On Friday 10 February 2006 01:59 am, david / vallner.net wrote:
Have you even used Tk/Tile?

Tsume

> Quoting tsumeruby / tsumelabs.com:
> > > I believe Glenn called for something that lets him do desktop applets,
> > > not standard GUI. Can you make something like completely borderless
> > > windows with non-rectangular shapes in FOX?
> > >
> > > <insert random religious rant against synthetic GUIs from a recent KDE
> > > whore here>
> > >
> > > David Vallner
> >
> > A standard GUI toolkit could be used to create the widgets, using the
> > borderless attribute to the windows. However, FOX is not a good candidate
> > because it isn't pretty. There is Qt, Tk(with tile
> > http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/), GTK(not pretty on mac). Best stick
> > with what you're writing for depending on the target: Windows, GNOME, or
> > KDE
> >
> > environments.
> >
> > Tsume
>
> Ah well, here it comes... That is very, very true. Cross-platform GUIs are
> IMO a
> myth, since the widgets are only the least of it.
>
> A Windows application will look completely out of place in KDE, and vice
> versa. E.g. the Windows convention is to use labels next to toolbar
> buttons, GNOME uses relatively large icons with labels below them, KDE by
> default doesn't have labels next to toolbar items, Mac has very few very
> large icons on toolbars. Putting the application menu bar on the top of the
> screen is the default on Mac, a somewhat popular setting in KDE, unheard of
> in Windows. (I personally feel mad whenever I use a non-KDE app that has
> the menu bar inside the window.) Mac apps are likely not to make heavy use
> of context menus because of the tradition of one-button mice, and instead
> use drag-and-drop for all sorts of things that would look plain weird to a
> Windows user. And then there's KDE letting you customize half every aspect
> of window behaviour and appearance. Single click vs. double click for
> activation. And the list goes on and on and on ad infinitum.
>
> Most applications have their official specific GUI design guidelines which
> are more or less followed by the developers targeting that platform - I
> expect the Windows ones being by and large rather ignored. If you want to
> make a truly cross-platform application, you need a toolkit that provides
> complete integration into the targetted environments, and you still need to
> spend time tweaking the frontends to look and feel like KDE on KDE, like
> GNOME on GNOME, etc.
>
> You can guess why Yahoo! Widgets don't have a Linux version. I dare claim
> it's at least in part because all the major, and a lot of the minor Linux
> desktop environments already have support for desktop applets (gDesklets,
> Kicker applets, SuperKaramba), and the interest in using the Yahoo API
> would be negligible.
>
> You can make a GUI app that compiles and runs on most major platforms, but
> odds are it will look completely out of place on the ones the developer
> doesn't use himself.
>
> That said, don't take this as an anti-FOX rant, I haven't worked with it
> any, but if you're starting out on GUI programming, you should possibly
> ignore the cross-platform issue and use a toolkit that is easy to use,
> learn, and Just Works - I recommend Swing to people that ask me about Java
> GUIs for the same reasons, even if SWT tends to look better. If FOX does
> deliver these, it's in my opinion a very good toolkit to bite your GUI
> teeth on, and with native theming support for WinXP and upwards in the
> works, it can also end up being a very good toolkit for Windows
> development. Just don't get fooled by the cross-platform buzzword, because
> that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
>
> David Vallner