL interface should be the right choice because the "magic" of this kind of software is the sensation of true immersion and virtual reality that the user should experience using it. Celestia is somewhat both a program, a simulation and a videogame. An OS-like UI like the ones for Windows and KDE is quite "disturbing" from this point of view. I've searched an tested a lot before starting CELUI. I've tested at least half a dozen of OpenGL UI tools. The answer to the question is: because the other OpenGL frameworks seem to me quite poor against my initial idea of a better GUI for Celestia. Another difference in the design of CELUI is the support for animations. In Celestia everything is "Time" dependent. Everything always moves! So why not the UI? For this aspect I was inspired by some videogames and Flash websites that offers animated GUI.