On 14-Jul-08, at 17:55 , Kyle Sluder wrote:
I suppose the question I should be asking you is, who is your audience? What does your product do? Why do you want to auto-generate your user interface in a serialized object graph form from a textual template? That certainly wouldn't be my first choice. If I were the president of an American auto manufacturer and decided that I wanted to start selling cars in the UK, my first instinct wouldn't be to design a mirror-image of one of my cars and fix what broke. It would be to design a car from the ground up for my target market that had the same soul as my original model, taking into consideration the tastes of my audience in the process.
Thank you for your very insightful comments. My target audience is people who wish to use a common tool on multiple platforms without re- learning how to use it from scratch. I do agree that one can not port software from one system directly to another. A good example (or a horrible example) is the Wireshark packet sniffer. Even though it uses X11 on Linux and OS-X, it uses the Windows key conventions (CTRL+C for copy instead of CMD+C, etc.) on my Mac. Key bindings crucially need to be OS centric, since the OS itself may be using ones that your app uses on another system. But other controls are less system centric and more particular application centric. FOr example a form for filling in a request for a government may have a format that is legally required. You cannot just put some field in different places on the screen, because the assumption is that you complementary fields will be tied to each other in fixed ways.
My most common reason for wanting to port forms and menus is simply that I wish to use the same wording on labels and descriptions. There has been a lot of effort in writing these so as to be meaningful to our users and there should be no need to type hundreds of them into another interface designer. A tool that allows one to get a rough port from one to another saves money from mundane clerical tasks like this to allow for money to be used for better design.
_______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
