Hello Rando,

RC> Reinder Verlinde wrote:
>> 
>> "it works pretty well", combined with "it runs under apple's X11" really
>> means that it is not a Mac application at all, and Mac users will in all
>> likelihood not find it a suitable solution.
>> 
>> Reinder

RC> You're probably right; but then again, there aren't ANY toolkits that do
RC> any better than that for cross-platform with OSX. wxwidgets technically
RC> works on OSX, but it's kind of a pain. I got it to compile once, but
RC> then I couldn't get python's wxPython to work with it and gave up. (I
RC> was trying to get the bittorrent wxPython stuff working.)

RC> Any others that exist (Including the local ruby favorite fox) only work
RC> under X11 anyway.

RC> (I believe QT is actually an exception to this, and they now provide a
RC> fully native OSX Framework. Are there ruby bindings for QT?)

The problem is different, it's not only an API question.

You simply can't generate a cross-platform GUI intensive application.
Point. Thats it. Thats what you must accept. It is possible with
Windows <-> Linux just because the Linux toolkits look much like the
windows Styleguide and where born more or less as with windows in
mind.

But it wasn't possible to port it to BeOS and it's not possible to port
it to Mac. I can only give you the recommonendation to download the
Mac Human Application Interface Guidelines.
Read it carefully and you see that you need to make design
changes for Apple and Windows. MS has accepted this and thats why MSOffice
and MSExplorer don't share the same codebase (at least for a very very
significant part of code lines).

Even QT does not much more then provide Aqua looking look. But even with QT
it's not possible to write a "write once, compile everywhere"
application. You need a specail Apple GUI abstraction layer that gives
you things like Proxy Icons, different modal window logic, menubars
without main windows etc.

-- 
 Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
 Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
 CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's